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A PDF of this Communication
is available on my webpage, along with prior
Communications and other
resources. | |
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| Fig.
1. James Hansen and Chad Hanson in
Stanislaus Forest just west of Yosemite in June
2021, in an area “rescued” by the United States
Forest Service following the 2013 Sierra Nevada
Rim fire.
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Fix Our Forests
Fiasco
30
January 2026
James
Hansen | |
The Senate is on the verge of taking up
a bill with the Orwellian title “Fix Our Forests
Act.” It is designed to do the opposite, as Dan
Galpern and I describe in an op-ed published
yesterday in the Boston Globe, which is copied
below with permission of the Globe. The bill would
result in swaths of the public’s national forests
becoming “categorical exclusion” zones open to
logging exempt from any environmental review.
Thus, the bill would override the purposes for
which national forests were set up, including
“outdoor recreation, range…watershed, and wildlife
and fish purposes.” This sin is rationalized under
the pretense that the Act will reduce wildfire
risk and improve forest health by “thinning” the
forest. This is nonsense, as our op-ed
discusses.
Here I draw attention to the
harm their unconstrained logging causes for
climate. Nature has the potential to be a big part
of the climate solution, if we allow it to work
(as discussed in our communication[1] in
2021). Fig. 1 is a photo of an area in which the
Forest Service allowed logging post-fire, cutting
down the “snags” (burned or scorched tree trunks).
Logs containing useful lumber were hauled off and
less desirable logs, branches and saplings were
ground up for biofuel. Trees were planted, but few
are growing. Planters replanted a few times, as
there are a few trees of varying ages trying to
get started. It is hard for trees to get
started in an area compacted by heavy machinery
and missing the nutrients that were hauled off for
biofuels.
Fig. 2 shows an area burned by
the same 2013 Sierra Nevada Rim Fire that was not
yet clearcut. Natural tree regrowth was thriving
and wildlife was abundant. The snags topple within
decades and provide habitat for small scale forest
life, as well as water holding capacity and
nutrients for the soil. The area in Fig. 2 was
slated to be cut like the area in Fig. 1, but it
never happened. Perhaps the ruckus that Chad
Hanson raised had an effect. Now, however, we are
concerned with a much larger area in our national
forests. For the sake of drawing down atmospheric
CO2 and the health of our national
forests, the Fix Our Forests Act should be
rejected.
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Fig.
2. Hansen and Galpern in June 2021 in an
area not then or yet logged -- regrowing on its
own.
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Boston Globe,
Jan. 29, 2026
| OPINION [Reprinted with
permission]
By
James Hansen and Dan
Galpern
A logging bill
masquerading as wildfire protection
Despite its name, the
Fix Our Forests Act would fast-track logging,
weaken environmental safeguards, and do little to
protect communities from wildfire or climate
harm. | |
Congressional leaders face pressure
from the logging industry to bring a deliberately
misnamed “Fix Our Forests Act” to the Senate
floor. They should resist. This bill is a Trojan
horse, pretending to protect vulnerable
communities from wildfire risk and improve forest
health. It does neither. Instead, it heeds the
command of President Trump’s Executive Order 14225,
which calls for the “immediate expansion” of US
timber production from lands managed by the US
Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management.
America is blessed with
magnificent national forests that are a source of
lumber and other resources. An adequate lumber
supply is important for the US economy, but most of that is provided by
private holdings. Timber production is just one of
a range of multiple uses for
national forests. Other uses include “outdoor
recreation, range, … watershed, and wildlife and
fish purposes.” Any “yield” from our national
forests must be pursued in a manner that maintains
“the various renewable resources … in perpetuity …
without impairment of the productivity of the
land.”
For those ends, the National
Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered
Species Act require the USFS and the BLM to
safeguard the public interest, including that of
future generations, and to protect rare and
endangered species. But the bill that the Senate
is considering enables land managers to skirt
these laws and fast-track otherwise questionable
projects under the guise of wildfire risk
reduction by vastly expanding allowable “categorical exclusion”
zones that are exempt from
review.
That would be a mistake. Mandated
environmental review allows challenges to
wrong-headed proposals. It also insulates
conscientious officials from industry pressure,
enabling them to do the right thing by considering
the wider ramifications of forest-disturbing
proposals.
The pretense of the legislation
is that deep forest logging will reduce fire
intensity, risk to downwind communities, and
climate-damaging carbon emissions. But such
“thinning” does not always reduce wildfire
intensity. Indeed, considerable evidence
establishes that the open conditions created by
such logging may lead to lower humidity, higher
wind speed, higher
temperature, abundant grass fuel, and
increased fire intensity. Moreover, thinning may
increase forest-derived carbon emissions “by three to five times
relative to fire alone,” in part because only a
fraction of the carbon in felled trees ends up
stored as lumber.
Effective community
protection requires planners and policy makers
alike to understand “the critical role of individual
homeowners and local government.” In
brief, in a warming world government
at every level needs to help communities become
far more ignition-resistant.
Updated building codes, neighborhood assessments
of fire vulnerability, home-hardening
modifications, defensible space pruning,
and local government empowerment are all needed,
but the Fix Our Forests Act offers none of
this.
As to combatting the climate crisis,
US forest lands play an important role by storing
considerable carbon; moreover, they retain high potential, if left to
mature, to sequester much more (as
old-growth forests and mature trees durably store
more carbon).
Recently, the International Court of Justice
ruled that, to address global climate
change, every nation is obliged not only to
constrain exploitation of their fossil fuel
reserves but also to preserve their carbon-rich
soils and forests. Congress owes it to our
children and grandchildren to pay close attention
here.
Many citizen-based community groups
have noticed FOFA’s chicanery. More than 100
groups issued a public analysis of the
measure’s extraordinary conveyance of discretion
to the land agencies, enabling officials to
approve logging and clear-cuts even in forests of
high ecological value — and for a wide assortment
of reasons. A few groups based in
Washington, D.C., appear to have been taken in by FOFA’s
sophistry, but they should take a closer look at
the relevant wildland and urban fire
science.
Congressional leaders should
decline to bring FOFA up for a vote, but if the
measure makes it to the Senate floor, senators
should read its content in light of that relevant
science. They then can rise up to strike it
down.
James Hansen, formerly director of
the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and
Solutions at Columbia University’s
Earth Institute. Dan Galpern is general counsel to
the Climate Protection
and Restoration
Initiative and long-time legal
adviser to Dr. Hansen
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