Red Tape Fuels Wildfires Scorching America’s Forests

“”Regulatory processes that increase the time between identifying and implementing treatments exacerbate wildfire risk and limit the flexibility of managers to use new information to quickly address emerging risk,” Eric Edwards and Sara Sutherland wrote in a report published last month by the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). “In 2021, for example, several proposed treatment areas burned in large wildfires while facing delays from environmental review and litigation.”

Under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the public and activist groups are able to formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a process that moves at the usual molasses-like speed of bureaucracy. Once the NEPA process has been exhausted, interested parties can move their objections to court by filing lawsuits.

“Although most projects are not litigated, the depth of analysis and time spent on the NEPA process is commonly based on the threat of litigation, as well as the level of public and political interest and defensibility in court,” Edwards and Sutherland note. 

That there’s any delay at all in mitigating wildfire danger is frustrating to those of us whose homes and communities have been threatened by fire. But the extent of such delays is mind-boggling.

“Once the Forest Service initiates the environmental review process, it takes an average of 3.6 years to begin a mechanical treatment and 4.7 years to begin a prescribed burn,” according to the PERC authors. “For projects that require environmental impact statements—the most rigorous form of review—the time from initiation to implementation averages 5.3 years for mechanical treatments and 7.2 years for prescribed burns.”

Lawsuits drag things out further, extending the timeline on prescribed burns to as long as 9.4 years.”

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