A bipartisan cohort of U.S. West senators introduced legislation Friday aimed at managing forests and mitigating fires, despite ongoing opposition from many environmental groups.
The Fix Our Forests Act, a companion bill to House legislation with the same name, seeks to bolster wildfire resilience by improving forest administration, supporting fire-safe communities and streamlining approvals for projects that defend residents and ecosystems from devastating blazes, according to its authors.
The bill — introduced by Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), John Curtis (R-Utah), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) — resulted from months of negotiations to reach a bipartisan consensus on these strategies and on collaborative efforts among federal agencies, states, tribes and other stakeholders.
“We need to act NOW with the speed required to mitigate wildfires and make our homes and businesses more resilient to these disasters, and to put in place protections for our communities and the environment,” Hickenlooper said in a statement.
Echoing these sentiments, Curtis warned that the America West is “on the front lines of a growing wildfire crisis,” while noting the months of “bipartisan cooperation and consensus-building” that took place among himself and his colleagues.
“The longer we wait, the more acres will burn, and more families will be impacted,” the Utah Republican added.
The legislation would involve establishing new programs to reduce wildfire risks across high-priority “firesides,” while expanding tools for fresh health projects — such as faster access to certain hazardous fuels treatments, the senators explained.
Also key to the bill would be the creation of a single interagency program to help residents build and retrofit using fire-resistant tactics within the wild land-urban interface.
The senators emphasized a need to expand research and demonstration initiatives, streamline federal response, and enable watershed protection and restoration projects to include adjacent nonfederal lands.
The Fix Our Forests Act has earned the support of several conservation groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience. Also on board with the bill are Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R).
Nonetheless, the legislation has also amassed vehement opposition from other key environmental voices — circumstances that were already apparent when the House companion bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), passed in January.
Environmental nonprofit Earthjustice warned Friday that “the bill would stifle citizen voices, remove science from land management decisions, and facilitate a large-scale rollback” of longstanding environmental protection policies “on millions of areas of federal land.”
“This bill instead would codify the Trump administration’s attacks on our national forests and open the door for the timber industry to recklessly log our forests under the guise of forest management,” Blaine Miller-McFeeley, Earthjustice senior legislative representative, said in a statement.
An analysis from Earthjustice argued that the bill would open swaths of federal land to logging without requiring scientific review or community input, and thereby raise the risk of wildfires. The group also flagged that the legislation removes Endangered Species Act consultation mandates and restricts the rights of citizens to judicial review.
Environment America, meanwhile, has maintained that the Fix Our Forests Act proposes exempting a range of “vegetation management activities,” such as logging, from environmental review. A press statement from the organization noted that more than 85 environmental groups oppose the bill for similar reasons.
But Environmental Defense Fund Executive Director Amanda Leland argued that “with the right funding, this bipartisan proposal will help,” as many Americans fight “a very real and growing threat to their homes.”
Padilla, who co-chairs the bipartisan Senate Wildfire Caucus, advocated for “durable solutions to confront the growing impacts of the wildfire crisis.”
The bill, he contended, constitutes “a strong, bipartisan step forward, not just in reducing wildfire risk in and around our national forests, but in protecting urban areas and our efforts to reduce climate emissions.”