Ground Truth Blog
The push is on to strip big trees from our national forests
by Mitch Friedman, Writers on the Range It didn’t get much notice, but President Trump has turbocharged logging on public lands in ways that are likely to increase dangerous wildfire. Inside the “Big Beautiful Bill” that became law this summer, a provision directs the...
Revenue-Driven Wildlife Management
As reported by The Colorado Sun, wild turkeys are thriving in the eastern half of Colorado to the point of becoming a nuisance in towns and cities. Merriam’s turkeys are native to the foothills and mountains of Colorado, but the population explosion is occurring among...
Vegetation Near Homes — Not Always a Fire Risk
Researchers Max Moritz and Luca Carmignani have penned an article raising concerns about a California plan to ban plants within 5 feet of homes for wildfire safety. “As scientists who study how vegetation ignites and burns, we recognize that well-maintained plants and...
Braving the Road
The Out-sized Impacts of Roadways on Plants and Animals and What We Can Do to Reconnect Nature by Ben Goldfarb The Kicking Horse Valley, a canyon tucked into Canada’s Yoho National Park, is a challenging place to be an elk. A herd of around two dozen migratory elk...
The Big Blowup and its Lasting Legacy
Following a fire season that started in April and grew worse during a summer of drought conditions, hurricane-force winds battered Idaho, Montana, and Washington on Aug. 20, 1910. The winds breathed new life into small and smoldering fires across the Northern Rockies....
Not for Sale
This year, the American people made their values unmistakably clear: our public lands are not for sale. In an era when billionaires treat mountaintops like private playgrounds and corporations eye our forests for profit, one might wonder whether the notion of land...
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest
At 3.36 million acres, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge is Montana’s largest national forest. The Forest provides habitat for 355 species of birds, including bald eagles, sandhill cranes, golden eagles, and trumpeter swans, the largest waterfowl in North America. President...
Trump Orders Consolidation of Fire Agencies
Citing “the devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires,” President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14308 on June 12, 2025, mandating the consolidation of federal firefighting under a single agency. Trump’s EO echoes his "Big, Beautiful Budget"...
Tell Your Senators to Oppose S.B.1672
Senate Bill 1672 targets our hard-won legal victories. If signed into law, the bill would exempt aerial fire retardant from the Clean Water Act. Just last year, USC scientists proved that retardant is toxic waste containing cadmium, vanadium, chromium, and other heavy...
Daily Montanan: ‘Lawsuit Filed in Missoula Over Toxic Metals Found in Aerial Fire Retardant’
Jordan Hansen, writing for The Daily Montanan, was the first to report on FSEEE's latest aerial fire retardant lawsuit. Hansen acknowledges the USC study that provides the scientific basis for he lawsuit. "A study by the University of Southern California estimates...
FSEEE Files Lawsuit Over Heavy Metals in Fire Retardant
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics filed another federal lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service over the agency's use of aerial fire retardant on May 7. In this latest complaint, FSEEE alleges that the Forest Service's use of fire retardant containing...
Respecting the Role of Dead Trees in the Forest
Dead trees have become a frequent target of the Forest Service in the years since the agency was forced to stop allowing clear-cut logging of old-growth trees. Either labeled as “hazard trees” or subject to “salvage logging,” dead trees have been identified by the...