‘Fix Our Forests’ Act threatens old growth

House bill could open forests to logging, not help them survive wildfires

A caravan of trucks carrying mammoth Douglas fir logs pass through North Bend, Washington, in 1948. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.

With so many five-alarm fires started at the hands of Trump and Musk, it’s difficult to focus on any one action. But fans of old growth forests need to know about this one. The so-called “Fix Our Forests” Act could soon come before U.S. senators for a vote.

The name is a misnomer. The act could actually open up wide swathes of our national forests to logging without necessarily doing anything to reduce wildfire hazards.

At least 85 environmental groups oppose the proposed legislation, and for good reason. It promotes logging in our national forests by bypassing the usual standards of public input. You know, the ones guiding public policy for the past half a century: the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.

“Taking the public out of the process, which is essentially what the ‘Fix Our Forests’ does, is just not the right way to do this kind of stuff,” said Todd Schulke, who oversees the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity’s forest protection and restoration program.

What’s more, the act could actually disrupt ongoing programs designed to help fire-proof forests, such as the Four Forests Restoration Initiative in Arizona and New Mexico.

“We’ve got hundreds of thousands if not millions of acres ready to go,” Schulke said, referring to agreements to do limited logging with wildfire resilience in mind. “The Forest Service—they don’t have the resources to prepare these projects and actually get them out. That’s the bottleneck. Not the planning process.”

Schulke has been working on some form of this initiative for almost 30 years. I first met him in the mid-2000s, when he was part of a White Mountains, Arizona, working group he said acted as a seed for the bigger forest restoration initiative.

As a University of Arizona researcher, I documented how the working group—a collaboration between environmental activists, government agency workers and loggers—negotiated conflict to agree on how to treat forests to make them more resilient to wildfires.

Their main tactic was to thin out the smaller trees that would carry flames into the canopies of the tallest, oldest trees. They also recommended using prescribed fire for similar reasons.

Many of the old trees had thick bark and high branches that allowed them to survive the recurring wildfires. After all, many of these forests evolved with surface fires coming through roughly once a decade, based on information gleaned from Indigenous knowledge and tree-ring records.

The original White Mountains group, now defunct, generally restricted cutting of any trees with a width (diameter) greater than 16 inches—a restriction that made loggers uninterested in the projects unless they were actually paid to do the thinning.

In time, the environmentalists agreed to compromise on some of their size restrictions in order to get large-scale thinning done without having to pay for it, giving Forest Service workers more latitude.

“We’ve learned over the years that it’s much better to dig into these projects and try to build this broader social agreement and to avoid the controversial things,” Schulke said.

This says a lot about the power of collaboration, as the Center for Biological Diversity built its reputation on filing—and often winning—lawsuits to protect endangered species. The center was among the environmental groups filing to protect the endangered Mexican spotted owl. A judge’s decision on this in 1995 stalled timber harvesting, leading to a stalemate that helped inspire the establishment of the White Mountains collaborative working group in 1996.

Before then, the U.S. timber industry often clear-cut wide swaths of old-growth forests. The West had plenty of them until 1890, when the railroads opened up log transport options. The Indigenous peoples had used fire and other stewardship practices to maintain healthy forests featuring big trees.

Sawmills in the West were tooled to slash mammoth trees. Even though clear-cutting has gone out of favor and old-growth forest has gotten scarce, loggers continue to prefer the trees that suit their sawmills.

Sadly, loggers might have a better idea of just where to go for the biggest trees based on efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to protect old growth forests. Under a Biden executive order issued on Earth Day of 2022, Forest Service employees have been working to identify “mature and old growth” stands in the 128 national forests and grasslands.

The now-aborted plan was to protect old growth stands in recognition of the important services they provide, while maintaining enough mature stands to replace them as they eventually aged out.

Old growth forests protect the ground below from penetrating heat and drying winds. They support wildlife with food and habitat. And they hold in their trunks and soils tremendous amounts of carbon that would otherwise convert back into carbon dioxide, the gas behind most of the ongoing global warming.

About half of a tree’s dry weight is carbon—all of it plucked from heat-trapping carbon dioxide. And the largest 1 percent of trees in a forest stand typically hold more than 50 percent of the carbon stored in trunks and branches, as forestry researchers from around the world found when they pooled their data for in a 2018 Global Ecology and Biogeography article.

Clearly the biggest, oldest trees deserve protection for being the heavyweights of carbon storage. And they would have, in an administration seeking climate change resilience.

We’re in another era now, though. At this moment, the Trump-Musk administration is hunting for climate change references in grants already awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The fear is the duo will attempt to cancel those grants mid-process, even as they mull other ways to hobble the long-respected agency.

Their actions on many fronts make it feasible that the plans for protecting old-growth stands could become blueprints for locating them for logging—unless we can convince enough senators to vote against this poorly named act.

A more accurate name for it would be the Fu*k Our Forests Act.

Please urge your senator to vote against the Fix Our Forests Act. The vote could come up any day now. Call 202-224-3121 and ask for your senator. In particular, Arizona Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego need to hear from you.

Notes and Resources

The ‘Fix Our Forests Act’ won’t actually fix our forests

Text of HR 471, Fix Our Forests Act

Four Forests Restoration Initiative

Collaborative stewardship to prevent wildfires

Biden administration moves to protect old-growth forests as climate change brings fires, pests

Biden administration withdraws old-growth forest plan after getting pushback from industry and GOP

Global importance of large-diameter trees

NOAA Is Told to Make List of Climate-Related Grants, Setting Off Fears