Stop the "Fix Our Forests Act"
4/30/26 - Taking action to prevent "logging America’s national forests at landscape scale"
Hello everyone:
Something different and important this week: I’m here to motivate you to do two things: 1) Read the full post, “Congress is About to Legalize the Liquidation of America’s National Forests,” by Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks, about how the Fix Our Forests Act, in the hands of the Trump administration, enables a large-scale sell-off of America’s national forests; and 2) contact your Democratic senators - too many of whom plan to vote in favor - to try and stop this bill from passing.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) now awaits a vote in the Senate, after sailing through the U.S. House of Representatives with considerable Democratic support. The Senate looks likely to pass it too, unless we can convince Democratic senators to withdraw their support.
The problem here isn’t that FOFA has no merit, but that in the hands of the Trump administration it becomes a incredibly powerful tool to erase vast swathes of national forest without 1) environmental review, 2) Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections, or 3) legal challenge.
As Jim Pattiz described it in his article’s subtitle,
Through the Fix Our Forests Act, Senate Democrats are about to hand the Trump administration permanent statutory authority to log America’s national forests at landscape scale.
The Fix Our Forests Act was written with good intentions under the Biden administration to help the Forest Service address wildfire risks, but like so much of American governance under Trump, the regulatory flexibility provided by the bill will be weaponized to destroy that which it was designed to protect. We’ve seen all the good faith assumptions that underpin U.S. democracy thrown onto the fascist pyre. We should not make the same mistakes with the management of our national forests.
The bill, Pattiz says,
was drafted for a Forest Service that does not exist.
It was drafted in 2023 assuming career civil servants working in good faith. Line officers exercising discretion in the direction of ecological restoration. Expanded authorities tilting in practice toward prescribed fire, thinning small trees near communities, protecting watersheds. The bill’s authors imagined an agency that wanted to do the right thing and just needed Congress to help ease the way.
That Forest Service is gone. It’s been gone since January. It’s not coming back any time soon.
The agency running your national forests today is led by scoundrels who despise the very idea of public land.
Pattiz provides ample description of those scoundrels and their anti-public-land ideology and actions. I’ll let you read the post for those details, but it is yet another reminder of how many Trump appointees are categorically opposed to the agencies they’ve been hired to lead.
The Democrats sponsoring and supporting this bill are, says, Pattiz, “operating under political assumptions that were suspect in 2023 and are catastrophically wrong in 2026.” They drafted a bill for
a Forest Service that wanted to tilt toward ecology but was boxed in by paperwork. They imagined fireshed management areas the agency would use to prioritize prescribed fire and community protection. They imagined emergency authorities used sparingly, for actual emergencies. They imagined an ESA Section 7 fix that would streamline noise-level bureaucratic delays without compromising species protection.
Every single one of those imaginings has been overtaken by events.
It’s especially important that you read the What the Bill Does section of Pattiz’s post. It details the six provisions of the FOFA, and makes it clear how much is at stake as well-intentioned streamlining of regulations are transmogrified into a gutting of national forests. Again, read the whole post, but here’s the gist:
Allows up to 10,000 acre “categorical exclusion” logging projects with no environmental review or public comment.
Allows up to 250,000 acre “fire-shed management areas” with accelerated logging that is exempt from environmental review.
Establishes an “emergency authority” to initiate logging before environmental review is complete. (The USDA Secretary immediately declared a false wildfire “emergency” on 112 million acres (59%) of national forest. That administrative maneuver would become permanent statute.)
Prevents new Endangered Species Act listings, or new data on previous listed species, from having any impact on Forest Service logging plans.
Nearly eliminates judicial review of Forest Service logging plans.
Eliminates the requirement to update forest management plans, essentially locking in the free-for-all that FOFA establishes.
Our job is to contact our Senators, particularly the Democrats who might be swayed by a clear description of the problem. Call or write. You know the drill.
Pattiz offers a sample letter to email to your Democratic Senators. Again, this should be done as soon as possible. Here’s my slightly modified, slightly longer version of his letter:
Sample Email
Subject: Vote No on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462)
Dear Senator [Name],
I’m writing to urge you to vote NO on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462) and to oppose any unanimous consent motion to bring it to the floor.
This bill was drafted in 2023 to provide a flexible forest management strategy regarding wildfire risk to a Forest Service which would apply it with thoughtful restraint and scientific rigor. But that Forest Service no longer exists.
Today the agency is run by a logging executive, supervised by a billionaire whom the Forest Service once tried to get a restraining order against, and overseen by a Secretary who has already falsely declared an “emergency” across 112 million acres — 59 percent of the entire National Forest System — to bypass environmental review.
FOFA hands this administration permanent statutory authority to do what it is already doing administratively: log America’s national forests at landscape scale, with no public input, no environmental review, no Endangered Species Act constraints, and no meaningful judicial remedy.
A bill written under the assumption of good-faith implementation cannot survive contact with this administration. The Forest Service, like other agencies in the Trump era, is now run by people intending to destroy that which they are sworn to protect.
Please vote NO on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462).
Sincerely,
[Your name]
We need legislation and action that addresses the risk of catastrophic wildfires, but it needs to reflect political reality. That’s not this bill.
Please read the entire post. With that in mind, I’ll give Pattiz the final word:
You don’t give this administration discretion. You don’t give it expanded authorities. You don’t give it relief from judicial review, exemption from NEPA, or statutory protection from endangered species law.
Kill this bill.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Yale e360, “Older and Wiser: How Elder Animals Help Species to Survive,” a fascinating discussion of “longevity conservation,” an idea we should all become familiar with. Conservation of higher numbers of a threatened population isn’t enough, researchers have realized; we need also to protect the full age structure of that population, in particular those older animals whose memory and skills serve as bulwarks against both natural and human-made crises:
Scientists say older animals often play several critical roles in how populations function, broadly falling into three categories: ecological knowledge, reproduction, and immunity. They carry knowledge that guides survival, play outsized roles in producing the next generation, and possess stronger defenses against disease built up over time. Together, these qualities can make the difference between populations that endure and those that slowly fall apart.
From Aeon, “Have you forgotten what it means to be afraid of nature?”, an essay on Aldo Leopold and his idea that fear is a necessary part of a meaningful relationship with, and obligation to, the community of life. To make the Earth more whole, we must be part of the community rather than imagining ourselves as its superior:
Leopold does not ask us to erase ourselves from the land, nor to self-sacrificingly suppress our needs and concerns for some abstract whole. He is more demanding. Can we enlarge our sense of responsibility, stretch our moral imagination across species and timescales, and learn to live with the discomforts that genuine membership entails? Can we learn to coexist with the fear that arises from our relationships with the natural world? The reality is that not everyone is ready. Perhaps that hesitation marks the point where a commitment to land – to thinking like a mountain – demands more than we are willing to give.
From Grist, “Why millions of adorable bees are emerging from this cemetery,” a good-news story of cemeteries acting as biodiversity reservoirs in urban spaces.
From Orion, an ode to bobolinks, those most marvelous of grassland birds. Fascinating too: They have one of the longest migrations of songbirds - 12,500 miles - and, during nesting season, are both polygamous and polyandrous.
From my wife Heather Hardy and A Nest of Songs, “Cozy Cave,” an ode to that most strange and marvelous of spring ephemerals, skunk cabbage, a plant that generates its own heat to melt through late winter snow and attract pollinating insects in to get warm.
From Wired, “One Way or Another, Most of Our Energy Comes from Solar Power,” a lighthearted but thorough explanation of how the Sun drives nearly all the processes by which humans create energy. Fossil fuels, for example, are essentially “batteries” of potential energy derived from Sun-fed living matter and stored as oil, gas, or coal. The article does a nice job also of explaining how these sources are converted to energy. In the end, of course, the most logical and efficient means of generating energy is directly from the Sun, rather than through byzantine energy systems that also threaten all of life.
From the Reveal podcast at Mother Jones, a deep dive into the increase of spraying California’s forests with ever-increasing amounts of Roundup (glyphosate) by timber companies and the U.S. Forest Service:
“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”
From MIT Technology Review, a long and detailed attempt to understand the crazy scale of current and future energy use by AI and the data centers that host them, despite the lack of transparency from the companies that built them. It’s not pretty, and it’s about to get much uglier. However intense the usage is right now, it’s the least it will ever be.
From the Guardian, another reminder that burning wood for energy is worse for climate than burning gas. Bioenergy is a mistake of planetary proportions, whether ethanol for fuel or wood biomass for electricity. I like heat from a woodstove, but this simply cannot work at scale. We should never again look at forests as a fuel source for society.
Also from the Guardian, a remarkable technological achievement from a Nobel laureate harvests water from even dry air. These devices work off- and on-grid, and may prove to be lifesavers after natural disasters and may provide large-scale alternatives to desalination. Here are the details from the company behind the tech.
My heart is shattered.
Only 19 months have elapsed since Hurricane Helene resulted in landslides, tree loss and flooding.
We are not listening to the forest floor.
The power company took more trees last month. The month before a cable company dug up the road easements. Currently North Carolina Forest Service is using machinators to remove Mountain Laurels and Rhododendrons under the guise of fire protection.
In When the Forest Breathes, Suzanne Simard points out that machines in the forest destroy 61% of the forest floor. That floor likely took 10,000 years to develop.
We can’t see the work beyond the visible world, yet at the very least we can respect this living skin we walk upon.
In the hands of this administration, it is both maddening and frightening at the same time.