Ground Truth Blog
Beetle-Kill Trees and Wildfire
Beetle-kill trees make an easy target in the rush to defend our forests and communities from wildfire. The trees are dead and brown, so they must be a fire hazard, especially in today’s unnaturally dense forests. Therefore, we need to cut the trees and salvage...
Court Ruling Halts Exemption for Wildfire Logging
Judge Michael McShane, chief judge for the U.S. District Court of Oregon, struck down a 34-year-old environmental-law exemption used for wildfire logging. As reported by Alex Baumhardt for the Oregon Capital Chronicle, McShane's ruling reversed recent Forest Service...
Former Forest Service Chiefs Attest: Americans Want Their National Forests Kept Intact
by Mike Dombeck, Dale Bosworth, Tom Tidwell, and Vicki Christiansen for The Hill. Twenty-five years ago, the Forest Service adopted one of the boldest conservation measures in American history, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The National Forest System already...
Interior Announces Next Steps to Consolidate Wildland Firefighting
Congress provides no funding for new agency. The Department of the Interior recently announced the next steps in establishing the U.S. Wildland Fire Service and named Brian Fennessy to lead the new agency, even though the final version of the Congressional...
Tell the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to Protect our Water
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will hold a hearing on the bill that would exempt toxic aerial fire retardant from the Clean Water Act on Wednesday, Jan. 28. This is a significant hearing that will directly impact the progress of this bill. We...
Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest
The administrative history of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest is complex, including large multi-million acre forest reserves created in the late 1800s that were parceled in the 1900s into national parks (North Cascades and Rainier) and national forests (Mt....
The 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act
The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 (HFRA) establishes a legal framework ostensibly designed to protect communities and watersheds from catastrophic wildfire. The legislation authorizes “hazardous fuels reduction projects” across National Forest and BLM lands....
Retardant Suspected in Polluted Wells
During New Mexico’s largest-ever wildfire — the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, slurry bombers made nearly 2,500 retardant drops, primarily Phos-Chek, to combat the blaze. Phos-Chek is the bright red fire retardant featured on news reels to convey a visually...
Implore Your Senators to Oppose HR 3898
The fire retardant lobby wants Congress to amend the Clean Water Act to allow unregulated toxic heavy metal pollutants in fire retardant to be dumped into our nation’s streams and rivers. Most of our nation’s drinking water supplies come from these water sources. If...
Incentivizing Fire-Safe Development
Citing “short-sighted fire suppression policies and the rapid influx of people and development in hazardous regions,” Meghan Hodges argues for incentivizing wildfire-safe developments through fire-hazard mapping coupled with fire-adapted building codes and robust code...
Forest Legacy Management Flexibility Bill
Introduced by California Congressmen John Garamendi (D) and Ken Calvert (R), the Forest Legacy Management Flexibility Bill (H.R.2771) “would give states the option to designate accredited, nonprofit land trusts to hold conservation easements purchased with federal...
Wolves and Forest Health
by Delia Malone Wolves represent wilderness. Colonizers viewed wilderness as a frontier to be conquered and converted into a landscape that mirrored Europe. This meant that wolves had to go. So, as Michael Robinson writes in Predatory Bureaucracy, wolves were killed...