Bush signs Healthy Forest Restoration Act<br>

An engine crew member with the Williams Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest cuts down a tree last summer as part of a larger thinning project. Many trees were already dead or dying due to bark beetle damage.

Many forest thinning and restoration projects have come to a grinding halt because environmentalists, among other groups, were able to appeal a project in court at any time along the project’s progress at an almost endless rate.

“Hopefully, it’s going to somewhat streamline things so we can be putting funds on the ground to get work done, rather than being involved with large amounts of appeals and often times litigation,” says USFS Southwest Region Spokesperson Art Morrison. “It’s just going to give us some new mechanisms to be able to work more efficiently to help restore forest health with the main focus in and around communities at risk.

The new law identifies 20 million acres — both in and around municipalities and in deeper forest areas — as high risk for catastrophic wildfires. It allocates $760 million annually through the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management for that acreage, and requires that at least 50 percent of those monies go to help wildland urban-interface areas — at-risk forested areas adjacent to municipalities — municipal watersheds, and critical species habitats, all identified within the 20 million acres.

While the USFS and many municipalities classified as WUI areas applaud signing of the bill, some groups, such as the Wilderness Society, oppose the legislation, saying that the first and main problem with the act is that the amount of focus around at-risk communities was inadequate.

“Our second concern was that when we looked at those zones around communities and did some mapping,” says Mike Francis, Director of the National Forest Program at the Wilderness Society, “we found that 85 percent of the land was private land, not federal land, and this bill only deals with federal land funding. We felt that a piece of legislation should also allow money to be allocated for non-federal land so they can have real protection around the communities and not just where the federal land happens to be.”

Dallas Boyd, Press Secretary for Walden, says while there may be some gray areas of the bill, at least it is a step in the right direction.

“It’s true that the bill does not require 100 percent of the treated areas are within the wildland urban-interface,” Boyd said, “but the bill recognizes the priority of treating areas in the WUI. It’s ridiculous to suggest that this bill is flawed for that reason when the Wilderness society proposed killing the bill, which would’ve resulted in doing nothing to treat the lands within the WUI. At least it’s a remedy. At least it’s an attempt. The alternative is to allow these forests to continue to burn.”

Boyd added that the lands at risk for catastrophic wildfire, insect infestation and disease are not limited to WUI areas and that interior portions of the forest are just as at-risk.

Morrison says now that the bill is signed, the next step is to do interim regulations on how the agency is going to be able to proceed and begin implementing the new law.