Environmental rules and lawsuits slow efforts to mitigate wildfire dangers
- The vulnerability of the bone-dry West to lightning strikes and jackasses with matches is a fact of life.
- Reducing danger requires thinning forests and allowing fuel to burn in controlled conditions, but this raises political concerns of its own that delays progress by years.
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.
The delays are 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 start a prescribed burn.
- For projects that require environmental impact statements, 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
- The federal government owns 28% of the land in the U.S., and more than half of the acreage in some western states
- Fire-mitigation efforts are necessary to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, but they've historically sucked up resources
https://reason.com/2022/07/08/red-tape-fuels-wildfires-scorching-americas-forests/
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