The so-called Resilient Federal Forests Act helps the logging
industry and hurts the public.
It does nothing at all for our national
forests…
Climate change is wrecking havoc in our Western states. Our National
Forests are burning. The Forest Service and the Department of the
Interior are scrambling to find funds with which to fight these fires in
the face of inadequate funding from Congress. And while our forests
burn, Boehner is busy pushing a bill he says
will solve all our problems. Which means, of course, if you have been
paying attention, it will do no such thing.
What Boehner wants is for President Obama to reconsider his threat to veto H.R. 2647, the
Resilient Federal Forests Act, which was
passed on July 9, 2015,
with what Boehner says was “bipartisan support.” But it’s not really in
keeping with the spirit of the idea of “bipartisan” support when nearly
all Democrats
voted against the legislation.
In a
letter yesterday
from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, Secretary of Agriculture
Thomas J. Vilsack, and Shaun Donovan, Director of the Office of
Management and Budget, to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) ranking member of
the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Cantwell was informed
that,
“The President’s approach includes the
bipartisan Wildfire Disaster Funding Act (WDFA), H.R. 167 (which was
introduced by Representatives Mike Simpson and Kurt Schrader), and S.
235 (which was introduced by Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Crapo) has
broad and diverse stakeholder support. This legislation provides for an
adjustment to discretionary spending caps and addresses the long-term
shift of resources to firefighting from other critical programs that
support forest and rangeland management.”
On the other hand, we could always rob Peter to pay Paul:
The House-passed Resilient Federal Forests Act
of 2015, H.R. 2647, would create resource uncertainty for disaster
response efforts by reallocating funds from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund to Federal firefighting
activities. In doing so, the bill would undermine the Federal
Government’s ability to adequately budget for, and fund responses to,
other natural or man-made disasters such as the damage caused by
Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Additionally, H.R. 2647 would undermine
financing for State and Tribal public infrastructure disaster recovery
projects.
According to Boehner in a press release, reality doesn’t enter into the picture, and the President’s
alternative, preferred by both the Forest Service and DOI, are not
“viable” because, you know, the House won’t pass anything Obama wants:
America’s forests are
national treasures, which is why the House passed a bipartisan bill to
help fight wildfires now and better manage our forests in the future.
Our plan will put an end to the government’s practice of borrowing from
long-term forestry priorities, providing stability that will prevent
crises just like this one. Our plan solves the problem and it has
bipartisan support, but President Obama has threatened to veto it
without offering any kind of viable alternative that can pass. So it is
good that administration officials are paying attention to this issue,
but they ought to direct their complaints elsewhere. The best path
forward is for President Obama to reconsider his veto threat and work
with us to protect our forests.
You can read what Boehner
says the bill is going to accomplish
here,
if you want the spin. Boehner says “protect our forests” as though he
means he wants to actually protect our forests. But you knew that was
too good to be true, right?
Here’s a helpful translation of Boehner-speak from the
Wilderness Society:
“This bill would put our national forests at risk for reckless logging
practices and short-cut vital environmental reviews and public
involvement.”
There you go. The Republican cabal’s answer to wildfires: Cut ’em down!
The bill, H.R. 2647, the “Resilient Federal
Forests Act of 2015,” establishes a number of new exclusions from
environmental review requirements for logging projects. By enabling
logging projects to skirt these review requirements, the bill would cut
out important opportunities for the community to engage in forest
management decisions. Ultimately, it elevates a single
interest—timber—over the diverse activities that take place on National
Forests, including recreation.
So the solution to the fires caused by climate
change is not protecting the environment, or even making more money
available with which to fight the fires, but to hand our national
forests over to the logging industry. Take, for example, the
effects on Oregon alone:
This bill would allow
much higher levels of logging and other damaging “forest management
activities” on our National Forest System and BLM public lands,
including BLM forest lands in western Oregon, by severely undermining
the National Environmental Policy Act, reducing citizen opportunities to
seek judicial relief, and reallocating Title II funds under the Secure
Rural Schools Act away from road maintenance and restoration activities
to timber projects.
Outdoor Alliance detailed their objections
in a letter to both Boehner and Nancy Pelosi in July,
In particular, we strongly object to:
- The creation of new, unnecessary categorical exclusions from review under the National Environmental Policy Act;
- Provisions to severely curtail opportunities for judicial
review by creating attorneys’ fee recovery provisions and bonding
requirements that would effectively preclude access to the courts;
- And changes to the composition of resource advisory committees
that would undercut the effectiveness of this tool for generating
community consensus.
In a
statement issued July 8, the White House stated its opposition to the legislation:
The Administration
strongly opposes H.R. 2647. The most important step Congress can take to
increase the pace and scale of forest restoration and management of the
national forests and Department of the Interior (DOI) lands is to fix
fire suppression funding and provide additional capacity for the Forest
Service and DOI to manage the Nation’s forests and other public lands.
H.R. 2647 falls short of fixing the fire budget problem and contains
other provisions that will undermine collaborative forest restoration,
environmental safeguards, and public participation across the National
Forest System and public lands.
In other words, the so-called “Resilient Federal
Forests Act” doesn’t make our forests resilient at all, but presents
opportunities to limit the public’s participation in what is, after all,
the public’s own property, weaken environmental safeguards, because who
needs the environment? And worst of all, will not only “undermine
forest restoration” but will enable cutting those trees down, which is
surely antithetical to the bill’s alleged purpose.
Boehner is always going to be Boehner.
Which means he is always going to take an issue, and come up with a
supposed solution that is merely an opportunity for grifters to profit
from the public trough. Rather than protect our National Forests, he
wants to cut them down.
I think we can agree that the crisis affecting our
forest lands should not be made an opportunity for profit, which is what
Boehner’s “bipartisan” legislation promotes. Cutting down our nation’s
forests is not to be confused in any sense with saving them.
It is the absence of trees in our national forests, after all, that we are trying to prevent.
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