Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, in a press briefing Tuesday on California’s raging forest fires, called for more management of federal forest lands to be shifted to local authorities, arguing that this would help prevent fires.
The call, which can be achieved only by federal legislation, aligns closely with bills offered by Republican lawmakers who want local authorities to control public lands and, in some cases, open them up to exploitation by oil, gas, and forestry interests.
In the briefing, Zinke also reiterated comments he made last weekend, when he said that environmentalists were behind the fires. He claimed that lawsuits filed by “radical environmental groups, that would rather burn down the entire forest than cut down a single tree or thin the forest,” prevented the sound management of federal forest lands.
What Zinke and Perdue are seeking instead is congressional legislation allowing greater local management. Perdue specifically called for an expansion of “good neighbor authority to tribes and counties, working to protect these homes and lives.”
In the 2014 farm law, Congress authorized the “good neighbor” policy, so that the states and Puerto Rico could manage forests on U.S. Forest Service lands. Under a bill introduced in the House by Arizona Republican Paul Gosar and included in the 2018 farm bill currently under negotiation, that authority would be extended to counties and tribes.
Gosar, who won re-election to Congress in the midterms despite public opposition by six of his siblings, has been a critic of federal lands, and co-sponsored a bill that could open up thousands of acres of western Arizona’s La Paz County to energy exploration. Gosar also has a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters.
Observers point out that this type of legislation represents the most recent development in the debate over control of federal lands — especially now that attempts at shifting federal lands to state ownership have failed.
“The push to transfer public lands is losing steam even as its proponents get closer to their goal: state control over federal lands,” according to High Country News. “With a sympathetic administration and Congress, the movement has shifted to a push for greater influence over federal lands rather than outright ownership.”
That comes in the form of the expanded management that Perdue and Zinke are seeking for local jurisdictions.
“Instead of seeking ownership of federal lands, encumbered as they are with environmental protections and financial obligations, the transfer movement is now focused on shifting control of their management,” according to a paper written by Martin Nie and Patrick Kelly at the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana. “The result would largely be the same, as there is little practical difference between transferring ownership and simply ceding to state and local governments all decision-making authority. In each scenario, the national interest in public lands is surrendered.”
Chad Hanson, a research ecologist with the John Muir Project and a national director of the Sierra Club, wrote in a CNN op-ed piece that management in the form of logging is ineffective.
“In the most comprehensive scientific analysis conducted on the issue of forest management and fire intensity — which looked at more than 1,500 fires on tens of millions of acres across the western United States over three decades — we found that forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging actually tend to burn much more intensely, not less,” he wrote.