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.

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.

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.

…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.”

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.