Key Points
- Categorical exclusions are an important tool that allow forest projects aimed at reducing wildfire risk and enhancing forest resilience to commence more quickly.
- Despite their importance, a Ninth Circuit ruling as significantly hindered the Forest Service’s ability to utilize categorical exclusions in many western states, severely impeding the agency’s capacity to carry out forest restoration efforts.
- Instead of limiting categorical exclusions, we should be expanding them to help reduce litigation over forest projects and ensure our forest restoration efforts can begin before it’s too late.
Background
Driving through western Montana this past Sunday evening, I saw the smoke plumes of the Miller Peak Fire building in the sky. It is, unfortunately, an all too common sight around the state this time of year and I knew immediately what it was. With at least nine new fires just this past weekend, our communities are bracing for wildfire season. These catastrophic blazes threaten human life, damage our watersheds, destroy wildlife habitat, and pollute our air.
Large and destructive wildfires are becoming more common across the West. Although several factors contribute to this trend, the declining health of our nation’s forests is a primary cause. Our forests are filled with excess dead and dying trees, brush, and other fuels—to the point where an area larger than the state of California is in need of restoration. Removing those fuels through mechanical thinning and prescribed fire are urgently needed to reduce wildfire damage and promote forest resilience. A new meta-analysis published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found that combining mechanical thinning with prescribed burns reduces the severity of subsequent wildfires in an area by 62-72 percent.
While the good news is that we know how to reduce wildfire risk through forest restoration activities, the bad news is it is exceptionally difficult to get that work done on the ground and at the scale needed. Before any chainsaws or drip torches can touch a federal forest, a restoration project must navigate complex bureaucratic procedures, including review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Stringent reviews under NEPA can take years, so policymakers have created categorical exclusions to exempt certain activities from the NEPA review process. Congress has, for example, categorically excluded collaboratively developed forest projects designed to reduce hazardous fuels and wildfire risk and other forest restoration projects designed to help mule deer and sage grouse habitat.
