Comunity Focus: Wilderness bill won't put out wildfires

Right now, there are nine active wildfires in Montana, burning thousands of acres of our cherished national parks, forests and grasslands. Hundreds of thousands of acres in California are burning too. This is in part because of the dry and hot weather we’ve had, but even more so due to decades of poor management of our federal forests. The evidence? One need look no farther than one of the first fires of the season, the Glacier Rim Fire which quickly burned about 100 acres of dead timber and thick regrowth brush in the same area of the 2003 Roberts fire.

This is not a new problem. Montana has been a tinderbox for a long time. Rather than sit idly by as our forests go up in smoke, I took action. Earlier this summer, I co-authored the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015 to help end the catastrophic wildfires that plague Montana and other western states. This is not a wilderness bill; this is a forest reform bill. A wilderness bill will not prevent wildfires, nor will it put them out.

This bill was the result of both my own experience living in western Montana and also years of congressional hearings, investigations, reports and public debate. It will bolster wildfire prevention by waging a proactive assault from multiple angles: First, it will incentivize local collaboration on timber projects, second, streamline bureaucratic process to expedite thinning and salvage projects and, third, dissuade frivolous litigation that grinds forest management to a halt. It also solves the wildfire “borrowing problem” by allowing the USFS to use funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fight fires.

More than 170 sportsmen, tribal, conservation, local government and industry groups, as well as retired forest rangers, have endorsed the legislation because it’s common sense solutions that can be implemented on day one. However, some outlying environmental groups contest the bill because they claim it doesn’t give them enough say in projects.

That is simply not true. The sections of the bill I authored emphasize and encourage local collaboration. This bill gives everyone a seat at the negotiating table. The only groups who will not have a say are the groups who choose not to participate. As a military officer I know the importance of teamwork, and the more locals are involved, the better the project will be in the end. However, these outlying groups often choose not to participate and have less of a teamwork mentality and more of a mindset of “I’m going to take my ball and go home.” Unfortunately that translates to launching a lawsuit to cancel a project completely.

One of the most vocal opponents to the Resilient Federal Forests Act, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, recently filed suit against the Forest Service for the Forest Stewardship Program, a project to harvest beetle-killed timber in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.  The litigants claim thinning is bad for the environment; however several environmental impact studies prove otherwise.

The Forest Stewardship Program is 9 years in the works. It is by all means a collaborative effort aimed at thinning areas the USFS, Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, county commissioners and Trout Unlimited say is unnatural and negatively impacting the watershed, and thus wildlife. As the Watershed Restoration Council noted, “conifer encroachment impacts flows, and if you lose that riparian area, you lose the most important wildlife in the area.” Thinning our dead, dying and overgrown forests is as much of a wildfire prevention issue as it is a conservation issue.

Frivolous lawsuits are at the heart of forest reform. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies launched more than 150 predatory lawsuits targeting legal and healthy forest projects in just the last ten years alone. During one such project they litigated on the grounds of preserving spotted owl habitat, the forest actually caught fire and burned down for a second time during the time it took to try the case, destroying the entire area, along with the owl’s habitat.

Opponents of the bill also wrongly assume the bill is unpalatable in the Senate because there is not a wilderness component. However, as the Hungry Horse News noted last week, previous attempts to attach a wilderness bill to any kind of forest management have “languished” in Congress, not even gaining support in a single chamber, let alone through the House and the Senate. My approach is far more pragmatic than the previous stalled bills and has even earned the support of dozens of Democrats in the House.

Montana is burning while some in the Senate sit on their hands and lament over process. But now, for the first time in over a decade, the Senate has the opportunity to act. I urge leaders in the Senate to talk to their colleagues in western states about the dangers wildfires pose, and act with expediency to pass the Resilient Federal Forest Act.

(Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., is the state’s sole member of the House of Representatives.)