Garberville, CA - A new wildfire bill introduced by Representative Scott McInnis (R-CO) does virtually nothing to protect homes and communities from wildfire, while it severely limits citizen participation and spends precious federal resources logging tens of millions of acres of federal public lands, grassroots conservation groups charge. McInnis' controversial bill - the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 - is to be reviewed by the House Resources Committee Wednesday, April 30.
"The most important step that Congress can take to protect lives and property from wildfire is to focus limited resources within the Community Protection Zone - an area directly adjacent to homes and communities. McInnis' fire bill completely fails to address this critical need, and instead will open the door to unrestricted logging of old-growth forests, roadless areas, and key salmon watersheds, all under the guise of "fuel reduction." Rather than provide any new funding authorization or mechanisms for fuels reduction on public or private lands, the bill relies on scaling back environmental safeguards to reduce fire risk. The results would likely be similar to the infamous 1995 Salvage Rider: more public distrust of the Forest Service, heightened opposition to fuel reduction projects, and no actual improvement in forest health." said Anthony Ambrose of the Environmental Protection Information Center in northern California.
Among other things, the McInnis bill would:
- allow the Forest Service to conduct large-scale, environmentally damaging logging projects without considering any alternatives or their relative environmental impacts;
- eliminate the statutory right of citizens to appeal Forest Service logging projects;
- impose unprecedented limitations on judicial review and give lawsuits challenging Forest Service projects priority over virtually all other civil and criminal litigation.
"The McInnis bill will deprive homeowners and cash-strapped counties and states of resources needed to conduct effective home protection efforts within the Community Protection Zone. As a landowner that has been working hard with my neighbors over the past three years to reduce brush and saplings around our homes, McInnis' fire bill is way off-target," said Jake Kreilick who owns 26 forested acres outside of Missoula, Montana. "At a time when counties and states are crying out for more money to protect homes and communities, Americans should question giving the logging industry more taxpayer money to conduct logging projects on tens of millions of acres of National Forest lands."
"Two wildfire camps seem to have developed in Washington, D.C. One draws on the wide-spread consensus that the vast majority of lands at risk are non-federal lands around communities, and that we should direct resources to states and communities to reduce fire risk within this Community Protection Zone. The other camp refuses to acknowledge these facts, intent on adopting legislation that will fail to steer funds to the areas of greatest need, but all the while promoting logging in the backcountry," stated Jeff Berman, a constituent of Representative McInnis and director of Colorado Wild, a grassroots conservation group based in Durango, Colorado. "Responsible fire legislation needs to specifically prioritize state and private community risk reduction."
"The McInnis bill clearly puts industry profits ahead of community protection. The best available science says that the way to protect communities is to create defensible space around homes and communities. In fact over 85% of the land in this community protection zone is on private, state and tribal land. The common sense solution is to provide funding directly to states and communities where the money will do the most good," said Randi Spivak, Executive Director of American Lands. "It is mindboggling that the McInnis bill takes the exact opposite approach, requiring that no money be given to states for community protection and instead proposes to log 20 million acres of forests away from communities."
"The McInnis bill does nothing to protect homes and communities from wildfire or promote badly needed restoration. Rather it proposes sweeping changes for how America's public lands will be managed for years to come by severely limiting citizen participation, undermining our nation's environmental laws and interfering with the judicial process," said Bryan Bird, Vice-President of the National Forest Protection Alliance, a national coalition of 130 conservation groups. "This bill provides nothing to forest homeowners and communities, while it gives logging corporations free reign on millions of acres of public lands deceptively in the name of 'forest health.'"
