Hearing Tomorrow on Westerman’s Bill: E&E News Story

Thanks to a TSW reader for this.

 

E&E DAILY | The House Natural Resources Committee will focus this week on a Republican bill to more quickly thin forests deemed in danger of wildfire.

Rep. Bruce Westerman, the chair of the committee, has proposed draft legislation to create federal “firesheds,” or areas the Forest Service has determined are at the highest risk of fire, and to expedite projects to remove overgrowth and dead or dying trees. The Subcommittee on Federal Lands, chaired by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), is scheduled to take testimony on it.

The draft bill calls for categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act to designate emergency firesheds every five years, beginning with areas already highlighted in the Biden administration’s 10-year wildfire strategy. More areas would be listed every five years, with projects not subject to environmental assessments or environmental impact statements.

We’ll discuss this in greater detail in the next post.

The draft also would provide for such exclusions along electric power rights of way, responding to the danger of fires started by downed power lines.

Now if we go back to Senator Tester’s questions last week about how a 100 foot tall tree fell on a power line.. and the Forest Service only let the Coop cut trees 10 feet on each side (if that is true, did not hear the FS side of the story) despite the Coop’s asking to do it, then there might be something useful there.  Also, in the Region 2 public meeting about Environmental Analysis and Decision-making, the power company folks offered that power line maintenance would be best served by a power line-wide decision, not District by District.  I wonder whether the Forest Service and the country might be better off with a national plan amendment for power lines rather than Old Growth.

Westerman, a trained forester, is one of Congress’ most outspoken proponents of a more intensive approach to managing forests, many of which have grown thicker with vegetation due to past polices of fire exclusion.

I hope I’m not being overly sensitive about natural resource professionals here, but he’s a Yale-educated forester.  Sounds better than “trained.” Also has experience in practice as a forester and engineer.

From Wikipedia:

He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in engineering in 1990 and subsequently received a master’s degree in forestry from Yale University.^[2]

Westerman worked as an engineer and forester before being elected to the Arkansas House in 2010. He was formerly employed as an engineer and forester by the Mid-South Engineering Company.

Back to the story.

Projects to remove trees — dead or alive — on fire-prone federal lands sometimes face years-long delays through NEPA reviews and litigation, both of which Westerman has tried to tamp down through legislation.

On the other side are environmental groups and advocates who say forests are better off, and more resilient, with less removal of trees for timber harvest and other purposes.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a Berkeley, California, environmental group, charged Westerman with “gutting the nation’s bedrock environmental laws as we approach Earth Day,” which is April 22.

Mature forests and large, old trees, on national forests store from 35 percent to 70 percent more carbon than logged areas, contain clean drinking water, support imperiled wildlife and are a guard against wildfire, DellaSala said. “They need to be taken off Westerman’s legislative cutting board.”

Here we go again.. thinning doesn’t help trees survive in dry areas.  As if there was one practice known as “logging” ..

Westerman’s proposal addresses other forest priorities as well, including promoting biochar — partially combusted wood that acts as a soil conditioner — produced from forest thinnings.

The draft bill would also promote re-seeding of native or fire-resistant grasses in burned-over areas, particularly in the wildland-urban interface.

And the proposal would tweak Forest Service provisions for long-term contracting with outside organizations for forest management, including by requiring the government to pay 10 percent of the contract cost as a termination fee, if the government ends such a contract early.

This bill is interesting so we’ll check it out in the next post.