The new climate change deniers aren’t who you may think they are. They aren’t popping off about how climate change is a hoax. They aren’t ignorant, or obvious. They are smart, educated, and persuasive—at least on the surface. Their modus operandi isn’t to tell you that climate change isn’t real, or that it isn’t caused by human consumption patterns. No. What they do is far more insidious, and vastly more dangerous and dishonest. They correctly tell you that climate change is real, and that the climate crisis is urgent, but then manipulate facts and evidence to greenwash logging and wood consumption patterns that have played a significant role in causing the climate crisis, while simultaneously encouraging an increase in those consumption patterns. In essence, they admit climate change is real, but deny the climate consequences of logging, or even attempt to spin logging as a climate solution. This matters because, at this stage, it is not possible to overcome the most severe upcoming impacts of the climate crisis solely by shifting away from consumption of fossil fuels. We must also, with equal vigor, increase protections of our best carbon sinks, especially forests, to draw down the dangerous excess of CO2 in our atmosphere. In other words, we must keep the carbon in the ground, and keep it in the forest. If you doubt this, read my book, “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.

Fundamentally, these new climate change deniers are acting as mouthpieces for powerful economic and political interests—many in the Republican Party and far too many in the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment. Some of them do it knowingly, generally for money, while others have simply been misled.

One notable example of this climate greenwashing is the prominent climate change podcast, “Boiling Point”, a venture of the Los Angeles Times. To be clear, like all large organizations, the L.A. Times is many things. The Times has done quite a bit of outstanding reporting on the environment, including forests and climate change. But Boiling Point is an exception to this.

The most recent Boiling Point episode, “The Myth of Forest Management”, was done jointly with another climate change podcast, Heated. While Emily Atkin from Heated attempted to be fair and balanced, Miranda Green from Boiling Point largely hi-jacked the podcast episode, inserting quotes from a scientist aligned with logging interests, Hugh Safford, to attack points I made in my interview, without informing me or giving me an opportunity to reply. The result was that Boiling Point used the episode as a platform to basically call me names, quoting some unnamed “scientist” as saying, “F*** that guy”, followed by a few other bits of vitriol. Ms. Green unleashed this barrage of ad hominem attacks specifically after I made the point that denser forests burn less intensely in wildfires than more open forests, and that mechanical “thinning” and other logging operations tend to intensify wildfire behavior and rate of spread.

What was going on there? Was this a spirited debate about interpretation of scientific evidence or methods? Not even a little bit. Not one substantive point or methodological issue was raised in these attacks. Not one. And here’s the really weird thing. In the interview, I was very specifically talking about numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies published by other scientists who have reported that the densest forests have the lowest wildfire intensities and that “thinning” and other logging exacerbate wildfires—mostly research from scientists with federal agencies and universities who have no affiliation with me. I have published many studies on these topics too, but I wasn’t even discussing my own research. So, why the concerted effort to silence or sideline me for talking about this? Clearly I touched a nerve. What followed this moment in the podcast episode was a series of comments and arguments by Miranda Green and Hugh Safford attempting to justify and promote logging—especially logging on public lands like National Forests—as a means to supposedly curb wildfires and “restore” forests. Since I was not given the standard opportunity to respond to Hugh or Miranda before the podcast ran, I’ll spend some time here debunking the disinformation and climate greenwashing promoted by Miranda Green and Hugh Safford on the recent Boiling Point podcast episode, “The Myth of Forest Management”.

Most critically, all content about the climate change impacts of “thinning” and other logging was omitted from the episode—in a podcast about climate change. Listeners did not get to hear about the numerous studies finding that “thinning” emits several times more CO2 per acre than wildfire alone, or that the overwhelming majority of scientific research finds that wildfires are driven mainly by weather and climate factors, and climate change—things that can’t be addressed with chainsaws and logging machinery. This should have been the core focus of a podcast ostensibly devoted to climate solutions.

To put this into perspective, it’s necessary to understand the very different effects of forest fires and mechanical “thinning” (logging) on forest carbon, and CO2 emissions. My colleagues and I spent four and a half years doing detailed and painstaking field work in forest fire areas to find out the percentage of tree carbon that is consumed and in large wildfires. In 2022 we published our findings, resulting from the largest and most comprehensive field-based study ever done on this subject. We found that even the largest and most intense forest fires only consume an average of 1.2% of tree carbon, a finding that is uncontested in the scientific literature. That’s it—just over 1%. In stark contrast, logging conducted under the rubric of “thinning” removes 30% to 50% of tree carbon, and most of this is emitted into the atmosphere almost immediately, since the majority of trees removed from forests are not useable for dimensional lumber or other wood products. The branches, tree tops, bark, round parts, and mill residues are burned for dirty energy, called “biomass energy”, which emits about 50% more CO2 than burning coal, for equal energy produced. The entirety of small/medium-sized trees—generally those less than 14 inches in diameter—are burned for biomass energy production. Post-fire clearcut logging is also 100% for biomass energy production in many cases these days, which we call “clearcuts for kilowatts”. What’s more, the damage done to forest soils by heavy logging machinery reduces forest productivity, i.e., carbon sequestration potential, by more than 30%, as over 200 climate scientists and ecologists, including me, recently noted.

Logging, regardless of the deceptive euphemisms used to spin it (“thinning”, “forest health”, “restoration”, “fuel reduction”), is a climate change nightmare. This is the true face of logging in the 21^st century: treating trees like giant sticks of coal for dirty, climate-polluting energy. It’s also an environmental justice nightmare. Burning fossil fuels produces dangerous levels of toxic and particulate emissions, and burning trees or portions of trees for energy is even worse. What’s more, the logging industry disproportionately locates its dirty energy facilities in lower-income communities and communities of color. But Boiling Point, in its gleeful promotion of logging, is apparently unconcerned with the fact that logging makes climate change worse, or the environmental racism associated with it.

Boiling Point’s Miranda Green also dug up a comment from a 2021 hit-piece article published by a pro-logging newspaper, claiming that 41 studies by a total of 111 scientists have supposedly “made the case for more forest thinning, and in the process ripped Hanson and his allies’ methods and results”, based on a comment from one of the Forest Service-funded scientists, Keala Hagmann. This comment was deeply dishonest and misleading (and, again, I was given no opportunity by Miranda Green to respond to it—she never even contacted me). First, the 41 studies in question are from Tables 3 through 6 of Hagmann et al. (2021), according to the lead author of that article (I sent her an email and she confirmed this), and not one of them pertains to thinning and wildfire intensity—not one. Second, most of the 41 studies in question did not pertain to my research or even reference or discuss my research. Third, many of the 41 studies did not even reference or discuss the research of colleagues of mine. Fourth, with regard to the portion of the 41 studies that did criticize my research, or the research of one or more of my colleagues, Miranda Green neglected to mention that, in every single case, my colleagues and I published rebuttal articles pointing out that the criticisms did not even challenge or question any of our central findings. Instead, the criticisms merely made tangential, fly-specking comments that we either acknowledged were fair (though minor) points, which did not alter our basic results or conclusions, or which we soundly refuted. Fifth, not one of the many, many rebuttal articles that I and/or my colleagues published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, in response to these critiques, was included or mentioned in the Hagmann et al. (2021) article, or by Miranda Green. In other words, by omitting any mention of our rebuttal articles, Hagmann et al. (2021) created the false impression that their critiques were the final word when, in fact, our rebuttals completely, utterly, and definitively addressed and refuted those critiques in every case, with no further comebacks from the critics about our methods, results, or conclusions. In 2023, my colleagues and I published a peer-reviewed study that comprehensively documented the enormous body of scientific evidence omitted by Hagmann et al. (2021) and a couple of other Forest Service-funded studies. We concluded, in Baker et al. (2023), that this pervasive pattern of scientific omissions represented a “falsification of the scientific record”, a finding and conclusion that remains uncontested in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Notably, the deceptive and fraudulent Hagmann et al. (2021) article was co-authored by Hugh Safford.

In the course of promoting logging, Miranda Green allowed Hugh Safford to tout two of his recent studies. Both of these studies are prime examples of the ways in which compromised scientists, who have a conflict of interest due to affiliations and funding associated with logging, will often manipulate methods to push their agenda, or will in some cases even make pro-logging conclusions that are directly contradicted by the results of their own studies. In the first of these studies, Safford and Saberi (2026), the authors claimed that mechanical “thinning” was effective at protecting forest trees from the Caldor fire of 2021 near Lake Tahoe, and used this conclusion to promote more funding to subsidize expanded logging on public lands. However, the study’s results actually point to the opposite conclusion.

The study’s narrative is that “thinned” forests had a lower percentage of trees killed by the Caldor fire. But Table 1b of the study shows that the thinning logging operations conducted by the Forest Service killed and removed over two-thirds of the trees before the Caldor fire occurred, including some larger, mature trees but, numerically, mostly saplings and other very small trees. What remained were larger trees that more often survive fires. Safford and Saberi (2026) omitted the thousands of trees killed by thinning from their analysis of tree mortality—a deceptive tactic typical of thinning studies from scientists funded by entities financially involved in logging, such as the U.S. Forest Service. This sleight of hand was the basis for the authors’ false narrative that thinning was effective at protecting forest trees from the fire. In the unthinned forests, the dense areas of conifer saplings remained, and most of these small trees are killed even in creeping, low-intensity surface fires. This deception allowed Safford and Saberi (2026) to misleading claim that a higher percentage of the trees in unthinned forests were killed, and that trees in unthinned forests had higher levels of crown scorch and crown torch. Of course they did, since even low-intensity fire will completely scorch or torch the numerically-dominant saplings that remained in the understory of the unthinned forest, and are close to the ground. Such trees did not generally get scorched or torched in the Caldor fire in the thinned forests for the simple reason that they had been mostly removed before the fire got there. Safford and Saberi (2026) used this trick to imply that the Caldor fire burned more intensely in the unthinned forests, which were much denser. But Safford and Saberi (2026)’s own results show this was not true. Figure 4 of that study shows that the height of the flames, and the killing of foliage due to flames, in meters, were generally higher in the thinned forests, indicating higher fire intensity in thinned forests.

Why is this? It’s pretty simple, actually. The largest and most comprehensive scientific studies—the ones that analyze dozens or hundreds of wildfires across large regions and many years—generally find that the densest forests have lower intensities in wildfires, due to the cooler, shadier, more humid, and less windy microclimate in denser forests. Safford admitted this is true in wetter forests, but claimed, without citing any evidence, that this principle does not apply to dry forests, such as ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forests. However, as Hugh Safford knows quite well, there are stacks of studies in dry forests finding that denser forests burn less intensely in wildfires. Many of these studies are cited and described in fact sheets on John Muir Project’s website, including the “Thinning and Fire” fact sheet and the “Myth of Overgrown Forests” fact sheet. Check them out, and see for yourself what Boiling Point and Hugh Safford don’t want you to know. One such large wildfire study, Lesmeister et al. (2019), which was authored by the U.S. Forest Service’s own scientists, found that denser dry forests with high canopy cover “buffer the negative effects of climate change” when wildfires occur. The authors noted that forest “thinning” undermines this important climate buffer, stating the following:

“Thinned forests have more open conditions, which are associated with higher temperatures, lower relative humidity, higher wind speeds, and increasing fire intensity. Furthermore, live and dead fuels in young forest or thinned stands with dense saplings or shrub understory will be drier, making ignition and high heat more likely, and the rate of spread higher because of the relative lack of wind breaks provided by closed canopies with large trees.”

In an even larger study in dry forests by these Forest Service scientists, Lesmeister et al. (2021), which included 472 wildfires over three decades, the authors found that more open forests with lower biomass had higher fire severity, because the type of open, lower-biomass forests resulting from thinning and other logging activities have “hotter, drier, and windier microclimates, and those conditions decrease dramatically over relatively short distances into the interior of older forests with multi-layer canopies and high tree density…”

Similarly, Lydersen et al. (2014), in the ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, found that the densest forests with the highest numbers of small and medium-sized trees had the lowest fire severity. In 2018, my colleagues and I analyzed 1500 wildfires in dry forests across the entire western U.S., over the span of three decades. In Bradley et al. (2016), we found that the dry forests with complete protection from logging, which tend to be the densest and most carbon-rich, had the lowest levels of wildfire intensity, while forests with fewer, or few, environmental protections, and substantial logging (e.g., mechanical “thinning”, post-fire logging, etc.) had the highest wildfire intensity.

Moreover, when trees are removed from forests, winds sweep through forests much faster, driving flames to spread far more rapidly, according to multiple studies from the Forest Service’s own scientists. This means that, after so-called “thinning”, fires will reach communities more quickly, giving people and their animals less time to safely evacuate, and first responders less time to arrive and help. We have already seen the tragic real-world results of this: in the Camp fire of 2018, which burned fast and hot through heavily “thinned” and post-fire logged forests (where logging had been conducted under the guise of “fuel reduction” and “fuelbreaks”) and destroyed the towns of Paradise and Concow, killing 85 people and destroying over 14,000 homes; in the Caldor fire of 2021, which burned at high-intensity through numerous “thinned” forests and destroyed the town of Grizzly Flats; in the Dixie fire of 2021, which raced intensely through vast areas of “thinned” forests and post-fire logging from earlier fires, before destroying Greenville and Canyondam; and many others.

Heedless of the weight of scientific evidence, the narrative spun by Hugh Safford, and Miranda Green by extension, was that current forests are far too dense, and overgrown, and are supposedly burning too intensely as a result. Totally aside from the huge body of scientific evidence finding that the densest forests tend to burn at lower intensities, they are also being misleading about the historical evidence regarding forest density. About 15 years ago, some Forest Service-funded scientists published research claiming that historical Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer and ponderosa pine forests had very low tree densities, only about 20 to 30 per acre, based on old U.S. Forest Service forest surveys conducted around 1911 in unlogged forests, prior to fire suppression. I reached out to the authors of the study, asking them to send me their raw data (it is standard practice among scientists to openly make data available once studies are published, so that other researchers can verify results and conclusions). They refused. So my colleagues and I went to the National Archives in San Bruno, California, where the original forest survey records were kept, and went through the certification process to handle and copy these historical documents. We found that the Forest Service-funded scientists had cherry-picked the data, excluding 94% of the historical forest records, without mentioning that exclusion in their study. They excluded records documenting the existence of far denser forests, and excluded 100% of the historical records regarding the density of small trees. Over the following years, my colleagues and I assembled and published all of the historical forest survey data that the agency-funded scientists had omitted, and we found that historical mixed-conifer forests were 7 times denser in terms of trees per acre than previously claimed, and historical ponderosa pine forests were 17 times denser than previously claimed. This finding is also uncontested in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Similarly misleading and false was the suggestion by Hugh Safford and Miranda Green that it is necessary to remove trees from forests before burning can be done. This is blatantly false. There is quite literally half a century of scientific studies documenting that fire can easily be restored to forests without removing any trees, including in the very densest forests, in forests that haven’t burned in over a century, and in forests with high levels of dead trees and downed wood. Even the U.S. Forest Service admits this (see John Muir Project’s “Fire Alone” fact sheet on this issue for citations and descriptions). That’s because it’s overwhelmingly about the weather. If land managers desire to have lower-intensity fire, they simply allow or conduct burning in mild fire weather. This applies to managed wildfire (allowing lightning strikes to burn for forest and habitat benefits), prescribed fires, and Indigenous cultural burning, all of which have an important role, but none of which require logging. Previous fire will moderate subsequent fire for a certain period of time, usually a few to several years, but that’s about consumption of twigs, dry leaves, and pine needles on the forest floor, and has nothing to do with tree removal. The entire narrative that forests must first be thinned before they can be burned is nothing more than a self-serving scam being run by logging interests and the scientists and politicians they pay to parrot their messages.

Safford also attempted to downplay the extensive logging of mature and old-growth trees happening currently on National Forests through the federal timber sales program, implying that this only occurs when the occasional bad-actor contractor takes some big trees without authorization. This is another blatant falsehood. Anyone can go on the website of any particular National Forest in the Sierra Nevada, or Oregon and Washington, or Montana and Idaho, and go to the “Projects” webpage to see that Safford’s claim is false. Pick several so-called “forest health”, “thinning”, “fuel reduction”, or “restoration” projects at random and download the Environmental Assessments to see what the proposed actions actually entail. In National Forests of the Sierra Nevada, for example, the largest (by acreage) projects, which make up the vast majority of the total area proposed for some form of “thinning”, consistently allow logging of mature and old-growth trees up to 30 or 40 inches in diameter—trees that would take two people to reach around and touch fingertips. When it comes to post-fire logging, there is no diameter limit whatsoever.

The second study that was promoted by Safford on Boiling Point was Safford and Stewart (2026), which Safford used on the podcast to suggest that large areas of forest are not naturally regenerating after wildfires (and, therefore, fires must be curbed and, therefore, we must do more logging supposedly to curb fires, etc., etc.). In terms of deceptive methodologies, this one is a real whopper. Specifically, the Safford and Stewart (2026) study claimed that an average of more than 200,000 acres are being “deforested” by wildfires per year in California. But the study used an administrative (political) definition of “deforested”, which includes forests with as little as 50% tree mortality from wildfire. So, if a given stand had 200 trees per acre, and fire killed half, leaving 100 live trees per acre, this was deceptively defined as “deforested”. The study upon which this deceptive model was based, Welch et al. (2016), admitted that these areas, which Safford and Stewart (2026) misleading claim are “deforested”, had an average of 707 conifer seedlings and saplings naturally regenerating per acre after wildfires. That’s a long way off from “deforested”.

Last, Miranda Green and Hugh Safford repeatedly demonized high-intensity fire patches, and talked about them as if they are an example of destruction or damage—something that must be prevented. Trying to stop or prevent high-intensity fire patches, or large fires, is a wildly outdated and misplaced goal, ecologically, as there are now several hundred scientific studies finding that many native plant and animal species not only benefit from the unique “snag forest habitat” created by high-intensity fire, but many of them primarily depend on it, including numerous woodpeckers and other cavity-nesting species that depend on patches of standing dead trees for homes and food (e.g., food in the form of native insects that depend recently-dead or dying trees to reproduce), as well as many shrub-nesting birds and small and large mammals that depend on the native fire-following shrubs, and downed logs. In fact, snag forest habitat, more technically known as “complex early seral forest”, is comparable to old-growth forest in terms of native biodiversity and wildlife abundance. It’s not damage or loss, it’s an ecological treasure. Read the “Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix” and “Smokescreen” books for a detailed description of this and hundreds of citations to scientific studies on this point.

Near the end of the podcast, Miranda Green was trying to find nice and supportive things to say about a notoriously anti-environmental and deceptively-named logging bill called the “Fix Our Forests Act”, which, if passed, would override environmental laws to allow an unlimited number of logging projects up to 10,000 acres in size each to occur on National Forests with little or no public notice or comment, or environmental analysis. This logging bill, sponsored by Senator John Curtis (R-UT) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), also contains a hidden loophole that would make it impossible to enforce any federal environmental laws on National Forests. There are no diameter limits, so old-growth trees and forests would be logged. There are no limits on the proportion of trees that could be removed, so public forests would be clearcut. Massive amounts of carbon would be removed from the last best places on our National Forests, and most of it would quickly go into the atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis at a time when we absolutely cannot afford to make it worse. But that doesn’t seem to bother Boiling Point. Welcome to the world of climate greenwashing.

Chad Hanson is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project (www.johnmuirproject.org) and is the author of the book, “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.

Take Action: Please call your U.S. Senators (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121) and urge them to oppose any attempts to pass deceptively-named logging bills like the “Fix Our Forests Act” (S. 1462) or the “Save Our Sequoias Act” (S. 4103), and tell them to oppose any cynical attempts to add any provisions from these logging bills to must-pass legislation like the Farm Bill Reauthorization or the National Defense Authorization Act.

Subscribe now

As I write this, a shadowy coalition is making substantial sums of money exploiting and destroying giant sequoia groves on public lands and lying about it. The “Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition” (GSLC), comprised of federal and California land management agencies and other entities financially involved in logging, is currently clearcutting old-growth stands, conducting large post-fire clearcut logging projects, and logging huge trees in the Giant Sequoia National Monument, and Yosemite National Park, within and adjacent to giant sequoia groves. They are doing this with limited or no environmental analysis or public participation, and often no public notice at all. And much more of this will happen, in many more giant sequoia groves, if the deceptive and profoundly dangerous logging bill promoted by the GSLC, the so-called Save Our Sequoias Act, is passed by the U.S. Senate.

The Act passed the House and is now in the Senate (S. 4103, Padilla, D-CA; Curtis, R-UT), where the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee plans to hold a hearing today (September 16, 2026) to promote this bill, and the false narrative upon which it is built. If S. 4103 is passed, the old-growth logging and clearcutting occurring currently within and near sequoia groves would escalate dramatically, since the bill would override federal environmental laws to severely curtail or eliminate public participation and disclosures about adverse environmental impacts. Giant sequoia groves and adjacent old-growth forests in the Sequoia Monument, Yosemite National Park, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks would be open to industrial logging under the deceptive guises of euphemisms like “thinning”, “fuel reduction”, “restoration”, “forest health”, and “reforestation”. Giant sequoia trees could and would be cut. The bill’s terms even apply the logging provisions to designated Wilderness Areas. And here’s the kicker: the Act would turn over management of all giant sequoia groves on public lands, and vast areas of adjacent old-growth forests, to the GSLC and logging companies, cutting the public out.

How did this happen? Aside from the Congressional Republicans and Democrats who are squarely in the logging industry’s pocket, how did so many others get snowed and misled? The answer is that GSLC member entities, and associated logging industry advocacy organizations, have been running an aggressive disinformation and propaganda campaign to prop up the political narrative that they concocted to keep vast sums of public funds flowing from taxpayer coffers into their pockets to subsidize their destructive activities. The GSLC’s false narrative would have us believe that recent wildfires have destroyed large portions of giant sequoia groves, and that logging, intensive herbicide (glyphosate) spraying, and industrial tree plantations are needed supposedly to prevent or curb future fires and “reforest” giant sequoia groves. In particular, the GSLC claims that giant sequoias are incapable of regenerating in high-intensity fire patches, especially large high-intensity fire patches with substantial areas of crown fire, where the flames reached the tops of the trees. These are lies. In fact, there is abundant, rapidly-growing giant sequoia regeneration in large, intense crown fire patches; in contrast, giant sequoias cannot effectively reproduce in lower-intensity surface fire areas, like prescribed burns.

The GSLC knows this to be true, but doesn’t want you to realize it. Some government scientists issued a report finding an astonishing average of about 17,000 giant sequoia seedlings per acre in large high-intensity fire patches after recent wildfires, contradicting the political narrative the GSLC has been using to keep the “gravy train” of public funding running to subsidize logging and industrial tree plantation forestry. Shortly thereafter, the sequoia regeneration data were manipulated and falsified by the GSLC, and a new version of the report was issued with fraudulent sequoia regeneration density figures far lower than the actual data presented in the original report. No explanation was given, and the GSLC has refused to respond to questions about the data fabrication.

Recently, the GSLC, which was created by the Biden Administration, has gotten even worse in the Trump Administration. Here are just a few among many examples:

• The GSLC just clearcut a portion of the iconic Mariposa Giant Sequoia Grove in Yosemite National Park, logging many huge old-growth trees and selling them to logging companies.

• The GSLC claimed that imperiled Condors, Fishers, and Spotted Owls would not use the recent fire areas, and supposedly would not be impacted by post-fire logging, but all three species have been found actively using and inhabiting these fire areas, including the high-intensity patches. Our research, based on the government’s own Condor GPS tracking data, documented that dozens of endangered Condors are now preferentially selecting high-intensity fire patches in the Sequoia Monument—the very same areas targeted by the GSLC for logging.

• The GSLC has recently been deliberately cutting and killing large swaths of natural giant sequoia regeneration in high-intensity fire patches, throwing the killed sequoia saplings into many hundreds of huge slash piles, and incinerating them with the public funds they have been receiving. In just one grove, Freeman Creek, our team of scientists found the GSLC has already killed 158,000 young sequoia trees.

Take Action: Please call your U.S. Senators now, and often, and urge them to oppose the sham “Save Our Sequoias Act”, S. 4103 (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121). And please tell them that you are outraged that taxpayer funds are being used to lie to the public, and exploit and destroy beloved giant sequoia groves on public lands.

But fire has become part of my life in another way, too. Years ago, I evacuated Estes Park, Colorado, during the East Troublesome Fire when it abruptly crossed the Continental Divide and raced toward the community. I remember dark red skies in the middle of the afternoon and sitting in gridlocked evacuation traffic, knowing a fast-moving fire was somewhere behind me. I remember the uncertainty of not knowing what my community would look like when I returned.

Since then, I’ve had numerous occasions when the place I lived was under an evacuation warning or when I closely monitored evacuation maps as fires approached nearby communities. Family and friends have evacuated, too. All of these experiences haven’t made me afraid of wildfire on the landscape though. They’ve made me concerned about whether the communities living alongside it are actually prepared for when it arrives.

There is a particular kind of fear when wildfire reaches a community. You can understand its ecology, celebrate the beautiful role of fire on the landscape, and appreciate the habitat created by fire of different intensities while still feeling your stomach drop when vulnerable homes and lives are in its path. Those ideas are compatible. Wildfire belongs on these landscapes and our communities need to be prepared to coexist with it.

That was what I found myself thinking about again during the Hawk Fire, just days ago. This time, in Reno, the area where I live was placed in an evacuation warning zone. I packed what I could into my vehicle, kept my go-bag ready, and watched the conditions closely. Fortunately, I never had to leave; however, nearly every other house in my area had an evacuate-now order as the fire was quite literally knocking on the doorsteps of my neighbors.

The Hawk Fire started outside Reno under Red Flag conditions and did what wind-driven fires naturally do: it ran, quickly. In less than 12 hours, it grew to more than 13,000 acres and traveled more than seven miles from its point of ignition. Nearly 90,000 people were affected by evacuation orders and warnings. Roads clogged with headlights. Power went out. Major roads closed. Police and first responders did an extraordinary job keeping traffic moving, but gridlock still persisted late into the night as people realized the fire had reached the community edge.

Then homes began to burn. Dozens of homes were lost, but these communities were also fortunate: the winds eventually moderated overnight. Had strong winds continued pushing flames and embers into densely developed neighborhoods, even for just an hour longer, the losses would likely have been far greater. Once multiple structures ignite, fire can propagate through the built environment through embers, radiant heat, and structure-to-structure ignition. A wildland fire can become an urban conflagration. Thankfully, we didn’t find out how bad this one could have become.

It’s important to remember that even though the weather changed just in time, our vulnerability still needs to be addressed after the fire. Packed and ready to leave, I kept thinking that the problem isn’t that fire moves across these landscapes; it’s that our communities aren’t ready to embrace this rhythm. I stood on my street corner and watched the gridlocked traffic inch forward with flames on the mountainsides behind it. I knew that this fire was a few strong wind gusts away from drifting across the community to my doorstep. And I know this is where our wildfire mitigation money belongs—in our communities.

The Hawk Fire didn’t become dangerous because a distant forest somewhere was “overgrown” and had “too many trees per hectare” compared to an arbitrary point in time. An ignition coincided with dry conditions and an extraordinary window of fire weather—it’s as simple as that. Large-fire years occur when climatic susceptibility aligns with short-lived weather opportunities capable of sustaining rapid fire growth. Firefighters can exploit changes in weather to defend homes, but they can’t turn off the wind.

Yet across the West, enormous sums are spent thinning, masticating, burning, and otherwise manipulating habitat in the name of wildfire mitigation while homes remain vulnerable to well-understood ignition pathways. Apparently, we have money to alter entire landscapes, but making the homes within those landscapes fire-ready is somehow beyond our scope.

I believe the broader scientific evidence weighs strongly against so-called “fuels reduction” in wild ecosystems as an effective strategy for protecting communities, and does not support manipulating wildlands in an attempt to control fire. But you don’t have to agree with me about that to agree about what should come first. Before we keep spending billions to alter forest densities and celebrate the number of backcountry acres logged, let’s prepare our homes.

Decades of research by former U.S. Forest Service fire scientist Dr. Jack Cohen found that home ignition depends principally on the characteristics of the structure and its immediate surroundings. His work shifted attention toward the home ignition zone—within roughly 100 feet of a structure—and making homes compatible with wildfire rather than assuming wildfire must first be prevented from reaching communities.

That means addressing roofs, vents, decks, fences, combustible materials, and the most combustible vegetation around structures, helping people who cannot afford those improvements, and investing in evacuation planning and infrastructure. Extreme conditions may occasionally overwhelm even well-prepared structures but if better preparation saves one more home—or better evacuation planning saves one more life—that is where I want our money going. In reality, there are numerous real-world examples where the vast majority of homes survive wildfires, and everyone safely evacuates, when fire-safe community preparedness is practiced community-wide ahead of time.

And this isn’t just about fire in Nevada. Reno is one example of a national problem. Across the country, communities remain vulnerable while enormous public investments continue flowing toward an ever-growing landscape-scale vegetation removal and manipulation scheme. We need a national commitment to community protection, starting in the regions facing the greatest wildfire exposure and working through vulnerable communities nationwide. Instead of boasting about acres “treated,” let’s measure something closer to what we supposedly care about: people and homes protected.

The order matters. Wilderness, roadless areas, and remote landscapes do not need to be logged or manipulated to protect homes. Even the Wildland-Urban Interface (“WUI”) has been artificially extended for miles, consuming vital resources far beyond the home ignition zone while the places where homes actually ignite remain severely underfunded. We should agree to finish preparing every single home ignition zone first. Then we can have the backcountry logging debate.

That is my challenge to forest collaboratives and conservation organizations advocating for landscape-scale “fuels reduction,” which often involves intensive logging. Many say they support home hardening and community protection. Great—fund it like you mean it and stop blocking efforts to shift funding to communities. Budgets are better statements of priorities than taglines on websites. If most of your advocacy, funding requests, projects, and political capital are directed toward altering habitat outside home ignition zones, then community protection isn’t actually your first priority. So, let’s agree to make it your top priority.

I think the science weighs heavily against tree cutting and vegetation manipulation as fuels reduction from every angle. You may disagree. Fine, we can debate that later. First, fully fund the thing that decades of home-ignition science already tells us directly addresses whether homes burn.

When the evacuation orders are lifted, numerous families affected by the Hawk Fire won’t be returning home. Their houses are gone, their memories are lost, and we definitely cannot say that this happened after we had already done everything reasonably possible to prepare every vulnerable home and neighborhood—we haven’t.

We know that some homes may burn regardless. There will always be extreme conditions capable of overwhelming some mitigation efforts. But until we can stand after a fire and say we did everything in our power to prepare those families before the flames arrived, it’s not justifiable to put community protection behind any multi-billion-dollar landscape manipulation scheme.

I accept the responsibility that comes with living with fire, but living in wildfire country is not a special lifestyle choice for millions of people—it is simply where home is—and coexistence creates responsibilities for us, not a requirement to endlessly alter the wild ecosystems around us.

That is why I support bills like the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act (H.R. 582 and S. 3609), and why I’m asking conservation organizations, forest collaboratives, agencies, and elected officials to shift wildfire mitigation funding toward the place that has the greatest effectiveness, the home ignition zone. This time, I got to unpack and stay home, but dozens of families will not have a home to return to as the smoke settles after the Hawk Fire. That difference makes the priority mismatch painfully clear.

We simply can’t—nor should we be trying to—eliminate wildfire from a fire-prone and fire-adapted continent. Fire of all intensities belongs here. Our communities do, too. Coexistence means accepting both realities and putting our resources where they will directly protect human lives and homes. As a result of this reprioritization of funds, the best available forest and fire science tells us that we would also be protecting ecosystem integrity by showing wild areas the restraint they need to naturally respond to fire on their own terms.

After every vulnerable community has been given the resources to become as fire-ready as possible we can debate our funding priorities. But until then, let’s support our neighbors, harden our homes, prepare our communities to coexist with fire, save our bickering about the nuances of forest structures on some far-off mountainside for the future, and shift our focus and funding to the places that matter most—the people and homes in our communities.

None of this is new to us, even if it’s still a fringe position inside this movement. Some of us have been making this argument for years, from outside the rooms where the legacy groups set strategy, not against the goal of protecting these forests, but against the terms they’ve settled for. Close the loophole. Stop treating “treatment” as neutral. We were told, repeatedly, that now wasn’t the time, by people whose access depends on staying inside acceptable vocabulary. Being on the fringe doesn’t make the argument wrong. It just means the people it threatens have had an easier time ignoring it.

Touting the loophole doesn’t fix the underlying problem. It just extends the smokescreen that nature is something we can manage into submission, an odd premise to keep leaning on when mechanical treatment emits roughly ten times more carbon than fire and native insects combined. Even in a large, intense wildfire, only about 2 to 3 percent of the carbon in trees is actually consumed. The rest stays on site, as standing snags, downed wood, and soil, feeding the next generation of forest, assuming it’s given the chance. “Treatments” remove carbon outright, and the microclimate left behind, hotter, drier, windier, makes what’s left more likely to burn severely too.

Mixed and high-severity fire moved through these forests long before colonization too, opening canopy, resetting soil, building the exact structural complexity species depend on.

Weather, not the vegetation on the ground, mostly decides whether a fire becomes an extreme, fast-moving event. Drought, wind, and heat drive that far more than what’s standing in its path, and as climate whiplash intensifies, there will be more fast fires, not fewer, especially if more acres get “treated.” What logging changes isn’t the weather. It’s what’s left behind for that weather to burn through: a hotter, drier, more open stand instead of an intact one. That’s why removing more trees correlates with higher severity, not lower. The mechanism is a degraded microclimate, not a fuel load that “treatments” claim to fix. Weather can’t be managed. A fire-adapted forest, built by exactly this kind of disturbance, doesn’t need to be either.

If anyone serious about climate still calls “hazard treatments” a solution, that’s a form of denial too. It treats these forests as if natural disturbance were an aberration instead of what they’ve evolved with since time immemorial, and it ignores that attempting to manage that disturbance away burns more carbon than the disturbance itself, even when that’s not obvious to most people watching the news. That’s on us to fix. They haven’t done the work of teaching people that a burned landscape in early succession is something to protect, not something to grieve. There are two real goals here, not one. Protect these lands and the natural disturbances that sustain them, fire, insects, all of it. And build fire-adapted communities from the home outward: hardened structures, defensible space, better evacuation routes, smoke centers, real investment in the places people actually live. We already have both solutions. What’s missing isn’t science or money. It’s the willpower in Washington to put actual dollars behind them rather than another round of stale buzzwords dressed up as caution.

Mainstream groups’ talking point is specific: “treatments” are already allowed under the current rule, since it only “bars new roads and industrial logging”, and 34% of Forest Service fuel treatment activity between 2001 and 2019 already happened in roadless areas. Senator Heinrich called this flexibility itself the selling point at a press conference this summer, describing the rule’s build-a-road-then-remove-it provision as “the most flexible conservation tool that we have.” That’s not a defense of roadless areas. It’s a description of how easily the loophole gets used, dressed up as praise. And it undercuts something these same groups say elsewhere, that roadless areas are among the last intact forests in the country. A landscape where a third of all national “treatment” activity has already occurred isn’t intact by any definition. It’s evidence the loophole has been doing exactly what a loophole does.

The independent record doesn’t support treating fuels reduction as neutral, and neither does the Forest Service’s own science. Bradley et al 2016 analyzed roughly 1,500 fires and found the more trees removed through logging, the higher the fire severity, not lower. Calkin et al 2023 concluded that wildland-urban fire disasters aren’t actually a wildfire problem, they’re a home-ignition problem, and the real fix is hardening the roughly 100 feet immediately around a structure, not treating forest miles away. A true public lands champion doesn’t cite a treatment statistic as a selling point. They ask what it’s actually buying, and stop repeating it once they know.

To be clear, we do not support the rescission. It’s a bad-faith attack dressed up as wildfire policy, and it should be opposed. But opposing it doesn’t mean celebrating the talking points Democrats and mainstream groups have chosen to oppose it with. USDA’s own release makes the administration’s actual argument plain: roads for “access,” natural disturbance reframed as tinderbox, all wrapped in the language of “treatments.” That argument deserves a direct rebuttal, not a softer version of its premise. Stop calling it flexibility. Say what it is, and then close the loophole, not codify it.

The public comment period opens tomorrow and runs through midnight, September 21. When it does, submit yours through Regulations.gov under docket FS-2025-0001. Then tell your members of Congress what the actual ask is: not a restored rule with the same hole in it, but closing the loopholes. Or even better: every Inventoried Roadless Area converted to designated Wilderness. Full stop.

Subscribe now

That’s a strange vehicle to choose, and not just because forest policy doesn’t belong in a defense bill. Padilla is also using this same NDAA to propose a demonstration program letting the Pentagon and National Science Foundation build a mock town on a military test range and ignite it repeatedly to study wildfire behavior. But the work’s already been done. Veteran U.S. Forest Service wildfire scientist, Dr. Jack Cohen, ran this experiment decades ago, igniting forest blocks next to test structures at measured distances and documenting exactly how homes ignite in wildfire. That research became the home ignition zone concept and the entire basis for Firewise and defensible space standards still in use today to create fire-safe communities. Padilla already has his own bill sitting in committee since January, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, that funds the actual answer Cohen’s work already gave us: home hardening, defensible space, community-level planning. Instead, the Senate Energy Committee is pushing toward building something specifically to destroy it, under Pentagon control, to re-derive a finding that’s been settled science since the 1990s. It’s the same instinct that produced McClintock’s numbers in the first place: treat fire as an enemy to be studied, contained, and defeated, never as a process already doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Two bills resting on a number that won’t hold still is its own problem. Forests are supposed to shift, expand, thin, and burn on their own terms, across the Sierra and everywhere else vegetation grows, at different intensities depending on climate, terrain, region, and species. That’s not disorder. That’s the system functioning. McClintock’s number is the one drifting to fit whatever case he’s making that day.

Whichever figure lands in a given hearing comes from a narrow and scientifically discredited set of reconstructions built off a single historical window. Treated as a target, it assumes forests have one correct density that exists outside of time. They don’t, anywhere. Fire history research shows density and fire frequency varying enormously by slope, soil, elevation, and species, a patchwork that never held constant across any region, let alone across centuries. Indigenous communities also burned within and around their own territories for subsistence and cultural purposes, tending specific plants, game, and travel corridors rather than running a landscape-scale management program. The record this whole “historical forest” narrative rests on is missing the pattern it would need to be complete. There was never one number, anywhere it’s been studied. Treating one as historical isn’t restoration. It’s a preference with a footnote attached. It’s worth noting that independent peer-reviewed research has found that McClintock’s historical forest density figures were found to have been falsified, and were based on profound cherry-picking of historical forest surveys by scientists funded by the U.S. Forest Service who omitted most of the trees, and denser forests, in the historical forest survey records. When all of the omitted historical data were included by other scientists, it was found that historical mixed-conifer forests were 7 times denser than the Forest Service claimed, in terms of trees per acre, and historical ponderosa pine forests were 17 times denser than the Forest Service falsely claimed.

The same substitution happens with wildfire severity. Low and moderate severity burns get called healthy. High severity gets held up as evidence something’s gone wrong. But high severity fire is precisely what black-backed woodpeckers, conifers with serotinous cones, and montane chaparral require, among hundreds of other native plant and animal species. It isn’t a deviation from a “good” system. It’s part of the system. The carbon accounting doesn’t support the framing either. Even the most extreme fires consume less than 2 percent of live tree biomass on average (Harmon et al. 2022). Logging, meanwhile, emits roughly ten times more carbon than fire and native bark beetle mortality combined (Harris et al. 2016). Whatever is driving that gap, it isn’t the forest.

None of this resolves into a simple story where restoring one practice fixes the forest, because forests don’t need fixing. What it points to instead is a different question entirely. Instead of asking what configuration a forest should be held to, ask whether the forest has standing to determine its own course. Rights of nature answer that directly. No historical density number and no severity threshold gets imposed from outside. The land isn’t failing to match somebody’s management plan.

I’ve been reading Robert Moor’s On Trails this month, which makes the case that science advances the way life does, through the death of old ideas as much as the birth of new ones, and that the bigger the finding under attack, the more likely it matters. It’s why this whole thing clicked into place for me the morning I read about Padilla’s amendments, more shock at the audacity than surprise at the pattern. The forest as density target paradigm is overdue for that death.

The climate crisis doesn’t need us managing nature into whatever shape best serves the interest currently holding the microphone. Two House-passed logging bills built on a number that keeps changing, now riding shotgun on a defense bill that’s also funding a town built specifically to be burned down, are what it looks like when a bad idea runs out of every other place to hide.

Subscribe now

Next month we’re headed back to the sequoia groves to keep monitoring, documenting, and holding agencies accountable to the weak protections already on the books, while pushing to make them stronger. That fieldwork costs real money, including travel expenses, lodging, food, field equipment, people power, and time on the ground in remote, rugged country. Meanwhile here in DC, we’re still getting to the Hill by bike, so even coffee and hydration packet money helps keep that side running too. Every contribution this summer helps cover the work that makes both of these possible, and comes with something in the mail, a small thank-you we think you’ll want to hold onto.

For those of you who’ve already kindly donated, thank you, we’re hoping to have your something special in the mail by the end of the month.

Donate today.

Inside a giant sequoia snag — a standing dead tree that spotted owls depend on for nesting — we found a pair. Two spotted owls, same hollow, two days running. We think we know what that means: an active nest tree

We notified the Forest Service. The tree is tagged, meaning the agency already knows it exists. What followed was silence: no Protected Activity Center established, no enforcement of the buffers that federal protocol requires.

Here is what those protections are supposed to look like. Around a spotted owl nest tree, the Forest Service is required to establish a Protected Activity Center, or PAC, a core buffer representing the heart of the nest area. Beyond that sits the Home Range Core Area, or HRCA, a 700-acre radius meant to represent 30 to 50 percent of the owl’s total home range of 2,000 to 3,000 acres. The HRCA carries a Limited Operating Period from March 1st through August 31st, the full arc of nesting season, during which logging is prohibited.

Last summer and fall the Forest Service logged inside the required quarter mile buffer, coming within 300 feet of the nest tree itself.

The logging hasn’t touched the nest tree. Not yet. But it doesn’t need to. Strip away the hunting ground, compromise both parents’ ability to feed themselves and their chicks, and the nest becomes a tomb. A nesting pair cannot relocate. They are committed to that hollow until the chicks fledge or don’t. Imagine having a newborn but being locked out of everything beyond the bedroom door: the kitchen, the grocery store, the world the baby depends on you to navigate. That is what logging the home range core area means for a nesting spotted owl pair.

As early as July 1st, days from now, it could happen again.

This is not an accident. It is a pattern.

The spotted owls in that sequoia snag don’t know any of this. They know the hollow, the grove, the fire-adapted forest they depend on. Freeman Creek is giant sequoia country: a landscape shaped by fire, especially high-intensity fire, ecologically rich precisely because of it, and now threatened by the same forest resilience logging framework spreading across California like a franchise.

We have filed suit in other sequoia groves and are prepared to fight here too. We are in the field documenting what is at stake, and that work has real costs. Getting to these remote groves takes time, transportation, food, and boots on the ground. We are asking you to help us stay there.

Every contribution this summer helps cover the fieldwork that makes this documentation possible, and comes with something in the mail, a small thank-you we think you’ll want to hold onto.

Please, donate today.

The owls are nesting. The clock is running. We need to be there.

Subscribe now

We just returned from another round of visits to the giant sequoia groves of the southern Sierra Nevada, and we came back with field observations from four sites and two new studies that dismantle nearly everything the agencies have been telling the public about sequoias, fire, and what these forests actually need.

Here is what we saw.

Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park — Cuts made in the name of fire mitigation, no public notice or environmental analysis. Pay attention to the institutional detail here, because it matters: this is the National Park Service, not the Forest Service. Different agency, different political constituency, different legal framework. When the same justifications — fire risk, forest health, proactive management — travel seamlessly across agency lines and across administrations, you are not looking at a rogue bureaucracy or a rogue presidency. You are looking at a story that the logging industry and the land management-industrial complex has successfully sold to everyone willing to buy it. The cover works because we have built a political culture in which doing something about fire is automatically preferable to letting fire do what fire does. And the work doesn’t wait for legislation. Emergency administrative orders are already authorizing this on the ground — in groves, in parks, across public lands — while the “Fix Our Forests Act” and the “Save Our Sequoias Act” logging bills work their way through Congress. Litigation is currently the thin line between these places and the equipment. That is the situation as it stands.

This is also a good moment to address a question that comes up in these conversations: but they didn’t cut sequoias, so where’s the harm? The other conifers being cut are part of the sequoia grove ecosystem. They are the same forest. In fact, most of the trees in a mature giant sequoia grove are other species, like cedar, fir, and pine. They all matter, live and dead. In fact, dead trees — including beetle-killed trees, which people often assume are the obvious candidates for removal — are wildlife habitat, soil anchors, and carbon stores. And when heavy equipment rolls through to extract them, it crushes the naturally regenerating sequoia seedlings that are already doing exactly what the agencies claim they are trying to encourage. The smokescreen is not just about which species gets cut. It is about what the machinery does to everything else on its way in and out.

Redwood Mountain Grove, Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park — Finally open to the public, and you should go. Burned in the 2021 KNP Complex Fire. It is regenerating not despite the high-intensity fire but because of it. The densest, most vigorous sequoia regeneration we observed was in the areas that burned the hottest. Many thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of naturally regenerating seedlings and saplings per acre. The planted seedlings, by contrast, were mostly dying — isolated, struggling, a living rebuttal to the assumption that sequoias need our help getting started, when they demonstrably do not.

Belknap Grove, Giant Sequoia National Monument — Logged and piled. The stated rationale is always fire risk reduction. What logging and slash pile accumulation actually produce is increased flammability. And those piles are an industrial artifact, not an ecological one. When they are ignited — with accelerant, in place, at a single point of concentrated heat — the result has nothing in common with the mixed-intensity fire these forests evolved with. It cooks for days and weeks in the same place. It sterilizes soil. It volatilizes stored carbon. It produces, deliberately, the kind of damage the agencies attribute to the fires they claim to fear. The exposed soil left behind is erosion waiting for rain. The disrupted canopy changes moisture dynamics in ways that make the remaining forest more vulnerable, not less. The intervention worsens the problem it claims to solve.

Freeman Creek Grove — The baby sequoias we documented last year are now eight, ten, twelve feet tall and still climbing in the big high-intensity fire patch. Natural regeneration in this large crown fire patch is doing exactly what it does. In the areas where management intervened — where equipment came through and seedlings were crushed under the notion that the grove needed tending — the contrast is not subtle.

Now the science, because two new studies put numbers to what we have been watching in the field, and several findings directly dismantle claims that have been repeated so often they have achieved the status of received wisdom.

The catastrophic fire narrative has the history backwards; there is now substantially less high-intensity fire across these landscapes. After a prolonged climate-driven period of reduced fire activity, recent increases simply reflect a gradual movement away from the lower end of the historical range of variability. Even where intense fire has become more common, levels remain well below what these landscapes experienced historically and these areas still burn mostly at low- and moderate-intensity. What we are seeing now is not a forest in crisis–it is a dynamic forest rediscovering part of its natural fire regime, a reminder that ecological resilience depends on embracing the entire range of variability these ecosystems evolved with.

Giant sequoia forests can only effectively reproduce after high-intensity fire. That is not a preference. That is an evolutionary dependency. Managing exclusively for lower-intensity fire leads to extreme sequoia regeneration failure and will not maintain viable sequoia populations. Groves being managed toward exclusive low-intensity conditions are, over time, being managed toward extinction. The science is not divided on this. The complication is manufactured by the side with the larger institutional budget and the most to lose if the models are retired — government agencies and industry running predictions and projections contradicting researchers who are on the ground actually counting what is there.

The mortality numbers that have been driving emergency policy: the often-cited claim that 20% of all large sequoias were killed by the 2020 and 2021 fire seasons does not hold up. The actual mortality rate from higher-intensity fire over the entire past century was 14.7%. The natural range before fire suppression, which maintained stable sequoia populations for millennia, was 21.1% to 43.1% per century. The sequoia groves were experiencing in recent wildfires something closer to the range of what they evolved to survive. They built emergency legislation on a misread number, and that legislation — the Save Our Sequoias Act and the Fix Our Forests Act — is still moving.

The natural regeneration in the largest high-intensity fire patch is now more than 21 times denser than agency scientists projected. Where planting was conducted in a Wilderness Area, it accounted for less than half of one percent of what natural regeneration was already producing. The programs consuming significant resources and justifying equipment access to sensitive post-fire areas are, in the most charitable framing, irrelevant.

The surviving large sequoia density within the largest high-intensity fire patch is nearly three times higher than government scientists initially estimated — because they failed to account for epicormic sprouting, the process by which sequoias that initially appear dead produce new green crowns from dormant buds across the crown. Many of the sequoias they counted as lost were not lost. The models did not know to look for what the trees were doing.

And finally: high-intensity fire is unrelated to time-since-fire. The overgrown forests narrative — the one that tells us decades of suppression have loaded these landscapes with extra flammability that now makes fire uniquely dangerous — does not survive contact with the data. That story is a justification in search of a conclusion, and the conclusion was always the cut.

Here is where we land. Fire is not catastrophic unless homes or lives are lost. The images we have been conditioned to receive as images of disaster are, in most cases without direct threat to human communities, images of ecological process. The sequoias pushing twelve feet of new growth through the ash at Freeman Creek are not a recovery story in spite of the fire. They are a recovery story because of it.

What is actually catastrophic is the intervention. The scraped soil at Belknap. The crushed and cut sequoia seedlings at Freeman. The no-notice cuts at Mariposa. The contractor-built bonfires doused in accelerant that bear no resemblance to the fire these landscapes need. The planting schemes that account for less than half a percent of what the forest was already doing on its own.

We know where this goes — and there is no logical stopping point. Fire is too useful as a justification, too legible as a threat, too available as the next emergency. Every fire becomes proof that the previous “management” activity wasn’t enough. Every forest management project degrades the forest’s resilience and guarantees the next fire will be invoked the same way. What remains, over time, is a patchwork of tree plantations and type-converted landscapes that no longer function as the fire-adapted ecosystems they were — produced not by fire, but by the program that claimed to be preventing it.

These sequoia groves do not need management. They need protection from the rogue land management agencies that ignore the science and implement their logging agenda. And they need advocates who understand that the fight is not against one administration — it is against a story that both parties have found useful, and that the forests cannot afford for us to keep believing. The agencies are counting on your fire anxiety to do their work for them. Don’t.

Call your senators today at 202-224-3121. The Senate version of the Farm Bill is reportedly due out any day now — and if it's anything like the House version, it will likely include two deeply destructive bills: the so-called "Save Our Sequoias Act" (S. 4103) and the so-called "Fix Our Forests Act" (S. 1462). Demand they oppose the inclusion of both. And if that's what it takes, push for another continuing resolution — there's no reason to hand this administration another win at the expense of our forests.

Subscribe now

This week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted to advance S. 140, the Wildfire Prevention Act, with a last-minute amendment codifying the repeal of the Roadless Rule, fifty-eight million acres of national forest theoretically protected from road construction since 2001. The response across public lands media was swift: Republicans had hijacked a good bipartisan bill. Senators Heinrich and Wyden held a press conference. Outdoor influencers rang the alarm.

The framing is wrong, and it matters that it is wrong.

S. 140 was not a wildfire bill before the Roadless Rule amendment. It is a logging acceleration package. It mandates logging targets scaled to forty percent above historical baseline by 2029. It raises the timber sale threshold in ways that expand commercial harvest authority. It requires agencies to use streamlined environmental review on any unit containing high-risk land, not as a discretionary option, but as a mandate. And it creates categorical exclusions for what it calls “high-priority hazard trees,” bypassing environmental review on removal projects up to three thousand acres. The bill also authorizes treatment wherever insects or disease may kill twenty-five percent of standing trees over fifteen years. May. Future tense. Probabilistic. That is not a damage threshold. It is a description of how forests work. Insects, disease, and fire are not threats to these ecosystems. They are the processes that constitute them. When legislation classifies succession as a hazard requiring remediation, it is not protecting forests. It is criminalizing them.

The Roadless Rule repeal is the most visible provision. It is not the only damaging one. Mobilizing to strip the amendment and resurrect the prior bill is not a conservation win. It is a defense of a logging mandate with better branding.

The carbon math is not ambiguous. Harris et al. (2016) found that forest management emits roughly ten times more carbon than fire and beetle outbreaks combined. Intact forests, their soils, mycorrhizal networks, snag fields, seed banks, and hydrological systems, regulate temperature, retain moisture, and cycle carbon at landscape scale. They have been doing this work since time immemorial without a management plan. The Forest Service sits under the United States Department of Agriculture. It was built to see these ecosystems as crops. Legislating faster harvest rates in the name of fire safety does not change what that is. It accelerates it.

The most damning number from yesterday’s press conference did not come from the fire statistics. It came from Trout Unlimited president Chris Wood, one of the architects of the original Roadless Rule: roadless areas represent two percent of the American landscape, and twenty-five percent of all threatened and endangered species depend on them for habitat. A quarter of this country’s most imperiled wildlife has been crowded into two percent of the land. That is not an argument for protecting roadless areas. It is an indictment of what has been done to the other ninety-eight percent, a measure of how thoroughly the commodity-crop model of public lands management has hollowed out the ecological fabric of this country, leaving the most biodiverse, structurally complex, hydrologically intact landscapes as isolated refugia in a landscape organized around extraction.

The press conference data intended to defend those areas actually reveals the problem. Thirty-four percent of all Forest Service treatments have occurred in roadless areas, which represent only twenty-one percent of the forested national forest landscape. These are not protected landscapes. They are the most intensively managed landscapes we have left. Senator Heinrich called this evidence of flexibility: do the work, pull the road out when you're done. But removing a road does not restore what was removed before it. The logs are gone. The centuries of structural complexity that created the habitat, the carbon storage, the hydrological function, do not return because the access point was decommissioned. A roadless area that has been logged and de-roaded is not a roadless area. It is a logged area without a road. The question the flexibility framing never asks is why these self-regulating landscapes require human intervention at all. The Roadless Rule's defenders have drawn a line and called it protection. It is just marking where the extraction hasn't gotten yet.

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho offered what he intended as reassurance at the committee markup: that when you sit down at the table, there is very little daylight between Republicans and Democrats on forest management. He is right. That is precisely the problem. Bipartisan agreement on public lands has consistently meant both parties accepting the premise that national forests require active management to remain ecologically functional, a premise the timber industry has spent decades embedding in agency culture, budget structures, and now legislation. It is the premise that produced the ninety-eight percent. Bipartisan is not a synonym for correct. On forest policy, it has too often been a synonym for shared capture.

Senator Wyden’s press conference remarks leaned heavily on the value of bipartisanship, on good work begetting more good work. But Republicans have made clear, repeatedly and without apology, that they are not interested in what the public wants on this question. When the Roadless Rule was established, one point six million Americans submitted comments, ninety-five percent in support. In the current effort to repeal it, ninety-nine percent of comments oppose repeal. Republicans are advancing the repeal anyway. Calling for bipartisanship in that environment is not a strategy for protecting public lands. It is a framework that keeps Democrats negotiating over the terms of extraction rather than contesting extraction itself.

Democratic senators cannot continue lending credibility to the wildfire-as-extraction framework and then express surprise when that framework is used to extract. Every time a Democrat praises the underlying bill, cites its bipartisan credentials, or treats the Roadless Rule repeal as the only problem in the room, they provide institutional cover for a policy direction that degrades the ecosystems that regulate our climate and does nothing meaningful to protect the communities fire actually threatens. Where is the outrage over the initial bill? The Roadless Rule amendment has generated press conferences, activist notes, and senatorial hand-wringing. The mandatory logging targets, the insect mortality provisions, the categorical exclusions, the streamlined review mandates, the machinery that will do the loud, durable damage, have generated almost nothing. That asymmetry is not accidental. It is how the framework protects itself.

The progressive tendency to frame every large fire as a symptom of climate chaos, and to treat anyone who complicates that narrative as insufficiently alarmed, has made it nearly impossible to have an honest conversation about fire ecology. Fire is not a pathology. It is succession. The crisis is not that fire exists on a fire planet. It is that we built communities in fire-adapted landscapes without accounting for what that means, and have spent decades doubling down on tactics that fail those communities while the structures they live in remain unaddressed.

Roughly forty percent of the American population lives within or adjacent to the wildland-urban interface. The most destructive fires in recent years have not been deep-forest events. They have been grassland and chaparral fires, the January 2025 Los Angeles fires being the most recent and visceral example, driven by ember transport across landscapes where communities were built without accounting for the fire regimes those ecosystems have always carried. Embers do not respect fuel breaks, treatment units, or property lines. The dominant approach to fire management, increasingly rebranded with more palatable language but unchanged in its extraction-forward logic, is not failing for lack of scale. It is failing because no amount of logging controls wind, drought, or the speed at which an ember travels, while the structures people live in remain unaddressed.

The legislative answer already exists. S. 3609 and HR 582, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, direct investment where the evidence points: community preparedness and home hardening in the wildland-urban interface. The science is clear on which intervention protects communities and which one does not. These bills require accepting that people living in fire-adapted landscapes need fire-resistant infrastructure, honest information about risk, and resources to act on it, not a logging mandate dressed in the language of prevention.

This is not a do-nothing position. These landscapes are not doing nothing. They are processing carbon, building soil, creating habitat, recharging aquifers, and regulating the temperature and moisture conditions that make them function. The work that actually needs doing, hardening structures, retrofitting communities, defensible space pruning around homes, is in S. 3609 and HR 582. It is not in this bill.

The Roadless Rule repeal should be opposed. But the rule in its current form is not the destination. These landscapes need stronger protection, not more flexible management. The loopholes that have allowed thirty-four percent of Forest Service treatments to occur inside roadless areas should be closed, not defended. Mother nature has been doing this work since time immemorial. The correct policy response is to stop interrupting her.

The bill should be opposed. The framework that produced it should be opposed. And the next time Congress calls a logging bill a wildfire bill, we should know better than to mourn the bipartisanship when it falls apart.

Jennifer Mamola is the Policy and Advocacy Director for John Muir Project.

Subscribe now

But I watched the video to the end, and something happened in the final few minutes that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Having correctly identified that our national forests are being managed like tree farms — that the Roundup exists to clear the way for commercially valuable conifers — the film’s conclusion pivoted to: our forests don’t need Roundup. They need replanting and thinning.

I understand the impulse. You’ve spent a year documenting institutional failure and you want to hand the audience a solution. But that solution is just Roundup with better PR. It is, in the most precise sense of the phrase, missing the forest for the trees.

Craig Thomas nails the diagnosis: Smokey Bear has a chemical addiction, fostered inside the agency with Monsanto’s help. He’s right. But the rehab he’s prescribing — replanting and “keep the forest thin” — is just a different substance. Same addiction. Logging in the name of natural disturbance, dressed up in captured science, is still logging. A large and diverse body of researchers, including Forest Service scientists themselves, has been saying so for decades, and has been systematically overlooked in favor of the extraction framework.

This is the same agency that adopted Monsanto-ghostwritten science to justify its herbicide program. Baker et al. 2023 documented it in detail for fire science: Forest Service-funded studies systematically omitted the reply literature that refuted their conclusions, creating what the authors called a falsification of the scientific record — a manufactured consensus that historical forests were low-density and low-severity, which happens to justify exactly the logging program the agency financially benefits from. Different product. Same ghostwriter dynamic.

What Fire-Adapted Ecosystems Actually Need

Since time immemorial, fire has not been visiting these forests. It has been making them. The ponderosa pine’s thick bark. The serotinous cone that only opens in heat. The black-backed woodpecker that exists almost exclusively in post-fire snag forest and will not be found anywhere the “restoration” industry has gotten there first. These are not species that tolerate fire. They are species that fire produced, through deep co-evolution with a process that predates every policy, every categorical exclusion, every timber sale.

Post-fire landscapes that can look catastrophic to the human eye — standing dead snags, open canopy, shrub fields exploding with growth — are not moonscapes. They are some of the most biodiverse, productive, and ecologically alive conditions a forest generates. The early successional habitat that follows high-severity fire supports species found almost nowhere else. Natural conifer regeneration, when left alone and given time, happens. Not on our schedule. On the forest’s schedule. Which is the whole problem.

The “forests need replanting” claim is not a neutral ecological observation. It’s a judgment that natural recovery is too slow, too messy, and too uncertain, and that human intervention is the appropriate response. The science does not support this. What interrupts natural recovery, reliably, is salvage logging, which compacts soil, removes the biological legacy that seeds regeneration, spreads invasive species, degrades aquatic habitat through chronic sedimentation, and strips the very conditions the forest was already using to heal itself.

Thinning Is Logging With Better PR

The “thinning reduces fire risk” claim has achieved the status of received wisdom, repeated by agency officials, legislators, influencers, and now apparently investigative journalists looking for a responsible-sounding off-ramp from the Roundup story. Dense, mature forests with high canopy cover consistently show lower fire severity, because closed canopies moderate temperature, retain humidity, and slow wind. Thinning does the opposite: it opens the canopy, dries out the understory, and accelerates wind through the stand. The treatment creates the conditions it claimed to prevent. Forest Service researcher C.M. Countryman documented this in 1956 — the agency has known for seventy years that “thinning” increases fire severity by altering the microclimate, regardless of what is done with the slash.

And let’s be precise about what “thinning” produces: commercially valuable timber. Those involved claim it’s removing “small-diameter” material, but “small-diameter” wood doesn’t pay for the operation — large merchantable trees do. So that’s what gets cut. When the accounting doesn’t work, and it rarely does, the response is never to stop. It’s to lobby for subsidies, new biomass markets, cross-laminated timber incentives — public money chasing a program that loses over $2 billion in taxpayer dollars annually, and that the forest would have handled for free. The pipeline doesn’t end. It rebrands.

Beetle Mania and the Salvage Reflex

Fire isn't the only disturbance that triggers the intervention impulse. The mountain pine beetle outbreak across western North America, and the massive blowdown left by Hurricane Helene across the Southeast, have both generated the same reflex: log it before it's "wasted." The justification is always some version of the matchstick argument: that standing dead trees and downed wood are simply accumulation waiting to ignite, and that leaving them is an act of negligence. It isn't.

If you've ever enjoyed a campfire, you already understand what the matchstick argument gets wrong. Shortly after trees die, the combustible oils in their needles begin to dissipate; within a year, dead needles and twigs fall and begin to decay. Within two or three years, snags are structurally closer to large logs than to kindling, and you cannot put a match to a large log and expect it to burn. Fires do not spread faster in forests with high levels of snags, and bark beetles generally reduce subsequent fire severity, not increase it. What drives extreme fire behavior is wind, humidity, and drought, none of which are addressed by whether the dead trees were logged first.

But each of these disturbances is its own ecological event, with its own succession, its own timing, its own community of species that have co-evolved with exactly these conditions. Beetle kill brings its own cast of species. Blowdown creates its own structural complexity, its own nurse log succession, its own openings. These are not failures. They are the forest doing what it has always done with stress: metabolizing it, on its own timeline, into something alive. Conservation North's Life After Disturbance poster series documents exactly what these landscapes become when left alone. It's worth your time.

Salvage logging doesn’t distinguish between any of them. It moves in with the same equipment, the same contracts, the same justification, and dismantles processes that were already underway. The carbon math is damning: logging in U.S. forests emits ten times more carbon than wildfire and native insects combined. And logging before or after any disturbance consistently results in more dead trees than the disturbance alone would have produced. The intervention doesn’t reduce mortality. It adds to it.

Disturbance is not damage. The salvage operation is.

The Accountability Question Nobody’s Asking

Here is what I find most striking about the replant-and-thin conclusion, and about most of the mainstream wildfire conversation: the proposed remedies never implicate the humans.

We have built hundreds of thousands of homes in fire-prone landscapes, with flammable roofing materials, flammable decks, flammable landscaping, under flammable utility lines. We are systematically destabilizing the climate through the burning of fossil fuels, making fire weather more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. We cause more than 84% of ignitions. And then we look at the forest — the thing that has been doing this since time immemorial without our help — and we decide it needs surgery.

A few summers ago, documenting a thinning project on the Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado, someone noticed my concern and asked if I didn’t think this was making the community safer. I asked whether they’d taken any personal precautions — home hardening, defensible space pruning. They scoffed. Why would they, when this was supposed to handle it. That exchange is the whole problem in one conversation.

Whether a structure survives a wildfire is determined almost entirely by conditions within roughly 100 feet of the building: the roofline, the vents, the deck boards, the five feet adjacent to the foundation. Not the ridge five miles away. Not the stand logged three years ago. And yet we keep building the same structures back into the same landscapes after they burn, under pressure to rebuild fast that reliably beats any pressure to rebuild better.

Then there is the infrastructure nobody wants to talk about. Investor-owned utilities have spent decades lobbying against undergrounding requirements, against accountability for transmission line maintenance, and against the kind of distributed generation — rooftop solar, community microgrids, locally owned co-ops — that would reduce both transmission line sprawl and the monopoly incentive to defer maintenance. Utility infrastructure accounts for less than 10% of wildfires but roughly half of the most destructive ones in California history. Camp. Dixie. Thomas. Woolsey. Their alternative to undergrounding — clearing fire-adapted native shrubs and trees in ever-widening corridors — replaces fire-resistant vegetation with the highly flammable grasses that carry surface fire and feed the ember cast that actually kills communities. The business model that concentrates profit and socializes risk is still intact.

This is where the evidence points: hardening structures, creating defensible space pruning at the parcel level, breaking the utility monopoly model that has turned transmission infrastructure into a reliable ignition source. Earlier this spring in Colorado, a bill that would have begun doing exactly this was killed in committee. “Conservation” organizations testified against it, standing alongside industry and government logging interests to oppose redirecting any “mitigation” dollars away from logging public forests and toward the homes of the people they claim to protect. That is not a conservation position. That is a market position — from the same nonprofit infrastructure that has spent decades manufacturing consensus around managed logging frameworks and defaming researchers who point to contrary evidence, presenting the result as settled science. Which is why the forest keeps getting logged and the houses keep burning.

The Ending the Documentary Couldn’t Give You

The Roundup story is a symptom of something larger than Monsanto’s lobbying operation or one agency’s regulatory capture. It is a symptom of a civilization that has decided, at every turn, that the appropriate response to a natural process is a managed one — that disturbance is damage, that recovery requires intervention, that the forest left alone is the forest wasted.

Forests touched by fire, beetle, blowdown, or drought are not waiting for our help. They are already doing something complex, something timed to cues we don’t fully understand, something that produces conditions found almost nowhere else. What interrupts that process, every time, is us.

The problem is bigger than replant and thin. The intervention reflex leads to the building codes we won't update and won't enforce when we rebuild, the utility corridors we won't underground, the homes we keep building in places that will burn, and the money we keep spending on the wrong thing — because intervention has contracts, budgets, and an endless scroll of carefully curated imagery and industry-funded science designed to foreclose the conversation before it starts, and restraint has none of those things.

Get out of the way. Stop poisoning the path back. And when the next documentary ends with a call to replant the forest, ask who benefits from the replanting.

If you made it this far: call your representatives. HR 582 and S 3609, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, would direct up to $1 billion annually toward home hardening, defensible space pruning, and evacuation planning — the things that actually keep communities alive. It's bipartisan. It needs pressure. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.

Subscribe now

PIELC, The Public Interest Environmental Law Conference held at the University of Oregon, is a worthy experience, and I would recommend attending to any environmental attorney or activist. There are awards, keynote speakers, a mini film festival and educational panels on all things related to law and the environment. The panels, there were over 60 from Thursday-Sunday, are a labor of love, built in real partnership with the grassroots organizations we work alongside year-round. These panels represent the urgency of the moment in relation to the laws, or lack there of, that govern our land, air and water. John Muir Project’s Director, Dr. Chad Hanson appeared on three: a deep dive into the disinformation campaign threatening giant sequoia protections nationally, joined by Maya Khosla, Adam Bronstein (Western Watersheds Project) and Mason Parker (Wilderness Watch); a panel on wildfire, active management, and the logging-as-fire-safety myth endangering both forests and communities with Brenna Bell (CRAG Law Center), Paula Hood (Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project), Paul Lynn (The Confluence Series) and Alex Budd (PNW Forest Climate Alliance); and a debate panel entitled Collaboration: Panacea or Pitfall?, a candid examination of whether collaborative land management groups are genuinely serving public lands — or quietly undermining them, with Ric Bailey joining Dr. Hanson to illuminate the extensive dangers to ecosystems from this type of arrangement.

I joined Adam Bronstein (WWP), James Holt (Nez Perce), Jeff Juel (Friends of the Clearwater), and Josh Osher (WWP) for New Direction for Public Lands: Revive the Wild, Rethink the System, Reimagine Our Shared Future, introducing a bold grassroots legislative vision to overhaul public lands law and governance in service of life, not extraction. The conversation is very much ongoing. If you or a group you work with would like to learn more, don’t hesitate to reach out.

But the urgency didn’t stop when the panels did.

We were fortunate to stay within walking distance of campus, which gave us the chance to host colleagues from across the West for evenings of brainstorming, reminiscing, and imagining the future we want to build together. The Pacific Northwest Climate Alliance party was another kind of gift — everyone I wanted to see finally under one roof, no one racing to the next panel. As Margaret Mead put it: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

After being uplifted by the camaraderie of PIELC, my plane descended into D.C. on March 16th to news that the House had just passed the so-called ‘Save (read Sacrifice) Our Sequoias Act’. The SOS Act was passed by voice vote, allowing politicians to avoid accountability for their stance on this unnecessary and destructive logging bill. Shortly after passage in the House, the Senate introduced its companion bill, S. 4103, notwithstanding that new science published in the weeks surrounding the vote confirms the bill’s core assumptions are wrong. A stark reminder that the urgency of this work doesn’t pause for conferences, travel, or apparently the truth.

As warmer weather approaches, and even as Congress pushes forward with the Sacrifice Our Sequoia’s Act and other new logging bills, billions of your federal tax dollars will continue flowing into logging public lands under the false flag of forest “health” and fire safety. We need a fundamental recalibration on this subject. What rarely gets said plainly: mixed-severity fire is natural and necessary in our forest ecosystems, and genuine community protection means investing in the fortification of homes and the human-built communities near fire-adapted public lands, not mechanical logging operations in the forest.

As we continue to fight the relentless extraction machine that is Congress, we will also take time to immerse ourselves in the places we fight to protect. This Memorial Day, we’ll be heading back to the Sequoias with colleagues from PIELC and beyond, to witness firsthand the natural regeneration unfolding where the forest has been left to its own resilience and to keep dreaming and planning together. In the meantime, two things you can do right now: call your senators to oppose S. 4103, and find a post-fire forest that escaped the logging crews — and let it remind you what patience and persistence actually look like.

Want to help us keep organizing, planning, and dreaming together? We know how to stretch a dollar, please consider donating.

Subscribe now

If you walk through a giant sequoia grove immediately after intense wildfire, the scene may feel like loss to some, but the truth is far more beautiful. For years, we’ve been told that fire suppression has left these forests “overgrown,” primed for “catastrophic” wildfire and in need of aggressive intervention ostensibly to prevent high-intensity fire from occurring. That narrative is now being used to justify sweeping policy changes, even as new science challenges the assumptions driving current and proposed management strategies.

A newly published study by Dr. Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project asks a fundamental question: did a century of fire suppression create an unnatural high-intensity fire problem in giant sequoia groves? The answer is no. Even after recent large wildfires, fire of all intensities remains far less frequent than it was before fire suppression began. The study also found no meaningful relationship between how long a forest has gone without fire and how intensely it burns when fire returns. This directly challenges the widely repeated claim that today’s forests are experiencing too much “severe” wildfire due to “overgrown” conditions.

The research also raises important questions about one of the most commonly proposed solutions to reducing high-intensity fire: using lower-intensity prescribed fire as a new wildfire suppression tactic. While natural lower-intensity fire has a role in these forests, managing forests with the goal of preventing higher-intensity fire may unintentionally alter these ecosystems in ways that degrade their integrity and undermine their viability over time. The study shows that while lower-intensity prescribed fire can produce a pulse of giant sequoia seedlings, that initial burst does not lead to lasting regeneration. After two decades, 82% of the studied areas lacked any giant sequoia regeneration at all.

A second new study by Dr. Chad Hanson and a team of ecologists, focused on the Redwood Mountain Grove after the 2021 KNP Complex fire, reinforces these findings. (Watch researchers document this firsthand.) In areas often described as devastated, the largest high-intensity fire patches, researchers found dense and thriving regeneration in every plot—averaging about 8,000 young giant sequoias per acre, with the strongest growth in the most intensely burned patches, the “crown fire” areas where the flames reached the tops of the trees. Concerns about seed loss, shrub competition, or distance from surviving trees did not match what the scientists observed on the ground. Instead, these high-intensity burn areas created some of the best conditions for natural regeneration, exceeding the federal government’s initial modeling projections at four years post-fire by more than 21 times.

Taken together, this new science tells a clear and consistent story: giant sequoias are not just adapted to wildfire, they depend on the full range of fire, including its most intense forms, to continue their life cycle. Efforts to suppress or replace these intense natural processes risks undermining the very future of these forests that we aim to protect.

Despite current management trends, we remain hopeful that these findings will help guide future land management decisions. However, the Save Our Sequoias Act continues to move forward, promoting logging and large-scale interventions that conflict with this growing body of science. Notably, in another recent study, Dr. Hanson and a team of ecologists found that post-fire logging, which the Save Our Sequoias Act promotes, kills 83% of the natural post-fire giant sequoia regeneration, as the logging machinery rolls over and crushes the sequoia seedlings and saplings.

As land managers of wild ecosystems, the default response to uncertainty should not be aggressive habitat manipulation and commercial resource extraction, but thoughtful restraint that treads lightly and reduces opportunities for ecosystem degradation. The emerging evidence raises a critical question: if giant sequoias are successfully regenerating after high-intensity fire, and if fire levels of all intensities in these groves remain below historical norms, why are we expanding logging and attempting to eradicate supposedly “undesirable” natural ecological processes? This is the question now facing the conservation community, policymakers and the public.

The path forward should be grounded in science, not outdated assumptions about the complex natural forces that shaped giant sequoia forests. Protecting this beloved species means embracing the natural disturbance regimes and evolutionary processes that have sustained it over time—including significant mixed- and high-intensity fire components—not forcing our desired conditions across the entirety of their range.

To truly safeguard these dynamic forests, we must ensure policy catches up with the science and use our voices to foster appropriate changes in management. Contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to reacquaint themselves with the best available science and oppose the Save Our Sequoias Act in favor of management rooted in empirical evidence, natural resilience, and respect for these extraordinary ecosystems. Learn more on our Factsheet and our website about the full body of science and how your voice can make a difference that protects giant sequoia ecosystems.

Take Action: Call your U.S. Senators (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121) and urge them to oppose the “Save Our Sequoias Act” logging bill, S. 4103. Tell them that the bill would severely harm giant sequoia groves, and that new science discredits the outdated assumptions in the bill.

Learn more: The Great Big Giant Sequoia Scam (Documentary Film)

Subscribe now

Across North America, forests evolved with natural disturbance processes such as wildfire and cycles of native insects like bark beetles. The scale and intensity of these processes varied widely in a dynamic dance of constant change, shaping forest structure and the life within it. These disturbances naturally thinned a portion of dense stands, removed weakened trees, opened space for new growth, created important wildlife habitat in the form of standing dead trees, or “snags”, and guided evolutionary pathways in ways human design cannot replicate.

During the webinar, panelists questioned the ecological value of the more intense end of natural disturbance regimes, specifically targeting high-intensity burn patches as places to prioritize large-scale habitat “restoration.” This perspective overlooks extensive research showing that high-intensity burned forests regenerate naturally, and often vigorously, without human intervention, that concerns about frequent transitions from forest to non-forest habitat are unsupported by empirical data, and that ecological change should be evaluated on ecologically meaningful timescales.

Even in the small percentage of areas where conifer regeneration is not immediate, this strengthens forests ecologically by creating a mosaic of heterogeneous structure and diversity that enhances resilience at multiple spatial scales. The contradiction is difficult to ignore: managers often advocate for mimicking high-intensity disturbance through logging or thinning to create openings, while simultaneously arguing that naturally created openings are problematic.

After high-intensity fire, research consistently shows that pioneering species quickly establish a dense growth of wildflowers and shrubs that rebuild soil fertility and stabilize slopes. Naturally regenerating trees take root while many plant and animal species reach peak abundance among the blackened snags, like the black-backed woodpecker, among many others. Some species, such as giant sequoia, even rely on intense fire to release seeds and create the large openings necessary for robust regeneration. And where conifer regeneration occurs more slowly, that means shrub-nesting birds and pollinators that depend upon flowering shrubs enjoy their necessary habitat just a bit longer. It is simply another expression of a healthy, adaptive ecosystem responding to disturbance on ecological timescales rather than human expectations.

While low- to moderate-intensity burn areas dominate most fire perimeters, they do not produce the essential habitat that ecologists call complex early seral forests. These structurally rich ecosystems form after high-intensity fire, often supporting greater plant species richness than unburned forests and providing critical wildlife habitat. Their diverse understories and ecological processes promote fierce natural resilience—the kind of resilience that preserves ecological integrity in a changing climate. Compared to historical records, this stage of forest succession is still significantly underrepresented in today’s forests.

During the webinar, post-fire “salvage” logging was promoted as a tool to recover economic value, reduce fuels, prepare sites for planting, and transition snag forest habitat toward manager-desired structures and compositions. Yet, this practice removes the very features that make burned forests ecologically valuable and reduces the availability of this rare type of habitat. Logging strips away snags and downed wood that support wildlife and nutrient cycling while heavy machinery compacts soil, killing and damaging the next generation of trees. What remains is a simplified landscape stripped of the structural complexity wildfire created. In reality, so-called “fuels reduction treatments” (a euphemism for logging) are some of the greatest threats to our forests, not natural disturbance itself.

Rather than attempting to engineer resilience, the most responsible approach is far simpler: allow natural processes to unfold without intervention. Forests possess their own adaptive mechanisms that have maintained healthy ecosystems through time. Intense natural disturbance processes, such as occasional insect outbreaks, act as natural selection events and favor individuals best suited to changing conditions in ways human management cannot predict. Where intervention is necessary, it should focus on reducing human impacts rather than expanding them—such as decommissioning road networks, reintroducing extirpated species, and strengthening protections so that burned landscapes can avoid the industrial “restoration” treatments proposed by panelists.

Naturally-ignited low-, moderate-, and high-intensity fire all play essential roles in forest ecosystems and any attempt to suppress these roles will degrade natural fire regimes. The real path to restoration lies not in controlling the aftermath of wildfire, but in addressing the source of human-induced climate change, allowing forests to grow to their full ecological potential, and restraining our desire to manage every detail of a forest. Intensely burned forests represent a vibrant stage of ecological succession that supports unique biodiversity, genetic adaptation, and long-term resilience. The healthiest future for our forests will not come from managing away high-intensity natural disturbance processes or designing every stage of succession to meet our desired conditions—it will come from refusing to lose sight of forest ecology and allowing wildness itself to guide forests forward.

Now House Republicans are pushing a markup on February 23 with a floor vote potentially as soon as March 3. The bill, as written, cuts SNAP — the main federal food assistance program — which may prevent House Republican leadership from mustering enough votes to pass it on the floor. The Senate has yet to release their version. Democrats should let it fail. The better play is to hold the line, run out the clock to the 2026 midterms, and fight for a farm bill under conditions where there are actual checks and balances on what passes. It’s not a sure thing. But passing this bill is worse.

Why? Because buried in Title VIII — the forestry title — is a package of provisions that would hand the logging-industrial complex unprecedented access to our National Forests, strip away what little public oversight remains, and launder the whole thing as wildfire prevention. It’s the “Fix Our Forests” Act playbook recycled into a farm bill. And we should be clear about what it actually is: a logging bill.

Some of this will look familiar. The “categorical exclusion” (CE) expansions–provisions that exempt logging on public lands from public participation and environmental analysis across vast landscapes–mirror provisions in the Fix Our Forests Act, which passed the House in January and is currently stalled in the Senate. But Title VIII doesn’t simply recycle FOFA — it omits two of its provisions, the Fireshed Center framework and litigation “reform”, while adding something far more troubling: a blank check exemption for timber sales in mature and old-growth forests, and post-fire clearcutting, on public lands under the deceptive guise of the term “emergency”, which makes litigation largely beside the point. After all, why limit lawsuits when you’ve already written the rules to prevent accountability in the first place?

Here’s what’s in it.

Conservation Easements: Paid to Protect, Now Paid to Log

Section 2701 amends the forest conservation easement program — allowing existing easements to be modified to support the “viability and sustainability of working forests.” In plain English: under the guise of wildfire protection, landowners who are already receiving taxpayer subsidies to protect their forests could now also be paid to log them. That’s not conservation. That’s double-dipping on the public dime.

Section 2702 repeals the Healthy Forests Reserve Program outright — a voluntary conservation program that protects private forest land for wildlife habitat — and folds it into the new easement framework above. What was explicitly a conservation program is now a ‘working forests’ program. Never mind that forests disrupted by fire or insects are already doing the hard work of recovering — sequestering carbon, rebuilding soil, restoring habitat. Logging them doesn’t help. It compounds the stress, strips away the very structure that supports recovery, and more often than not sets the stage for the next fire and the next outbreak.

Watershed Protection: Now with Logging

Section 8203 funds projects to protect watersheds from wildfire impacts — including logging adjacent to streams. Read that again: logging next to streams, framed as water source protection. The provision doesn’t protect watersheds. It uses them as a justification to put chainsaws next to the water supply.

Salvage Logging: The Insect and Disease Pretext

Sections 8205 through 8207 authorize salvage logging and timber sales in response to insect and disease infestations, with streamlined contracting. Bark beetle outbreaks and other disturbances are — like wildfires and droughts — regular, recurring conditions on our National Forests. Treating them as emergencies that justify expedited logging with reduced oversight is the same blank check logic as Section 8416, applied to a different trigger. Dead and dying trees are ecologically valuable. This bill treats them as inventory.

Categorical Exclusions: FOFA’s Unfinished Business

A “categorical exclusion” (CE) lets federal agencies skip full environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. CEs were initially designed for genuinely low-impact, routine work. The logging-industrial complex has spent decades pushing to expand them — because the bigger the CE, the less public scrutiny taxpayer-subsidized logging projects face on public lands. Section 8202 quietly reauthorizes funding for hazardous fuels treatments — including logging and mechanical thinning — through 2031, providing the financial backbone for everything that follows.

This bill delivers exactly that, on a massive scale.

Section 8401 adds yet another new CE for “hazard tree” removal — defined so broadly, and with such a generous acreage cap, that it functions as a pretext for large-scale logging. The Forest Service already has authority to remove genuinely dangerous trees. This section doesn’t solve a problem. It creates a workaround.

Sections 8402, 8403, and 8404 each triple the size of existing CEs from 3,000 to 10,000 acres for each logging project — covering collaborative “restoration” projects, wildfire “resilience” projects, and fuel breaks. To put that in perspective: Yosemite Valley — the iconic heart of Yosemite National Park, home to El Capitan and Half Dome — covers roughly 8,000 acres. A single categorical exclusion under this bill could exceed an area that size. The current 3,000-acre limit — already larger than most people would consider routine — is being tripled to 10,000 acres, with no limit on the number of CE logging projects. Neither number belongs in a categorical exclusion.

Section 8407 creates a brand-new CE for work up to 10,000 acres, with up to 3,000 acres of commercial logging built in. And the Forest Service can contract the entire project out to a third party — meaning private timber companies could propose, plan, and execute commercial logging on your public land with minimal environmental review and effectively no public input.

Suppression Without Accountability

Section 8408 authorizes broad wildfire suppression activities on federal lands with minimal public consultation. Suppression sounds unobjectionable — of course we want to protect communities from wildfire. But fire is not the enemy of our National Forests. It’s an ecological necessity. Fire drives regeneration, creates habitat, and shapes the forest structures that support biodiversity. Decades of aggressive suppression haven’t just failed to prevent large fires — they’ve deprived forests of a process they depend on. Open-ended suppression authority with no consultation requirements and no reporting obligations doesn’t protect forests. It deepens the damage. Combined with the CE expansions and the blank check timber sales in Section 8416, this provision helps complete a system designed to move fast, suppress fire, and log what’s left.

Endangered Species? Ignore Them.

Section 8411 allows forest planners to skip consultation on the needs of listed endangered species and the impacts of proposed logging on those species. The Endangered Species Act requires this consultation because federal actions on public land can permanently destroy habitat for wildlife already pushed to the edge. Waiving it doesn’t speed up anything meaningful. It just means the damage gets done without anyone having to account for it.

Section 8405, covering greater sage-grouse and mule deer habitat, removes the requirement that management treatments benefit both species. The dual-benefit standard was supposed to be the safeguard that made expanded management in sensitive habitats acceptable. Eliminating it makes clear that wildlife protection was always an afterthought.

Roads: The Wildfire Prevention Bill That Builds Wildfire Causes

Section 8412 expands Good Neighbor Authority — adding “special districts” as eligible partners for logging and fuels projects on federal lands. More troubling: it explicitly authorizes the construction of new permanent roads on National Forest land. New roads mean new access. New access means more logging, more fragmentation, and less wilderness. Roads are one of the most lasting and damaging changes you can make to a forest — and one of the most dangerous. Research shows that nearly 95% of human-caused wildfires occur within half a mile of a road. If the goal is actually wildfire prevention, building more roads in our National Forests is precisely the wrong answer.

A Blank Check for Timber Sales — No Appraisal Required

Section 8416 may be the most brazen provision in the entire title. Any time the Secretary of Agriculture determines there’s an “extreme risk” — wildfire, insects, disease, wind, flooding, drought — the Secretary can conduct timber sales without an appraisal, under rules that the Secretary writes unilaterally.

Think about what that means in practice. Wildfires, droughts, and bark beetle outbreaks are not rare emergencies on our National Forests. They are regular, recurring conditions. This provision effectively transforms emergency authority into a permanent logging mechanism — one that can be triggered at will, that sets no ceiling on how much public forest can be sold, that allows sales below fair market value, and that lets the Secretary waive public involvement, environmental protections, and worker safety laws at their discretion.

This is not about protecting communities from wildfire. This is a blank check for the logging-industrial complex, written in the language of crisis.

Grazing as Wildfire Management: Seriously.

Section 8418 authorizes federal grazing as a wildfire risk reduction tool. The science on grazing as fire management is, to put it charitably, thin. What it does do is open public lands to livestock under the cover of fire prevention — another extractive industry handed a wildfire justification.

Carbon-Washing by Congressional Mandate

Section 12410 is a remarkable piece of policy fiction. It simply declares that burning “qualified renewable biomass” — wood from our forests — has a greenhouse gas emission rate of zero.

It doesn’t. Burning trees releases the carbon stored in them. The peer-reviewed science on this is unambiguous: biomass combustion generates substantial carbon emissions, and the idea that future regrowth offsets those emissions depends on timeframes and assumptions that are actively disputed in the scientific literature. As we’ve documented, this kind of accounting is carbon-washing — using accounting tricks to make extraction look like climate action.

Congress cannot legislate away the carbon in a burning tree. But it can require federal agencies to pretend the emissions don’t exist. That’s exactly what this section does.

Let’s Stop Calling This “Wildfire Prevention”

The logging-industrial complex and its allies in Congress have spent years perfecting the art of using wildfire fear to justify logging. The LA fires burned through chaparral and grassland — not forests — yet within weeks they were being cited as proof that we need to log more National Forest land. Peer-reviewed research, including Lindenmayer et al. (2025) and decades of fire ecology studies, shows that commercial thinning operations kill far more trees than they save, and that logged areas often burn hotter and faster than unlogged ones. Dead trees don’t drive fire intensity — weather does. This is settled science.

None of that research is reflected in Title VIII. What is reflected is a decade of lobbying dressed up in the language of resilience and restoration.

The markup is Monday. This needs to be stripped from the bill entirely. Our forests — and the communities that depend on them — cannot afford another generation of the same lie.

If you’re in a position to contact your representative before Monday, especially if they sit on the House Agriculture Committee, now is the time.

Subscribe now

Notably, proponents of this narrative include those who advocate for passage of the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act” (S. 1462)—a logging bill that would severely undermine environmental laws and restrict the ability of courts to hold the Forest Service accountable for illegal logging projects on public lands.

In reality, there is a serious problem with the narrative being used to promote the Fix Our Forests Act and similar logging bills: it’s a fiction. Dozens of scientific studies by the government’s own scientists, conducted over the course of nearly half a century, have clearly established that there is no need to remove any trees before managing with fire, even in extremely dense forests or forests that have not burned in over a century. The burning—including managed wildfire, prescribed fire, and Indigenous cultural burning—is simply conducted in the natural fire season during mild fire weather, avoiding hot, dry, windy conditions, if low-intensity fire is desired.

But the false narrative persists because so many people are making so much money at taxpayer expense. Case in point, the Central and West Slope “thinning” project on the Plumas National Forest in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The U.S. Forest Service admitted in its responses to public comments that “it is known that tree removal is not required before prescribed fire can be used”, and further admitted in its environmental assessment that thinning plus prescribed fire is about six times more expensive per acre for taxpayers than prescribed fire alone, without thinning.

Heedless of these facts, the Forest Service chose to conduct 218,000 acres of logging, under the guise of “thinning”, on public lands in the Central and West Slope project. Millions of mature and old-growth trees would be sold to logging companies, cut down and killed, and hauled to lumber mills in the deceptive name of wildfire management through this project, with a shocking price tag of $673 million, according to the environmental assessment. There are many other such thinning projects being planned and implemented currently on national forests across the country.

Notably, it’s not just logging companies that get a financial windfall from logging on public lands; the U.S. Forest Service also has a financial interest. Many people may not realize that the Forest Service uses public funds to plan and implement projects that sell vast swaths of trees on our national forests to logging companies. The Forest Service keeps most of the revenue from these federal timber sales for its own budget. This creates a perverse financial incentive to prioritize logging over all else. As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has observed, the Forest Service “has a substantial financial interest in the harvesting of timber” from national forests, and is often “more interested in harvesting timber than in complying with our environmental laws.”

For their part, logging interests shower many members of Congress, of both political parties, with campaign contributions to prop up the federal lands logging program and keep it going.

The candid truth is that the political narrative currently being used to promote the Fix Our Forests Act does not square with the science. In addition to numerous well-documented adverse impacts of mechanical thinning to wildlife and our climate, forest thinning is wildly expensive and is simply not necessary. Managing forests with fire alone effectively modifies the behavior and intensity of subsequent wildfires, where that may be a goal, while mechanical thinning often increases wildfire intensity.

And here’s the kicker. Under existing laws, the Forest Service already has the legal authority to allow an unlimited number of managed wildfires (natural lightning ignitions allowed to burn in mild to moderate fire weather for ecological benefit). The agency also has the existing authority to expedite and carry out prescribed fire projects up to 3,000 acres in size each through “categorical exclusions”, without conducting environmental analyses. There are no existing legal impediments to returning fire to our forests.

At one of the House Natural Resources Committee’s recent hearings promoting the Fix Our Forests Act logging bill, one of the Committee’s witnesses, recently retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire scientist, Dr. David Calkin, conveyed an inconvenient truth to the Committee’s leadership, stating: “The only solution to wildfire is more fire. We need more fire on the ground. There is no substitute for fire.”

In fact, there is no need for any of Fix Our Forests Act’s provisions that would weaken or override environmental laws…except, of course, that the true goal is simply to increase taxpayer-subsidized logging on public lands, regardless of the costs.

Take Action: Call your U.S. Senators (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121) and strongly urge them to oppose the “Fix Our Forests Act”, S. 1462. Tell them the deceptively-named “Fix Our Forests Act” is a destructive and dishonest Trojan horse logging bill cynically masquerading as a forest health and community wildfire protection measure.

Chad Hanson, based in the Sierra Nevada, is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project and the author of the book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.

Subscribe now

Attendance was thin. Democrats barely showed—three members to seven Republicans—which was unfortunate because Dr. David Calkin, one of the nation’s most credible wildfire scientists, laid out why current policy keeps failing. Congress agreed wildfire is a real threat, communities are suffering, and federal response is inadequate. Where it went wrong—again—was in what lawmakers chose to do: log, thin, promote logging for forest biomass energy production, and carve out regulatory loopholes, while sidelining measures that actually reduce community risk.

Calkin Got the Problem Right

Dr. Calkin, fresh off a 23-year career as a senior wildfire scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, reframed the problem clearly: wildfire is not one issue, but two. First, the destruction of communities. Second, what policymakers often describe as the condition of landscapes—typically measured against the recent past. The two are related, but not the same, and they require different solutions.

Nearly every major community wildfire disaster of the past decade follows the same pattern: human-caused ignition, extreme fire weather, proximity to homes, and suppression capacity overwhelmed almost immediately. In this context, forest management does not save communities, nor is it even relevant to saving communities. Forests are wild ecosystems, not infrastructure projects—unmanageable in real time, much like Congress without term limits.

Calkin’s proposal represents a genuine paradigm shift: wildfire policy should move homeward-out, not forest-in. After decades of over-investing in suppression and backcountry logging under the guise of fire management, public resources should prioritize community-centered risk reduction—starting with the 40 percent of U.S. structures located in the wildland-urban interface.

Chasing Trees, Missing Houses

Despite this clarity, committee members returned to their comfort zone: thinning, logging, biomass energy, and regulatory shortcuts.

Rep. Tom McClintock claimed, without any evidence, environmental laws have caused the loss of “a quarter of our national forest” to “catastrophic” fire, arguing forests must either be mechanically “cleaned up” or “nature will burn it out.” That framing is misleading. Fires—even high-severity and stand-replacing events—are natural processes that maintain ecosystem function, carbon storage and sequestration, biodiversity, and forest regeneration. The real wildfire disasters occur when communities are impacted, and the real driver of community wildfire disasters is exposure: ember-driven, structure-to-structure ignition, a reality that the FOFA logging bill largely ignores.

Even when members acknowledged Calkin’s testimony, discussion drifted back to logging for dirty biomass energy production as a supposed solution. Calkin clarified that while he is not opposed to all forms of “fuels management”, it is not a silver bullet. Most of the material posing wildfire risk is non-merchantable, while federal logging projects focus on removing mature, fire-resistant trees. The real driver of home destruction is ember-driven, structure-to-structure ignition, which backcountry logging or biomass programs don’t prevent. FOFA’s efficiency claims collapse when measured against the risk that actually threatens people and property (FEMA: Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves Interim Report).

Fire Is Not Ecological Failure

Post-disturbance landscapes are not ecological voids; they are periods of intense renewal, supporting a rich abundance of native plants, insects, birds, and mammals that rely on complex early seral forest habitat. Fire reorganizes ecosystems—it does not erase them. Treating forests as failed systems in need of industrial correction reflects a political narrative, not ecological reality. The unknown in fire-adapted landscapes is not a problem to solve—it is a reality to respect. Nature regulates itself far more effectively than human hubris ever could.

The Pattern Is the Point

FOFA’s repeated hearings aren’t momentum—they’re insecurity. A bill that already passed the House over a year ago shouldn’t need to be endlessly re-sold, re-justified, and invoked after community wildfire disasters.

Insurance, timber, and biomass interests are actively lobbying on FOFA—and some were literally in the room. Meanwhile, community-first wildfire legislation that aligns with Calkin’s testimony—home hardening, defensible space, evacuation planning, emergency communications—languishes without hearings or floor time (H.R. 582, S. 3609, H.R. 948). That imbalance is not accidental; it reflects priorities, and industry campaign contributions to members of Congress.

The insurance industry looms especially large. One witness represented the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, which spent $5.6 million lobbying in 2024. Community resilience and safety, it seems, rank below stabilizing backcountry timber supply and insurance balance sheets.

The Truth Congress Keeps Skirting

The problem wasn’t scientific disagreement—it was structural bias. Agencies and lawmakers consistently highlight research that justifies aggressive logging, expanded suppression, or biomass extraction for dirty energy, while sidelining decades of work showing the ecological value of intact and post-disturbance forests. Science isn’t failing; the system it operates in is. Funding structures, agency mandates, and political pressure determine which findings are amplified and which disappear.

Calkin’s simple but radical point was this: making fire “go away” is impossible, but protecting communities from fire is achievable, if we focus there. Fire policy must be insulated from political cycles, and public lands require mixed-severity fire to function. FOFA fails not only because it focuses on so-called fire or fuels management; it also fails because it centers the backcountry wildlands while communities burn. Congress heard that truth clearly—and still lawmakers tried to “fix the forests” instead of preparing communities and centering the saving of lives and homes.

Take Action: The Senate is weighing two fundamentally different approaches to wildfire policy. Oppose S. 1462, the Fix Our Forests Act, which doubles down on backcountry logging and regulatory shortcuts while failing to address the primary drivers of community wildfire loss. Support S. 3609, the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, which prioritizes home hardening, defensible space, emergency planning, and community-level risk reduction—where the evidence shows lives and homes are actually saved.

Call your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them: no on S. 1462, yes on S. 3609.

Subscribe now

Setting aside the fact that the L.A. fires were not forest fires, the bigger question is this: Why is the House still holding hearings on H.R. 471 at all?

FOFA passed the House last January — rushed to the floor before the ashes had even settled — using tragedy as political cover for a bill built on wildfire misinformation.

A year later, instead of moving on, House leadership is still trying to sell it.
Still defending it.
Still centering it.
Still pretending logging is the solution to wildfire.

This is at least the fifth House committee hearing related to FOFA since passage — some directly on the bill, others using its branding or tied to related forest/wildfire policy. When a bill has to be re-litigated in hearing rooms for a year after passage, it’s a sign the case for it was never solid to begin with.

This isn’t standard procedure. FOFA has already passed the House and moved to the Senate, yet House committees keep holding hearings to promote it. That’s a clear signal the case for the bill isn’t strong, and leadership feels they need to keep selling it.

Meanwhile, actual community-focused wildfire bills are sitting untouched:

• H.R. 582 — Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act: Empowers communities to plan and fund wildfire resilience measures where people live, including home hardening, defensible space, and emergency communication upgrades.

• H.R. 948 — SAFE HOME Act: Provides a tax credit for homeowners to make their homes more fire-resistant, covering expenses like fire-resistant roofing, defensible space, and smoke mitigation equipment.

Those bills address the real drivers of wildfire disaster:

• home ignition vulnerability

• evacuation failures

• lack of retrofits and defensible space

H.R. 471 does not. Yet Congress keeps dragging the public back to a logging bill that already passed in the House — while ignoring solutions that actually protect lives.

Extraction over safety.

With our powers combined, we can kill this bill in the Senate.

Americans deserve wildfire legislation that defends people, not smoke-filled headlines. While tragedies like the LA fires rightly drew attention, the political narrative used them to push policy rather than reflect the broader reality.

If the Fix Our Forests Act were truly about safety, it wouldn’t need to be sold for a year straight. And if Congress were serious about wildfire, they’d be holding hearings on the bills that actually protect communities.

Call your Representative

Ask them:

• Why hasn’t the House moved on from H.R. 471?

• Why are hearings still being held to promote it?

• Where are the hearings for H.R. 582 and H.R. 948?

• Why is logging treated as wildfire policy while community safety bills stall?

Call your Senators

Tell them:

• Vote NO on S. 1462 if it reaches the Senate floor.

• Wildfire policy must be grounded in independent evidence, not fear.

• Logging forests does not protect communities.

We don’t need more theatrics. We need Congress to stop confusing headlines with science — and stop using wildfire grief to push destructive policy.

Subscribe now