Category Archives: Forestry

…thousands of federal employees across the country lost their jobs as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s initiative for large-scale reduction and grant freezing. …Layoffs included essential employees whose responsibilities were to respond to wildfires, provide wildland fire safety education… Dustin Tetrault, Big Sky Fire Department’s fire chief said the state is well-equipped at the local government level has been gradually filling more roles to have large-scale incident response. …Many tenured forest service employees are being fired or accepting a leave with promised pay because the state of the forest service remains so uncertain. This takes away years of knowledge of the land and relationships built with local services like BSFD, making future collaboration more difficult. …Despite uncertainty, there are two potential bills in the Montana legislature that, if passed, could have a major effect on the reorganization of how the U.S. deals with emergency fire services, Tetrault explained.

Lombard and Stanley are two co-founders of Rising Appalachia. The nonprofit is revitalizing 45 acres of former mine land, once owned by the Sugar Creek Coal Company… But the space won’t exist solely for recreation and education; they want to make it economically productive for the community again. The Sugar Creek Coal Company still owns 900 acres surrounding Rising Appalachia’s project. Lombard, Stanley and other community members are trying to raise approximately $4 million to purchase the rest of it and establish a community forest. “People can hunt on the land, they can gather food on the land, they can be involved in submitting public comments for projects and management proposals,” Stanley said. “But it’s not exactly managed by the community. A community forest in contrast, is designed by and managed by the people who live here and depend on the forest.”

It might be time to treat your trees to prevent pine beetle infestations in the Black Hills. That’s according to US Forest Service Entomologist Kurt Allen, and Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Forest Health Specialist John Ball. The pair have been hosting talks and information sessions on mountain pine beetle outbreaks since 1999. Last week, they stopped in Spearfish with a handful of clear messages. For one thing, the Black Hills is not necessarily on the verge of a mountain pine beetle epidemic — at least not on the scale last seen a decade ago… “Between the larvae feeding and a blue stain fungus they introduce, they kill trees very quickly,” Ball said.

An annual wildfire briefing between staffers for Southwestern members of Congress and Forest Service officials was unusual for two reasons, according to a congressional aide in attendance. First, the private briefing was a month earlier than is typical, a sign of the acute risk of wildfires this season in New Mexico and Arizona amid years of climate change-caused drought and especially low snowpack this spring. Second, Forest Service officials … refused more than 10 times in the meeting to say how many Forest Service employees had been fired, how many resigned and what might come of wildfire dispatch centers if the Trump administration terminates their leases. “We’ll have to send this to Washington and they will get back to you,” was the standard response, according to a Congressional aide… The meeting embodied how fraught the relationship has become between Forest Service and congressional staff amid President Donald Trump’s blunt efforts to slash federal spending.

…For millennia, Indigenous peoples nurtured the land with stewardship practices that sustained their communities and promoted resilient ecosystems based on a rich diversity of habitats and species. The forced removal of Indigenous peoples and the criminalization of their fire stewardship practices – replaced by industrial forestry practices that centered on commodity timber extraction and aggressive fire suppression – has caused a decline in landscape and biological diversity along with a loss of resilience to wildfires and climate change. Proposed amendments to the plan would work to better incorporate tribal co-stewardship and facilitate a more beneficial role for fire. …The inclusion of tribal co-stewardship and Indigenous knowledge represents a profound change that goes beyond undoing past wrongs to Indigenous peoples—it will help restore species, habitats and landscape diversity. …The Trump administration now threatens to subvert the progressive prospects of the Northwest Forest amendment by its effort to banish the words “diversity” and “inclusion.”

IDAHO, USA — The U.S. Forest Service has identified Southwest Idaho as one of the nation’s most at-risk regions for wildfires as organizations prepare for the upcoming wildfire season. The Southwest Idaho All-Lands Partnership is working on wildfire mitigation across public and private lands to reduce damage from wildfires. “Southwest Idaho is, for lack of jargon, one of the riskiest places in the U.S. for wildfire,” said Ford Van Fossan, who is the Conservation Connect program manager at the National Forest Foundation and oversees the partnership. “We have a lot of folks that are in harm’s way potentially when fires come through our landscape.” Wildfires scorched over 800,000 acres of Idaho’s land in 2024… The National Forest Foundation said it aims to use a mix of “public funding, including federal grants and private funding,” to support these efforts amid federal funding cuts.

Washington’s Department of Natural Resources says it’s coming up with backup plans to address the growing threat of serious wildfires in the state. The typically close working relationship with federal forest managers has frayed under the Trump Administration. It started in mid-February, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut thousands of probationary employees at the U.S. Forest Service. The USDA is in charge of stewarding places like the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest. Altogether, about 2,000 employees across the country were fired. The USDA emphasized that no “operational firefighters” had been let go, and argued the critical work of responding to wildfires would not be interrupted. …Grassroots Wildland Firefighters estimated that three-quarters of the employees laid off had secondary wildland firefighting duties, meaning firefighting wasn’t their primary job, but they were pulled in to fight fires as needed.

The Alaska Forest Association and two of its members have taken legal action against the US Forest Service. The lawsuit … seeks to compel the federal agency to comply with the Tongass Timber Reform Act’s mandate for timber sales, a move that could help revive the struggling timber industry in southeast Alaska. “Federal law requires the Forest Service to sell enough timber every year to meet market demand,” said Frank Garrison, attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs that include Viking Lumber and Alcan Timber. “…the agency has violated federal law three times over.” The dispute stems from the US Forest Service’s 2016 Management Plan, which outlined a gradual transition from selling old-growth timber to younger trees over a ten-year period. … However, the plaintiffs argue that the agency abandoned the plan, ceasing old-growth timber sales immediately and failing to provide sufficient young-growth timber as promised.

Time is running out for those wanting to offer feedback on proposed changes to the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan. The public comment period closes Monday. The plan includes four management alternatives for 24.5 million acres of federal forest lands in Western Oregon, Washington and Northwestern California. It covers 17 national forests, seven Bureau of Land Management districts, six national parks, and 165,000 acres of national wildlife refuges and Department of Defense lands. Locally, this includes parts of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. …First put into effect in 1994, the plan includes standards and guidelines for management activities for each of the agency’s various land use and aquatic conservation categories. The proposed alternatives are intended to reduce the risk of wildfires, address climate change and — perhaps most controversially — expand logging.

It’s now clear that some moves President Trump has authorized his pal Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to make will thwart at least a few of Trump’s own often-repeated priorities. …Then there are two moves that figure to make the next fire season, coming up in late spring or early summer, as bad as or worse than recent ones. Trump legitimately repeats the conviction that cleaning forest floors can reduce the intensity and frequency of wildfires. He consistently and falsely blames California’s government for not doing this. …With Musk’s aid, though, he fired 3,400 Forest Service workers in mid-February who were still on probation in their first year of employment, many of whom had been hired to do the job Trump calls critical to stopping fires. …If he knew these firings completely contradict priorities he has trumpeted, why would he have approved them?