The Property and Environment Research Center has a report worth a look: “The Roadless Rule and Wildfire Management:
More targeted policy could better balance costs and benefits across different landscapes.”

Highlights:

Road Access and Ignitions: Existing research on human and road access identifies competing effects. While limited access to roadless areas may make initial firefighting efforts more difficult, rescinding the Roadless Rule could lead to more ignitions. A Fire Ecology study by Aplet et al. earlier this year found that ignition density is roughly four times higher within 50 meters of roads than in inventoried roadless areas, particularly for human-caused fires.¹

Community Risk: Inventoried roadless areas contain roughly 74,000 acres, or 2 percent of national forest acreage in direct-exposure zones—areas with buildings or populated land directly adjacent to flammable wildland vegetation—and 7.3 million acres, or 16 percent of acreage in broader wildfire-transmission zones, which include vegetated land within approximately 2.4 kilometers of clusters of buildings, where wildfire fuels may cause fires to spread into populated zones.

Emissions Risk: Fires igniting in roadless areas generate less fine inhalable particulate matter (PM₂.₅) in total than fires igniting in managed forests, although associated emissions per acre of roadless land are about one-third higher.

Suppression Costs and Damages: From 2010–2020, fires that ignited in inventoried roadless areas accounted for roughly 25 percent of reported suppression costs across Forest Service lands ($3.9 billion of a total of $15.6 billion). These fires were associated with approximately 1,700 reported lost properties, or about 11 percent of the nearly 16,000 total property losses reported. Suppression costs per acre of roadless land are higher than for managed forests but lower than for wilderness areas. These outcomes are assigned by ignition location, not by assessing all areas where fires eventually burned, suppression resources were used, or damages occurred

The Mountain Journal posted this story yesterday, Aug. 24….

Excerpt:

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz argues full suppression is essential for this hazardous summer. And Brian Fennessy, director of the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, defends a policy shift it’s made: Federal officials who want to promote forest health can no longer make the final call about whether to let a fire burn.

Public land managers have toggled back and forth about a full-suppression strategy over the past decades. Many believe that the full suppression strategy both overextends limited firefighting resources and ignores basic science about how fire affects forests.

“We don’t think wildfire should be divorced from the land,” said Bill Avey, president of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. “That’s been a policy failure.” Decades of extinguishing wildfires and climate change-induced drought have left Western forests full of dry fuels, contributing to conditions that can produce catastrophic fires. Making full suppression the default response, they argue, could perpetuate that problem while demanding more firefighting resources than the government has available.

From The New York Times today.

Towering woodlands in the West are being permanently replaced by tracts of spiky shrubs. Conditions “just aren’t normal anymore,” one researcher said.

Excerpt:

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

“This is a permanent shift from one ecosystem type to a fundamentally different one,” said Winslow Hansen, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an independent research center in Millbrook, N.Y.

The consequences of the shift, for both people and wildlife, are expected to be profound.

This brief 08/20/2026 letter to the Curry Coastal Pilot left me wanting to hear more from Mr. McCall. I agree with him. FWIW, on my private property in the northern Cascades, the Doug-fir that sprouted after a ~1903 fire are now up to 30 inches DBH and 170 feet tall — still spike tops. The stand is thinning itself via laminated root rot…. I’ve made some fine lumber out of the ones I’ve felled…. 

Proposed change coming to the Northwest Forest plan

Essay from High Country News. An experienced trail crew leader argues that, in today’s forests, the rigidity of the regulation buries what it’s designed to protect.

“As we sawed through yet another fire-scarred fir that had fallen across a backcountry trail, my trail crew and I would sometimes hear a hiker, pause our work and brace for the inevitable question: “What, they don’t let you use chainsaws?” ”

IMHO, the use of chainsaws would be less intrusive than the constant sounds of aircraft, which one hears on or off trails, in meadows, on the shores of remote lakes, etc.

I don’t have the full article ($), but here’s an excerpt (thanks to Nick Smith, who included the link in today’s Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities email.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/green-group-sues-to-invalidate-decades-of-federal-land-decisions

An environmental group’s lawsuit filed Wednesday aims to invalidate decades of logging projects, oil and gas leasing, and numerous other federal land management decisions made over the last 30 years because the federal land plans they were conducted under weren’t submitted to Congress.

Cascadia Wildlands’ lawsuit challenges two Oregon federal land management plans finalized by the Bureau of Land Management since the Congressional Review Act was enacted in 1996. The plans, which were never submitted to Congress for review, authorized logging projects the group says harm wildlife.

The group filed the lawsuit after Congress last year, for the first time in history, began using the CRA to scrap BLM land management plans disfavored by congressional Republicans, including plans for Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota.

The Government Accountability Office in 2025 declared the plans are rules under the Administrative Procedure Act. This gives lawmakers the ability to disapprove of them under the CRA, which requires rules to be submitted to Congress before taking effect.

Land plans were never considered rules prior to 2025, and those that took effect between 1996 and 2025 have never been submitted to Congress. Cascadia Wildlands says Congress’ use of the CRA to scrap the plans invalidates countless public lands management decisions made since the CRA became law.

“If land management plans are subject to the CRA, then no land management plan adopted after 1996 is in effect unless and until it has been submitted to Congress,” Cascadia Wildlands and its legal representation, Susan Jane Brown, an attorney for nonprofit law firm Silvix Resources, said in a statement.

A blogger named Wes Siler — I know little about him — has this recent post….

Interior Orders Politicization Of Death, Injury Reporting In National Parks, Public Lands

https://open.substack.com/pub/wessiler/p/interior-orders-politicization-of?r=4duo1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

“We used to be able to release specifics about serious accidents and incidents,” complains an employee of the National Park Service who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “Now we can’t release any demographics or specifics, just say, ‘the NPS responded to a serious incident’ with no other details. Which basically makes everyone who has someone visiting the park thinking their loved one has died.”

For a look at what our colleagues in Canada are talking about….

Senate committee report calls for better co-ordination of wildfire response

The New York Times has an op-ed today, “A Water Doom Loop Is Coming.” It’s by Gary Ferguson, author of “The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West.” As a subscriber, I’m allowed to “gift” access to the essay. Here’s the link.

First 2 paragraphs:

In much of the Southwest, the ponderosa pine is the one and only truly big tree, thriving in dry heat and poor soils. The painter Georgia O’Keeffe captured the beauty of a stately ponderosa north of Taos, N.M., in one of her most stunning works, “The Lawrence Tree.” The creators of the television show “Yellowstone” were so taken with ponderosa forests that they did much of their filming within one far from Yellowstone in western Montana.

But after about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of million of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.