NGO Letter Against HR 471, ‘Fix Our Forests’ Act
Deadline: Wednesday, January 22nd at 12pm PT
Dear Members of Congress and President-Elect Trump:
While the wildfires in Los Angeles were raging, killing at least 25 people and destroying more than 17,000 structures, leaders of the Congressional Western Caucus, Representatives LaMalfa (R-CA), Westerman (R-AR), and McClain (R-MI), sought to take cynical advantage of this profound tragedy to promote the “Fix Our Forests Act” (H.R. 471), which would increase logging across federal forest lands as a supposed community protection measure.
We the undersigned organizations strongly urge you to oppose the “Fix Our Forests Act”, which the Republican leadership of the House plans to take up for a floor vote on Thursday, January 23, 2025. If passed, this bill will increase threats to at-risk communities from wildfires while amplifying the climate crisis. The deceptively named “Fix Our Forests Act” would override bedrock environmental laws and curtail public participation to mandate landscape-scale logging on federal lands. The Act has no limits on the size, age, or percentage of trees to be removed, so logging of large trees and clearcutting would likely occur on a vast scale across federal forests, even though most vulnerable human populations are not in forests. Even in forested areas, fires are often spilling over from intensively managed private lands, where studies show that logging, combined with severe fire weather, can increase fire severity.
Passage of this bill would threaten lives and communities from wildfires in multiple ways.
First, the Act diverts attention and resources away from the communities that are most at risk from wildfires—those that are in areas dominated by grasslands and shrublands, like the communities devastated by wildfires in Los Angeles. In the minority of at-risk communities that are in forested areas, the Act ignores how large fires have rapidly swept through intensively managed forests before burning down towns, as we saw tragically with the towns of Paradise, Grizzly Flats, and Greenville in northern California in recent years, and in the weather-driven Labor Day 2020 fires in southern Oregon. The Act’s proponents ignore the many studies that find removing trees from forests reduces wind resistance, allowing winds to spread wildfires much faster, leaving people less time to safely evacuate and giving first responders less time to save lives and homes. Research shows the faster wildfires move, the more they impact communities.
Second, instead of acknowledging the overriding role of extreme weather and climate change in driving fast-moving fires that threaten communities, the Act ignores and denies these central factors, focusing on vegetation removal across remote wildlands instead of scientifically well-established, community-based methods to keep lives and homes safe from wildfires. Effective measures include retrofitting existing structures to make them more resistant to embers, creating and maintaining smart defensible space within 100 feet of structures, establishing better land use planning to prevent homes from being built in fire-prone areas in the first place, and evacuation planning and preparedness. The bipartisan Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act (Rep. Huffman, D-CA) and the SAFE HOME Act (Rep. Kiley, R-CA) would focus more resources into these effective practices. Notably, current science finds that vegetation management or removal more than 100 feet from homes provides no additional benefits to home protection from wildfires. The relevant area is the home itself and its immediate surroundings, not remote, publicly owned forests. Moreover, decades of research by government scientists has demonstrated that agencies can and often do manage forests with fire alone, without any prior tree removal—even in dense forests—and at far lower per-acre cost compared to mechanical thinning or other logging operations. Prescribed fire or managed wildfire alone are more effective forest management activities that also provide better results for biodiversity, yet the Act would focus far more attention on logging activities.
Third, focusing on intensive vegetation removal, especially through logging, in remote federal forests contributes to the global cycle of carbon emissions and extreme fire weather by increasing carbon emissions more than threefold per acre relative to fire alone. Exacerbating climate change makes extreme weather fluctuations worse, further threatening communities not just from wildfires but also from hurricanes and severe flooding.
Ultimately, the Fix Our Forests Act would compel federal land management agencies to double down on the ineffective approaches to wildfire mitigation employed at great cost over the past two decades. More importantly, this legislation would fail to prevent tragedies like those experienced in Los Angeles this month. Please oppose it.Sincerely,
John Muir Project
Los Padres ForestWatch
Wild Heritage
350 Eugene
350PDX
350 Salem Oregon
350 Seattle
Advocates for the Environment
Alliance for the Wild Rockies
Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments
Anthropocene Alliance
Bill Anderson Fund
Bunny’s Flowers
Center for a Sustainable Coast
Cherokee Concerned Citizens
Citizens Awareness Network
Clean Energy Action
Climate Communications Coalition
Coal River Mountain Watch
Coalition for Wetlands and Forests
Conservation Congress
Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution
Dream Tank
Earth Ethics, Inc.
Earth Law Center
Earth Neighborhood Productions
Education, Economics, Environmental, Climate and Health Organization (EEECHO)
Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition
Empower Our Future
Environmental Protection Information Center
Feather River Action!
Friends of the Bitterroot
Friends of the Clearwater
Gallatin Wildlife Association
GreenLatinos
Greenpeace USA
Habitat Recovery Project
Heartwood
Inland Empire Task Force
Junta Comunitaria Pastillo Tibes Corp
Kettle Range Conservation Group
Klamath Forest Alliance
KS Connectivity
Legal Rights for the Salish Sea
MS COMMUNITIES UNITED FOR PROSPERITY (MCUP)
Natural Resources Law
New Jersey Forest Watch
New Mexico Climate Justice
Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition
Northwest Watershed Institute
Olympic Climate Action
Partnership for Southern Equity
Patagonia Area Resource Alliance
Prairie Protection
Predator Defense
Rosewood Strong Community
Save Our Sky Blue Waters
Save the Wakarusa River Valley
Saving Island Green Wildlife & Beyond
South Bronx Unite
South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership
Swan View Coalition
Taking Back Our Youth
The Clinch Coalition
Unite the Parks
Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment
Voices of Water Program; Biodiversity for a livable climate
Water League
We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review
Wellspring Spa
WildEarth Guardians
Wyoming Wildlife Advocates
Yellowstone to Uintas Connection
Olympic Climate Action 