The Fix Our Forests Act prioritizes industry over nature

America’s public forests are under assault. We have already seen the massive timber harvests called for by President Trump’s executive order, the elimination of the Roadless Rule, and the gutting of wildlife protection efforts.

Those are the broad stokes, but there are also finer maneuvers underway, such as abandoning the traditional practice whereby forest personnel paint-mark the trees selected for cutting, handing those decisions over instead to the timber companies themselves. Or the various subsections that keep popping up in the “Big Beautiful Bill” — for example, giving timber companies an option to pay for hastened environmental review and defunding endangered species recovery efforts. It also arbitrarily requires the Forest Service to increase harvests by 250 million acres annually for nine years.

This is the context within which we must now view the Fix Our Forests Act, a logging-in-the-name-of-fire-prevention bill, stuffed with provisions that significantly override scientific and citizen review. If it passes, those overrides would be handed over to an administration that has made clear its ambition to "log, baby, log" using whatever tools of governance it can. For the next three and a half years, the Fix Our Forest Act would be the Trump Our Forests Act.

Trump is wasting no time opening the forests to extraction, yet his two main vehicles — the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management — are somewhat limited in their authority as federal agencies. Many of Trump’s ambitions are therefore vulnerable to legal challenge by the citizenry.

This is where the Fix Our Forests Act comes in. By putting the environmental overrides and judicial constraints into statute, Congress imbues these agencies with greater legal authority, significantly raising the legal bar for citizen redress.

That so many Democrats appear willing to go along with this is nothing less than astonishing, especially given that just last year Senate Democrats shot the bill down, largely due to those very overrides of citizen control. Why the sudden acquiescence? Let’s call it a political fear of fire.

When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), an enthusiastic Fix Our Forests Act supporter, introduced the bill for the May 6 Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, she invoked “growing threats across the nation,” putting wavering Democrats in the difficult position of looking soft on wildfire. She then linked the Fix Our Forests Act to the horrific January fires in Los Angeles, which were still burning when Fix Our Forests Act proponents rushed a revised version of the bill through the House to capitalize on the tragedy.

It was a deceitful move, though. The Fix Our Forests Act, which focuses on logging in the backcountry, would have done nothing for the people of Los Angeles. The fires they suffered were grassland and chaparral fires on non-federal land and spread from building to building in the city.

This sort of mismatch between claim and reality appears throughout the Fix Our Forests Act. It claims to be about fire reduction, yet it allows harvest of a forest’s most fire-resilient trees — the larger, mature ones. It claims to be science based yet ignores science which draws different conclusions. It claims to protect communities from fire yet focuses mostly on wildlands logging far from human settlement.

There seems to be some confusion as well. One of the main arguments against the “fuels reduction” narrative, is that it’s not fuels but climatic conditions — hot, dry, windy — that precipitate fire. Yet Klobuchar made her case for the Fix Our Forest Act by citing “Rising temperatures, drier summers, longer fire seasons and earlier snow melt…” In other words, climate. In fact, many studies show that industrial scale thinning, by exposing soil to sunlight, exacerbates the very climatic conditions Klobuchar referred to — heat, desiccation and wind.

To be sure, real people are in real danger. But as it turns out, there’s already a bill to help them. The Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act provides designated funding to actual communities to do the things that will truly provide protection, such as hardening homes, improving emergency escape and access, and treating the land immediately around the communities themselves, all while using the process to lower insurance premiums. That bill has been held back in favor of the Fix Our Forest Act, with nary a peep from Democrats.

Fear of fire is understandable, but political fear of fire — following the political winds on a bill that strips citizens of their ability to contest logging on millions of acres of maturing forest — isn’t. If Democrats then hand such a bill to an administration that shows clear contempt for public process and governance, they will betray their own tradition of environmental stewardship.

Democrats have been looking pretty hapless lately. Here’s their chance to show some grit, by saying no to the Fix Our Forest Act and championing the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, which puts people and forests first, not industry profits.

Rob Lewis writes about the living basis of climate at his Substack newsletter, The Climate According to Life. Author of the poem/essay collection The Silence of Vanishing Things, he publishes regularly in local, regional and national news and literary outlets on matters of land protection and restoration.