Does Environmental Review Worsen the Wildfire Crisis?

Description

Wildfires are burning record numbers of acres in the western United States each year. More than 10 million acres burned nationwide in three of the past seven years, most of them in the West. In 2020, 7.1 million acres of federal land burned in wildfires, including 4.8 million acres of Forest Service land.

Wildland fire management is the top budget item for the Forest Service, with suppression costs reaching $1.76 billion in 2020. Increasingly, legislators, agency officials, and forest science researchers are concluding that more proactive fire mitigation activities are needed to lessen the severity and costs of western wildfires.

Regulatory processes and litigation, however, pose significant barriers to achieving these mitigation goals. One survey of forest managers suggested that environmental policies are viewed as an important hurdle to prescribed burns, a key method of reducing fuels. Regulatory processes that increase the time between identifying and implementing treatments exacerbate wildfire risk and limit the flexibility of managers to use new information to quickly address emerging risk.

Does Environmental Review Worsen the Wildfire Crisis? is a new study that demonstrates that federal and state regulations driven by “Green” ideology that “nature knows best” and “nature is best untouched by human hands” stand in the way of the US Forest Service and other managers of forested lands taking the precautions necessary to curb wildfires.