Region Archives: US West

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As Los Angeles reels from deadly January wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an order Thursday directing the state to advance long-delayed regulations requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to clear combustible materials around their homes. Newsom ordered the state to publish draft regulation next month, with a deadline to adopt those rules by the end of the year. The requirements were passed by lawmakers in 2020 and originally set to take effect by Jan. 1, 2023. Newsom signed the order after he returned from Washington to advocate for disaster aid. The rule requires homeowners to clear materials like dead plants and wooden furniture within 5 feet of their homes in fire-prone areas. As multiple fires roared through LA neighborhoods in January, the regulations still weren’t written, and the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection told The Associated Press last month it had no firm timeline for completing them.

Post-fire tree planting significantly accelerates forest recovery in burned areas, increasing regrowth rates by 25.7%.  That’s according to a first-of-its-kind study by researchers at the Ecological Research Institute (ERI) of Northern Arizona University, recently published in the scientific journal Forest Ecology and Management. Recent policy changes and significant financial investments aim to accelerate tree planting efforts nationwide; however, the large-scale effectiveness and impact of post-fire planting has remained largely unknown, until now. Lead author Kyle Rodman, an ERI research scientist, said this study gives researchers and policymakers alike an in-depth look at the effectiveness of tree replanting in landscapes that have been increasingly affected by wildfires. 

This opinion piece is by the following groups: Central Utah Water Conservancy District, Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities, Weber Basin Water Conservancy District, Mountain Regional Water Special Service District, Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake & Sandy, Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, Summit County, and World Resources Institute. After another catastrophic wildfire season in the West, it is clear that Utah can no longer put off needed investments to protect our forests and critical sources of drinking water. The consequences of delaying these essential investments grow yearly and the stakes have never been higher. …These fires are a wake-up call. Infrastructure costs should not fall on water ratepayers alone. While Utah water utilities and our partners have made progress in reducing wildfire risks in key watersheds, the wildfire crisis demands even greater levels of collaboration and funding — and both are needed now from Utah’s state Legislature.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the bipartisan Aerial Firefighting Enhancement Act of 2025 to strengthen the aerial wildfire suppression fleet and better combat the year-round threat of catastrophic wildfire. “I have worked to expand the operations of Very Large Air Tankers that have proven absolutely essential to firefighters battling wildfires in New Mexico, Los Angeles, and across the West,” said Heinrich. …“As a former Navy SEAL and the only aerial firefighter in the Senate, I understand government’s most solemn duty is to keep the American people safe,” said Sheehy. The bill reauthorizes the Secretary of Defense’s authority to sell excess Department of Defense aircraft and aircraft parts, acceptable for commercial sale, to persons or entities that contract with the government for the delivery of fire retardant or water by air to suppress wildfires…

SACRAMENTO– The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) is announcing the availability of up to $5 million for Tribal Wildfire Resilience projects. CAL FIRE is soliciting applications for projects that work to support California Native American tribes in managing ancestral lands. This includes implementing and promoting Traditional Ecological Knowledges in wildfire resilience. Also, creating wildfire safety for tribal communities. Applications will be accepted from now via the Tribal Wildfire Resilience Grants webpage. Applications are due by 12:00 PM on Friday, March 28, 2025. Eligible applicants are California Native American tribes and tribal-led non-profit organizations with documentation.

State Sen. Brian Jones is hopeful wildfire disaster aid is forthcoming and wants to make sure San Diego gets its share. When California leaders sat down with President Donald Trump at a roundtable discussion on disaster aid for the Los Angeles wildfires last week, they weren’t sure what to expect. Trump had threatened to withhold federal funding unless California met his demands for changes to water policy, forest management, sanctuary protections and voter ID. Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom was walking a political tightrope: positioning the state as the center of Trump resistance while also negotiating wildfire assistance. …Dialing back his combative manner, Trump expressed condolences over the wreckage of Pacific Palisades, which he viewed from a helicopter. …Last week Newsom signed a bill awarding funding for firestorm recovery … that barely begins to cover losses from the L.A. fires, whose total damages could be $250 billion, according to an estimate by AccuWeather.

Laura McCarthy

SOCORRO — The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources at New Mexico Tech will present the 2025 Earth Science Achievement Award for Public Service and Public Policy to New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy. McCarthy has advanced the role of earth science in public policy, and will receive the award during a ceremony in conjunction with Earth Science/New Mexico Tech Day. As State Forester, McCarthy is responsible for forest management on 43 million acres of state and private lands, including wildfire prevention and response, forest health improvement, reforestation, watershed health, and climate change adaptation. Under her leadership, the State Forestry Division has doubled in size, modernized its business systems, and taken on the challenges of postfire recovery and reforestation of burned areas with the year 2100 climate in mind. She is committed to forest health, drawing on her experience as a forester, wildland firefighter, and policy advisor.

A utility company wants to cut through 5 acres of mature Doug fir and big leaf maples in a massive Portland urban forest to make way for new transmission lines. Portland General Electric executives say the company needs to improve its infrastructure to meet Portland’s electricity demands, particularly as it moves away from fossil fuels and prepares the grid to carry more renewably generated power. The company plans to meet that goal by removing 400 trees through intact, mature forest to install new power poles and 1,400 feet of transmission lines. The proposal has drawn fierce opposition from environmental groups, as well as the city of Portland itself. That opposition was on display during a public hearing Wednesday, where city staff recommended a hearings officer deny PGE’s plan. A decision is expected in early March.

Related coverage in Portland Mercury: “A Dangerous Precedent”: PGE Faces Major Backlash for Forest Park Utility Proposal

At the worst possible moment, budget uncertainty has effectively stalled the Forest Service’s effort to thin the forest to reduce the risk of wildfires: That’s the message Forest Service officials delivered to the Eastern Arizona Counties Natural Resources Committee last week. The Forest Service had already imposed a hiring freeze before the congressional budgeting process fell apart. Congress in January adopted a continuing resolution to get through March and avert a government shutdown. The continuing resolution was necessary just to allow the federal government to spend money Congress included in its last adopted budget for the current fiscal year starting in October. But it’s still unclear whether the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate can agree on fresh action to lift the debt ceiling and adopt either another continuing resolution or an actual budget. Some Republicans have demanded steep cuts in previously approved spending to rein in the federal deficit.

MISSOULA – Forestry students at the University of Montana are working hard this week to set up the 106th Foresters’ Ball, a beloved campus tradition and fundraiser for students in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation.  Students and alumni have turned UM’s Schreiber Gym into an old logging town featuring wooden false fronts of a saloon, chapel, jail and other buildings. The Western atmosphere will draw hundreds of flannel-clad visitors to gather and dance to live music. This year’s theme for the ball is “Tankers Dumpin’ & Crews a Jumpin’,” a nod to the brave firefighting crews across the state. The work to create this year’s ball was inspired by fire crews past and present, said Koson Verkler, a senior forestry student and “chief push” of the Foresters’ Ball Committee. A replica wooden smokejumper aircraft and parachutes will be displayed at the ball. 

Around a hundred community members showed up to the U.S. Forest Service office in Medford on Wednesday night for a public meeting about proposed amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was created in 1994 to protect threatened and endangered species, like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. It was meant to put an end to the timber wars of the 80s and 90s, when environmental activists protested the over-harvesting of trees in the region. The plan covers all of the Forest Service lands in Oregon and Washington, as well as a small part of Northern California. While innovative at the time, even environmentalists like Carol Valentine with the Sierra Club believe the plan needs to change to meet our new challenges. …Environmental activists held a rally outside the Forest Service office to push for stronger protections for old-growth ecosystems in the amendments.

The ecosystems on the American Southwest’s federal lands are hemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than any other region in the U.S., according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. While federal land ecosystems in most states are sequestering carbon dioxide on average, California’s lost six times more than any other state during the 17-year period from 2005 to 2021 that the study analyzed. “In California, it’s primarily a story of fire,” said Benjamin Sleeter, a research geographer with the USGS who led the ecosystem analysis in the new study. While scientists typically expect the movement of carbon in and out of ecosystems to cancel out in the long run, human intervention and climate change have destabilized the delicate balance. It’s made the daunting task of modeling carbon flowing between ecosystems and the atmosphere, which has challenged scientists for decades, even harder.

…some electric utilities and cooperatives are urging the Senate to seal the deal on the “Fix Our Forests Act” that aims to expedite some federal approvals and reduce wildfire risk overall. The legislation …establishes requirements for managing forests on federal land, including reducing wildfire, expediting certain forest management projects, and implementing forest management projects and activities. …The legislation prohibits courts from immediately halting a project unless they determine that the person suing to stop it “is likely to succeed on the merits” of the case if the lawsuit gets a full hearing. …The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association applauded the bill, arguing it would make it easier for electric cooperatives to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, and called on the Senate to also pass the bill. …Pacific Gas & Electric “supports legislation that would expedite permitting and approvals and reduce barriers to the essential work of keeping powerlines clear of vegetation.”

Assembly Republicans announced a series of bills to address and improve California’s wildfire prevention, response and recovery efforts. The Republican proposals will streamline badly needed wildfire prevention projects, encourage residents to harden their homes against fire, hold people accountable for arson, looting or flying drones near fires, and help communities and homeowners recover from disasters. Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher … highlighted the urgent need to remove the fuels that drive catastrophic wildfires. … “California hasn’t done nearly enough to remove flammable vegetation and prevent devastating wildfires – if you don’t believe the science, believe your own damn eyes,” Gallagher said. … Republicans’ policies are focused on three areas: preventing devastating wildfires through fuels reduction projects and home hardening, improving disaster response by cracking down on looting and irresponsible drone use, and helping communities recover by supporting local nonprofits and making it easier to rebuild.

The catastrophe of wildfire is creating interesting politics in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, America’s liberal center, has waived environmental reviews and permitting requirements to allow Los Angeles wildfire victims to rebuild their homes with less oversight and regulation. …It’s remarkable that Newsom put the Coastal Commission in a choke hold. Over-regulation is the charge Republicans have leveled at the commission for years. …Given Republican Donald Trump’s win, are Democrats adjusting their politics to meet the moment? Are environmental rules that have guided development for over half century still relevant when wildfires burn whole communities and forests? …How the stress of wildfires changes the way we consider environmental regulations will be something to watch in the coming years. Trump wants make such rules go away. That’s not right. But giving a blanket waiver as Newsom has done may not work well, either.

Federal officials and an environmental group have settled a lawsuit over a Kettle Range timber project’s potential impacts on Canada lynx. The Kettle Range Conservation Group and the Colville National Forest finalized an agreement last week that ends a lawsuit over the Bulldog Project, a combination of logging and prescribed burning the agency had planned on about 13,600 acres in the Kettle Range and a nearby area known as the Wedge. The Kettle Range Conservation Group sued over the project in 2023, arguing that it would damage important habitat for lynx, which have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 2000. The suit raised concerns with a 2020 update to the agency’s lynx analysis units, which shrank the area protected as habitat for the snow-loving big cats. In the settlement agreement filed last week, the Forest Service agreed to return to its previous lynx unit boundaries and to not authorize timber work within the units, both old and new.

In 2021, a nonprofit formed to answer county executive Satpal Sidhu’s call to plant one-million trees in Whatcom. The organization, Whatcom Million Trees Project (WMTP), has now planted over 2,800 trees and protected nearly 323,000. The mission is to plant and protect mature trees, while also connecting people to nature and spreading the understanding of why trees and forests are so important to our region. The planting and protecting takes place in community parks and neighborhoods, as well rural lands in more remote parts of the county. Though the group clarifies that young saplings won’t add notable climate or biodiversity benefits for years, they hope to spread hope though the communal planting of trees.

Clemson University has named Wayne Phillips, a forester with 28 years of experience across all aspects of the forestry supply chain, as the new manager of the Clemson Experimental Forest. Phillips takes over management of the forest after eight years as area marketing manager with Weyerhaeuser, a timber, land and forest products company that owns or manages 28 million acres of forestland. Phillips is the seventh manager of the 18,000-acre forest since Clemson College began supervising the land in 1939 under an agreement with the federal government. Over nearly 100 years, careful management has transformed the land from depleted row crop farmland to a resource for teaching, research and outreach, as well as a valued community asset.

The Fix Our Forests Act, co-sponsored by a Republican receiving substantial donations from the logging industry, makes it easier to bypass environmental review on federal lands. It would allow loggers to more easily thin forests by reducing environmental regulations and public input. The thinking is that reducing tree counts means reducing wildfire fuel. However, the most dangerous fires—the ones that threaten densely populated areas—rarely begin deep in the woods. For example, the Los Angeles firestorms “originated in very brushy areas just outside of town, then became an urban configuration issue,” said Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, or FUSEE. “No amount of logging would have saved anything—it’s this spurious connection.”

Related content from UtilityDrive: PG&E, other electric utilities call for Senate to pass forest management bill

In the first two days of his new term, President Donald Trump signed more than 200 executive orders. One was aimed at accessing more natural resources in Alaska. It attempts to roll back protections on over 9 million acres of Tongass National Forest, potentially opening them up for logging… The Juneau-based Southeast Alaska Conservation Council has been fighting to keep most of the Tongass roadless for decades. Council Director Maggie Rabb said it’s hard to predict what this administration will do next… Rabb said that the conservation council is not anti-logging. There is still active logging in the Tongass. For Rabb, the Roadless Rule has been an effective tool to protect old growth without actually ending logging. “The push to roll back the Roadless Rule has very little to do with on-the-ground realities in Southeast Alaska or market demand, and it’s very much about external agendas that are disconnected from our region,” she said.

PAYSON — When lightning ignited chaparral and ponderosa pine litter to form the West Fire in late August, U.S. Forest Service fire managers knew they had some room to let it run. Flames would creep along the brush and undergrowth some 13 miles northeast of Payson, burning around natural firebreaks in the rocks just below the rim. Once the fire crested the rim, having covered some 15,000 acres, it would die against a broader firebreak that Salt River Project (SRP) contractors had chewed out of the dense ponderosa forest with the intention of saving critical Arizona watersheds from just such a fire. …“The intended result is to reduce hazardous fuels, improve watershed conditions and wildlife habitat,” the Forest Service’s incident commander said. …The main reason for thinning, though, is to restore balance and, ultimately, fire itself to a landscape that had grown too thick to burn at less than catastrophic intensity. 

PORTLAND, Ore. – The United States Forest Service (USFS) is currently taking comments on its proposed changes to the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) through March 17. The NWFP dates back to the mid-1990s, serving as the blueprint for conserving forests and wildlife habitat along the West Coast. It covers over 24 million acres managed by the Forest Service and other federally managed lands, spanning from California and up through Washington. The proposed amendments intend to provide an updated management framework that incorporates best available scientific information and current conditions in order to better address the social, economic, and ecological changes experienced over the last 30 years. The proposed changes outlined in a Draft Environmental Impact Statement focus on themes of fire resilience, economic benefits, and forest stewardship, with Tribal inclusion and adapting to changing conditions interwoven throughout these themes.

In a brown dirt field, wet from irrigation and washed in early morning sunshine, a curious metal contraption moves like a mini tractor. As large as a love seat, and set on caterpillar tracks, the machine hums and zaps as it rolls at a snail’s pace over rows of small pines at the U.S. Forest Service tree nursery in Coeur d’Alene. “This machine can potentially save us a half million dollars annually in manual labor costs across our six nurseries,” said retired Forest Service Senior Research Scientist Kas Dumroese, M.S.’86, Ph.D. ’96. The machine, a weeding robot developed by this year’s University of Idaho robotics team, is designed to kill weeds in the nursery’s seedling beds. The team is comprised of graduate and undergraduate students and is based at the North Idaho College campus in Coeur d’Alene.

Since the 1970s, billions of dollars in federal contracts have gone to forestry work like replanting trees or fuels reduction. Oregon has long been a center for businesses getting those contracts. But that industry looked a lot different 50 years ago. On a December morning the hills above Ashland, like many forests in the West, are buzzing with the sound of chainsaws. Workers with the nonprofit Lomakatsi Restoration Project are busy working to protect the valley from wildfire. Crews are clearing understory, reducing fuel that can feed fire. But while Oregon has long been a center for these jobs, the industry has changed dramatically over time. …Thanks to the 1972 Oregon Forest Practices Act, Rust found that alternative. The law required land clear cut by loggers to be replanted, a win for early environmentalists. 

…This week, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act to help overcome the legal and political hurdles that stand in the way of addressing the wildfire crisis. …the declining health of our nation’s forests is the primary cause [of the wildfire crisis]. …Red tape and unnecessary litigation hold up forest restoration projects for years, consuming time and money that should instead be spent on the ground. Research from the Property and Environment Research Center—found that federal permitting and litigation can delay needed projects from five to nine years. …Co-sponsored by Rep. Scott Peters and Rep. Bruce Westerman, the legislation received broad bipartisan support. The Senate and President Donald Trump should move quickly to pass the legislation and empower agencies and partners with needed forest restoration tools.