A Federal Approach to the Wildfire Crisis

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a version of the Fix Our Forests Act in January of this year. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by a bipartisan group of senators.

Republican Senator Tim Sheehey and Utah Republican Sen. John Curtis have joined with California Democrat Sen. Alex Padillia and Democrat Sen. John Hickenhooper to establish new forest management requirements. Their goal is to bring some common sense to forest management and keep wildfires from starting and getting out of control.

Deemed a very critical piece of legislation, the bill is rather draconian.

To begin with, the bill sets up some fireshed high risk areas and requires the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to form an interagency Fireshed Center to manage those risks.

The agency’s responsibility will be to assess and predict where wildfire is likely to strike.

Some forest management projects will be pushed forward that are now under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and it will exempt some activities from review by NEPA.

Teams will be set up to speed up reviews and interagency consultation processes overseen by NEPA, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the National Historic Preservation Act.

To help manage forests, it will put limits on requirements for consultations on threatened and endangered species belonging to the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 and the Federal Land Management Policy Act of 1976.

Lastly, Fix Our Forests Act will limit any litigation popping up from the fireshed management projects and puts a limit on legal fixes courts put into place.

“I don’t think anything could completely prevent wildfires,” Padilla said last week. “But through this work, if we can prevent just one more community from experiencing the heartbreak felt by the families in Santa Rosa or in Paradise or the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, then this effort would’ve been worth it.”

Groups like Environment America oppose the bill because it “bypasses critical environmental laws that protect our ecosystems and restricts scientific input and public engagement. The bill could have devastating consequences for the environment and endangered species.”

Source link: Insurance Journal — https://bit.ly/3RlRjAe