House votes to pass wildfire package that could harm outdoor recreation

With the backdrop of devastating wildfires in California, the House just passed a package of wildfire fixes, the Fix Our Forests Act, that puts outdoor recreation and public lands at risk.

Fix Our Forests does take some important steps to address wildfire, including building an interagency fire center, requiring strategic planning for fuels reduction projects, and establishing community wildfire risk reduction programs. However, the bill does not address a number of urgent wildfire policy needs, including expanding prescribed burns, protecting public health from wildfire smoke, and ensuring fair pay for wildland firefighters. Most concerningly, some of the bill’s provisions, detailed more thoroughly below, would undermine outdoor recreation and conservation values.

Wildfires profoundly affect the outdoor recreation community, and fires have had devastating impacts on public lands and waters and outdoor recreation infrastructure in recent years, including most recently in southern California.

Outdoor Alliance has worked to educate the outdoor community and lawmakers on why fires have become more severe, how wildfire affects outdoor recreation, and on wildfire fixes that deserve support. Some of these policy solutions include better forest management including prescribed burns, better pay for firefighters, and post-fire recovery and mitigation. As land managers work to scale up these solutions to levels commensurate with the wildfire crisis, it is essential that this work be carefully planned in a way that protects outdoor recreation and other public lands values. Several pieces of Fix Our Forests would undermine this sort of thoughtful, integrated wildfire planning and must be addressed before the House passes the bill.

The biggest concerns, detailed in our letter to the House, include:

1. Excluding large forest management projects from environmental review, limiting how outdoor recreationists can participate in the public process around projects that affect recreation areas, and potentially leading agencies to pursue projects that could lead to controversy or litigation.

2. Significantly limiting how and when stakeholders—the outdoor recreation community, hunters and anglers, business owners, local residents, and others—can challenge misguided land management agency decisions in court.

3. Allowing agencies to move forward with land management plans even when it could harm a listed endangered or threatened species.

Your input is vital. The House needs to hear that you are disappointed with their vote on the bill, and the Senate should hear from the outdoor recreation community right away, asking them to make changes to the bill to protect the outdoors before passing it.