For Immediate Release: April 11, 2025
Contact:
Josh Osher, Western Watersheds Project, josh@westernwatersheds.org; (406) 830-3099
Katie Bilodeau, Wilderness Watch, kbilodeau@wildernesswatch.org; (406) 542-2048
Ben Pitterle, Los Padres Forest Watch, ben@lpfw.org; (805) 617-4610
Mary O’Brien, Project Eleven Hundred, maryobrien10@gmail.com; (541) 556-8801
Chris Krupp, WildEarth Guardians, ckrupp@wildearthguardians.org; (206) 416-6363
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced the inaccurately named “Fix Our Forests Act.” The bill directs the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to develop plans to ramp up logging, grazing, and other destructive activities in the name of wildfire and fuels reduction. Despite just how bad these projects will actually be for public lands, waters, and wildlife, the bill creates massive exemptions from bedrock environmental laws designed to ensure that projects are thoroughly analyzed, use the best available science, and involve the public in decision. This bill also creates massive hurdles for judicial review that ensure projects will likely be completed before the courts can even take a close look at the agency’s plans.
“At one of the most crucial moments for the future of our public lands, waters, and wildlife, Congress is abandoning ship and handing over control to the cattle and timber barons who got us into this mess in the first place,” said Josh Osher, Public Policy Director for Western Watersheds Project. “What we need right now is a new paradigm that values life over profit and extraction, not the same tired ideas wrapped in deceptive new packaging.”
One of the most egregious and nonsensical sections of the bill (Sec. 117) would open vast swaths of currently ungrazed public lands, including in wilderness areas, national monuments, and areas of critical importance for wildlife, to extreme levels of grazing with the purported goal of removing invasive weeds and creating fuel breaks. Not only does the science not support grazing to reduce invasive species or wildfire risk, it actually clearly shows that grazing does the opposite. Grazing exacerbates cheatgrass dominance by trampling protective biocrusts and weakening native plants, compacts and dries out soils, and destroys riparian areas which act as natural buffers and refuge for wildlife during wildfire.
“This bill fleeces America–increasing grazing on public lands and our protected Wildernesses to reduce fire makes as much sense as a dentist filling a cavity with sugar,” said Katie Bilodeau, Legislative Director for Wilderness Watch. “It’s a handout to an ecologically destructive practice that taxpayers already heavily subsidize.”
“Using livestock to mow down meadows and grasslands every year will at the same time mow down precisely what our thousands of western native bee species need for their food (and existence): flowers,” remarked Mary O’Brien, Director of Project Eleven Hundred.
The Fix Our Forests Act will exacerbate the problems caused by decades of excessive logging, grazing, and vegetation management on our public lands by prescribing more of the same with even less caution or foresight. In contrast, bills such as H.R.582 – Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act introduced by Rep. Huffman actually provides solutions to increased wildfire risk to communities.
“This bad piece of legislation distracts from what really works—home hardening, defensible space in the immediate zone around structures, and strategic community planning,” said Ben Pitterle, the Director of Advocacy & Field Operations with Los Padres ForestWatch. “This bill is a disaster for forests, wildlife, and only offers false hope to those living in fire-prone areas”.
“This bill is addressing the invasive species crisis by upping the ante on the primary cause of the crisis—livestock grazing,” said Chris Krupp, public lands attorney with WildEarth Guardians. “It’s terrible public policy. Our representatives are supposed to resolve crises, not make them worse.”
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