Jonathan Wood writes in The Hill about how lawsuits harm forest management.
- Last month legislation which shields the U.S. Forest Service from disruptive lawsuits expired, which could threaten key environmental progress.
- While climate change is in part responsible for the wildfire crisis, outdated regulations and onerous lawsuits are making it harder to actively manage forests which makes wildfires worse.
- These lawsuits stall or stop critical forest restoration and management projects like mechanical thinnings and prescribed burns.
- To preserve our natural environment, federal and state lawmakers must modernize regulations to bring more forest management projects online and protect forest workers against harmful lawsuits.
“However, this disruptive litigation can directly harm species by delaying projects essential to conserving their habitat. In 2019, a Cottonwood-related lawsuit shut down forest restoration projects throughout New Mexico’s and Arizona’s national forests for more than a year. That delay appears to have contributed to a prescribed fire in New Mexico growing out of control and becoming last year’s Hermit’s Peak fire, which burned 340,000 acres of forest, destroyed wildlife habitat, and degraded water quality. No one wins if a species’ habitat goes up in smoke while the Forest Service is bogged down in litigation and paperwork.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
