Ground Truth
Air Force Training Proposal Draws Criticism
A U.S. Air Force proposal to expand training flights over New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, including over designated wilderness areas, has drawn a strong negative reaction from local residents who fear the flights would disrupt the region’s tranquility and drive...
Global Supertanker Services Wins Protest Against Forest Service
The owners of a 747 passenger jet retrofitted to drop retardant and water on wildfires have won an appeal claiming the Forest Service has no basis for limiting the size of firefighting aircraft. In a decision issued last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office...
States Control Wildlife on Federal Land, Right? Think Again.
An exhaustive law review article that was commissioned by the Forest Service refutes the widely held belief that states control wildlife within their borders and federal land managers control only the habitat. The article, titled Fish and Wildlife Management On...
House Approves Legislation Exempting Logging Projects from Environmental Laws
The House of Representatives yesterday approved a bill that would remove the requirement that the Forest Service and other federal agencies undertake thorough environmental reviews before sanctioning logging projects as large as 30,000 acres. HR 2936, the Resilient...
Small-Town Newspaper Gets It Right
A pitched battle is underway over how to interpret this summer’s wildfires on federal lands, which wafted thick layers of smoke into urbanized areas around the West. How that battle ends will have serious implications for how our public lands are managed in the years...
Study: Murrelet Decline Continues
Marbled murrelets, the diminutive seabirds that fly inland to lay eggs high in the crooks of old-growth Northwest forests, will likely go extinct in Oregon in coming years if no action is taken to help them, according to the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. A...
Drone Oversight
Fall Creek flows through the Cascade Mountain foothills in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. It’s a lovely stream and a popular getaway for residents of nearby Eugene, where FSEEE is headquartered. On August 10, lightning sparked a fire just north of Fall Creek....
Activists Outline Science of Wildfires to Senate
This has been a notable year for wildfires, with smoke clogging urban areas of the West and the federal government spending well over $2 billion trying to stop the flames. Homes—and lives—have been lost. As the fires burned, a narrative galvanized: Decades of fire...
Battle Over Wolf Creek Continues
A three-decade battle over an upscale resort community that a Texas billionaire wants to build high in the Colorado Rockies isn’t over yet. B.J. “Red” McCombs has long sought permission to construct the massive Village at Wolf Creek development at the base of the Wolf...
Ousted Montana District Ranger Gets His Post Back
A Forest Service district ranger in Montana who had been reassigned after tussling with local landowners over access to national forest land will get his job back after an internal review, according to a report in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Alex Sienkiewicz had...
Videos Show Aftermath of “Catastrophic” Wildfire
On September 26, federal firefighting managers boarded a helicopter and embarked on a flyover of the Chetco Bar Fire in southwestern Oregon, which at one point this summer was considered the top-priority wildfire in the nation. The fire, which burned nearly 200,000...
Go Ahead: Move the Forest Service to Interior
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has made no secret of his desire to acquire the U.S. Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture. Zinke’s zeal for restoring the Forest Service to Interior, where during its earliest years it resided, earned him a scolding from...
Bad Bills Abound
The first months of the Trump administration brought plenty of setbacks for conservationists. There was Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposal to scale back national monument designations. A budget plan calling for double-digit cuts to land-management agencies. A...
“Gardening” Our Forests Not the Answer
This summer was exceptionally hot and dry throughout much of the West, and those conditions, unsurprisingly, led to an abundance of wildfires. More than 8.5 million acres have burned across the nation, well above the 10-year annual average of about 5.8 million acres....
Senator Calls Out Errors in National Monument Report
The Trump administration’s plan to roll back national monument designations was blasted this week by New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, who, during a congressional hearing, pointed out several factual errors in a report issued by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Heinrich,...
FSEEE Challenges Navy War Games
FSEEE has filed a lawsuit challenging the Forest Service’s approval of a Navy plan to conduct electronic warfare training on the Olympic National Forest in Washington state. Earlier this summer, Olympic National Forest officials gave the Navy a special-use permit to...
Unleashing the SuperTanker?
Global SuperTanker Services, LLC, a subsidiary of a Connecticut equities firm, says it has what it takes to put out wildfires. The company owns the largest firefighting aircraft on the planet, a retrofitted Boeing 747 that can dump huge quantities of fire retardant,...
Park Service to Cull Grand Canyon Bison
More than a century ago, ranchers introduced bison to the Kaibab Plateau of northern Arizona, hoping they would crossbreed with their cattle. A century later, descendants of those bison have wandered from the Kaibab National Forest, where their numbers were held in...
FSEEE: Retardant Doesn’t Put Out Wildfires
For the past several days, smoke has engulfed much of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, prompting residents to don facemasks and look longingly at forecasts for signs of cooler weather and cleansing winds. An active fire season in the state, and across much of the West, has...
Conservationists Challenge Pipeline Plan
A coalition of conservation groups is challenging a draft Forest Service decision to allow a Virginia energy company to build a $5 billion, 600-mile-long natural gas pipeline that would cross two national forests. The Forest Service issued its draft decision in July....
FSEEE Calls Out Lawmaker for Backing Bad Bill
There’s certainly no shortage of bad bills being considered in Congress right now. This is a dangerous time for the environment, with anti-conservation forces ascendant in both chambers of Congress and in the White House. We’re focusing right now on one particularly...