With more than three million acres already burned or burning, 2022 is shaping up to be another devastating year for wildfires in the U.S.
America’s forests need to be managed more actively, a task the Biden administration took up earlier this year when it announced a 10-year strategy to reduce excess fire fuels, like downed trees and underbrush, on up to 20 million acres of national forest and 30 million acres of other lands. [bold, links added]
This plan is a step in the right direction, but it’s unlikely to come to fruition if the administration doesn’t first tackle two major obstacles to forest restoration: environmental red tape and litigation.
Projects to clear out fire fuel often face substantial delays. New research from the think tank where I work, the Property and Environment Research Center, found that it takes an average of 3.6 years for efforts to clear downed, unhealthy, and too densely grown trees to move from the required environmental review to on-the-ground work.
For prescribed burns, the delay is even longer, 4.7 years. And these are the averages. Many urgently needed projects take much longer.
While many bureaucratic, technical, and fiscal obstacles affect these delays, red tape and lawsuits are substantial contributors.
Fuel-reduction projects are more likely to require an environmental impact statement, the most extensive level of review under the National Environmental Policy Act, than other projects that are covered under NEPA.
The process exhaustively analyzes a project’s environmental impact and requires that the potential impact be compared with many other hypothetical projects. It can take more than five years to complete.
NEPA is intended to serve the laudable purpose of informing decisions, but when delay comes at a significant environmental cost, requiring something as rigorous as an environmental impact statement is counterproductive.
Last year almost 10,000 acres of northern spotted owl habitat in Northern California’s Klamath National Forest went up in smoke in the Antelope Fire.
The Forest Service was well aware that the area was at risk of a wildfire and had a plan to protect it, but the project was tied up for about a decade by environmental reviews and objections from environmental activists who, ironically, were concerned about the owls’ well-being.
These sorts of years-long delays are becoming all too common.
Add litigation to the mix and things can really go sideways. The Forest Service is risk-averse.
Surveys of agency personnel have found that the mere threat of a lawsuit can lead the agency to step back and waste precious time trying to “litigation proof” a project.
Fear of litigation for projects requiring an environmental impact statement—the complexity of which opens up plans to more lawsuits—can tack on an additional two years before they can actually be implemented.
According to Drew Stroberg, a district ranger in the Klamath National Forest, the Forest Service’s project to reduce wildfire risk in the owl habitat was delayed in part because the agency wanted to avoid any possible lawsuit.
After a fire consumed the area last year, he observed that the resources and copious reports generated in that effort “might as well be in the trash can.”
The same might be said of the Biden plan if it doesn’t reduce red tape and lawsuit risk.
How can the Forest Service meet its ambitious 10-year goal if almost all of that time gets lost in the review and planning of its initial projects?
A good start would be streamlining the environmental review process for forest management. Other major projects already get less scrutiny under NEPA than fire-fuel reduction.
These endeavors receive a categorical exclusion, which allows them to skip the rigors of an environmental impact statement and instead receive a more moderate analysis, which on average takes around three years.
That’s still plenty of time to determine whether a forest-management project presents an undue risk, but such an approach could let the Forest Service prevent the sort of destruction seen in Klamath National Forest.
Requiring a less complex report would also lower the Forest Service’s risks of litigation, saving additional time. With each wildfire season bringing new calamities, every year counts.
The only way to tackle our wildfire crisis meaningfully is through better active forest management, as the Biden administration has proposed.
But if the risks of litigation and overly cumbersome regulation aren’t removed, that plan is likely to go up in smoke.
Read more at WSJ
Lets start by putting these Eco-Freaks on the fires let them learn some real responsibilty they wont get from their liberal collage professors and administrators
A couple things come to mind. Realistically, the Forest Service & Dept. of Interior managed lands are probably about 40-50 years behind on needed projects due (primarily) to litigation. As far as the new categorical exclusions for smaller scale projects, the environmental NGO’s are already lining up to litigate those, as well. So, like most other areas, fire protection projects are forced through detailed NEPA analysis on EA’s & EIS’s where the activists can continue the “cottage industry” of endless litigation. So, until we can (somehow) reign in these environmental fanatics & achieve some form of balance in the NEPA process, this situation is NOT going to improve anytime soon…
Interesting. Last year Colorado, where I live, had a significant number of acres burned but little this year. And I’ve not seen the huge fires in California that were there last year with deaths and towns destroyed. The big fires so far were in New Mexico and Arizona.
No matter how much you love trees and forests (and I do) your options are limited.
You can harvest it, manage it and remove the undergrowth or you can watch it burn.
The Wood in a forest comes out as lumber or smoke & flame – take your pick.
Early American settlers travelled by covered wagons to the West and were able to drive through the widely spaced trees of the indigenous forests. You can’t do that today – the trees are too close together and the ground so littered with years of accumulated deadfall and brush that they are impassable.
These original forests had frequent underbrush fires – in many cases set by native Americans – who knew how dangerous fuel build up can become. Australian aborigines similarly have a long history of controlling vegetation with fire.
Then came those who thought they could do a better job of “managing” a forest.
Rushing to extinguish minor fires is all good and well but if you simultaneously don’t make an effort to clear the dead wood and vegetative clutter that would naturally be cleared by low intensity fires – then the fuel load continues to build until the day comes that a fire starts that you cannot extinguish and it then creates devastating “crown fires” which race at speed through vast areas.
Once you start “managing” by putting out fires you must then manage the underbrush, deadfall and clutter as well.
And of course such events are more likely to occur during prolonged dry spells or droughts – which aside from all the climate change hype are normal climatic occurrences (which are not becoming more intense or frequent – regardless of what the alarmists tell you). So a minor fire can quickly become an uncontrollable inferno.
Such fires are difficult to run away from and people die when they cannot egress quickly enough.
Had controlled burns and bush clearing been done at more opportune times the major conflagrations could have been avoided.
Raging wildfires invariably get stopped at managed privately owned logging forests (timber farms) where sensible policies prevail over clueless eco-utopian idealism.