Lawmakers Push for Forest Management Reform After Deadly Blazes

Traffic cones block the entrance to Sequoia National Park in California as the KNP Complex fire burns nearby, on Sept. 15, 2021. AP Photo/Noah Berger

A group of congressmen met in Yosemite National Park to push for more reasonable regulation regarding forest management. The lawmakers asked that the same measures that saved California’s South Lake Tahoe from the 2021 Caldor fire should be applied to other areas of the nation before the damage becomes irreversible.

The House Committee on Natural Resources, led by Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), hosted the committee’s outdoor hearing at the Curry Village Amphitheater in Yosemite National Park on Aug. 11, pointing to the need to preserve the national park from what many believe to be the inevitable devastation of future fires.

“We’re loving our forests to death,” Mr. Westerman said in his opening statements, outlining the need to “embrace a new conservation ethos” and correct mistakes to “conserve our nation’s bountiful lands and resources.”

The lawmaker went on to point out that for the majority of U.S. history, California has maintained roughly 64 trees per acre. That number is now over 300 trees per acre.

“These overstocked forests become susceptible to insects, disease, and ultimately stand-replacing fire, as trees are forced to compete for the limited resources they need to survive—water, nutrients, and sunlight,” Mr. Westerman said.

According to the lawmaker, wildfires have burned more than 72 million acres in the last 10 years, and California has seen 8.7 million acres burned in just the last five years, a figure that makes up around 22 percent of total burned acres nationwide.

“Behind these wildfires are lost lives, communities destroyed, their ecosystems and wildlife habitat irreparably damaged, access and opportunities for outdoor recreation taken away. Air and water polluted, billions of dollars in economic losses year after year, and millions more tons of carbon gasified and needlessly jettisoned into the global atmosphere,” Mr. Westerman said.

“The self-inflicted devastation is widespread, but perhaps nothing exemplifies our welfare process more than the loss of 20 percent of the world’s Giant Sequoias in just two short years.”

Effective Changes

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) asserted in his opening statements that the kind of forest management that kept fires at bay prior to the 1970s has gone by the wayside since the action to be able to harvest timber has become “endlessly time-consuming, and ultimately cost prohibitive.”

According to Mr. McClintock, forest management plans take around four and half years to complete, and the necessary environmental studies alone are around 80 pages long and cost millions more to complete than the value of the timber harvested.

Because of these and other hurdles, harvesting in his district in California has dropped 80 percent since the 1970s. However, the carveouts enacted in the Tahoe Basin seven years ago worked to save South Lake Tahoe from the Calder fire in 2021.

“With the federal timber supply cut off, the number of mills has shrunk from 149 in 1981 to just 39 today. And so, nature has returned to remove the excess timber by burning it up,” Mr. McClintock said.

Those changes, similar to the Save Our Sequoias bill and HR 188, reduce the time to approve a forest management plan from four years to about four months and reduce the environmental study requirements from 800 pages to just a few dozen.

According to Mr. McClintock’s address, the changes made in the Tahoe Basin, in addition to saving cities from devastation just a few years ago, resulted in nine times greater timber harvesting over the years when the area was governed by legislation that covers most of the state.

Lawmakers were faced with the possibility of their action being too late to completely mitigate damage, Dave Daley, a rancher and past California Cattlemen’s Association President, testified before the group.

“Because of the fuel loads that we now have, nothing can stop even the controlled wildfires that we'd like to have in place,” said Mr. Daley, who is also a professor emeritus of animal science at Cal State Chico. “We are at a point now that it is going to be extremely difficult to get the genie back in the bottle. And I’m not sure how we will do so.”

Proposed Legislation

With more than 50 original cosponsors, the bipartisan Save Our Sequoias bill would offer land managers the emergency tools and resources needed to “save these remaining ancient wonders from the unprecedented peril threatening their long-term survival,” according to a committee’s press release in April.

The legislation would strengthen the collaboration of federal, state, tribal, and local land managers through shared stewardship agreements alongside the formal establishment of the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition.

A central feature of this legislative move is the introduction of the Giant Sequoia Health and Resiliency Assessment, designed to prioritize wildfire risk reduction treatments in high-risk groves and systematically track scientific forest management activities.

Notably, the National Park Foundation and National Forest Foundation are set to gain new authority, enabling them to accept private donations to support Giant Sequoia restoration and bolster resilience efforts.

“All Americans want to protect our environment. The Save Our Sequoias Act offers a common sense, bipartisan solution to poor forest management and the burdensome regulations that make it extremely difficult to protect California’s historic Giant Sequoias,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said of the legislation when it was announced, according to the committee press release.

HR 188, or the “Proven Forest Management Act of 2022,” offered similar solutions but to a wider group of federal lands to combat fires elsewhere in the nation.

Both pieces of legislation have passed through the House Natural Resources Committee and now await a vote from the full House.