Matt Weiner, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Megafire Action, wants to bring some urgency back. This week, the organization launched a six-figure ad campaign in Washington, D.C., aimed at spurring senators to get back to working on wildfire resilience and forestry reform. Though the bill’s approach is divisive — the House version drew initial pushback from more than 100 environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters, for opening up large tracts of federal forest to logging, among other concerns — Weiner told me “there’s no huge substantive holdup in the Senate that is keeping it from getting to 60 votes.”
I caught up with Weiner this week to learn more about where things stand with the Fix Our Forests Act and talk through some of the bill’s more controversial regulatory rollbacks. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Catch our readers up: Why the Fix Our Forests Act, and why now?
We’re looking at a generational opportunity to change the way we do land management. This is the most significant change Congress has considered since the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and maybe even since the original National Forest Act.
The smoke impacts of wildfires are killing more people than the flames. Wildfires are the most significant driver of PM 2.5 emissions growth in the country right now. The clean air community has done a fantastic job of reducing industrial emissions of PM 2.5, which has had real public health impacts, but those gains are in danger of vanishing because of the growth of wildfire smoke exposure.
Then there’s the climate. If you care about carbon emissions, this is a huge opportunity at a time when a lot of other climate issues seem to be on the backburner. The 2020 fire season in California — a particularly bad year — released enough carbon to undo 20 years of the state’s emissions reduction progress. The 2023 Canadian wildfires, if treated as a country, would have been the third-largest emitter in the world that year. And if you start thinking about Alaska and the Boreal burning in the way the West has been burning, it could potentially be game over for the climate. It’s important that people understand that this is an existential climate issue and that we have an opportunity to make progress in a bipartisan way.
You and I have chatted before — we first spoke about the Fix Our Forests Act almost a year ago, now. What’s happened in the past 12 months with the bill?
The bill passed the House right after the Los Angeles fires. The last time we spoke [in October 2024], the bill had passed the House in the previous Congress with a bipartisan margin. But this time, it got a much bigger bipartisan show of support: 64 Democrats and all the Republicans in the House.
The bill saw some changes and improvements to focus on the immediate needs in Los Angeles County [after the January 2025 fires] — things like improving the ability of a city like Los Angeles to gain access to Community Wildfire Defense Grant funding and improvements to the Wildfire Intelligence Center targeted at making sure it plays a role in helping local governments make decisions on where to place assets before a high risk event.
Then the bill went to the Senate, but instead of moving the House bill through, a group of senators came together to write a bipartisan version with some changes. Senator Curtis from Utah was the lead, along with Senators Padilla, Hickenlooper, and Sheehy. Their version included changes to the litigation section from the House bill, which had raised concerns among a lot of environmental organizations, as well as modifications to the permitting section. That earned the bill the support of more environmental organizations than the version from the House — they have the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation on board, as well as a lot of local organizations and wildfire groups like the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience.
But then a lot of the oxygen in the Senate was taken up by the reconciliation package. That put a pause on things through the August recess, and now they’re looking to hopefully mark up the bill during the October work period. We’re very optimistic about being able to get floor time. We think there’s a clear path to 60 votes in the Senate for this bill, and if there’s a good, constructive markup, it could be much more than that. There’s no substantive holdup as much as there is the ever-present fear of stasis and losing momentum. That’s why we launched an ad campaign with an eye toward building the urgency back up.
How did the ad campaign come together?
The idea was that this is a bipartisan issue, so where is the support? We didn’t need to launch a big persuasion campaign; we needed to highlight the absurdity of the fact that, eight months after Los Angeles, we still haven’t had any meaningful action from Congress. There is an opportunity before them that would make a big difference in wildfire policy writ large.
I’m interested in your focus on using “state-of-the-art science” and “new and innovative technologies” to address wildfires and forest health. What have you seen in this space that has made you excited?
The bill is about improving the planning and implementation of wildfire policy — especially mitigation work like treatment projects, but also in the built environment. A big cornerstone of that would be the creation of a new Wildfire Intelligence Center, which would use the most advanced technology to understand what our risk profile is on the ground across landscapes and jurisdictions. Right now, there is no one entity in government responsible for taking a comprehensive look at risk across landscapes, what we’re doing on the ground, and how that buys down risk.
At the same time, one of the things we’re negotiating is making sure that the Forest Service and the Department of Interior are positioned to work with some of the companies doing advanced modeling, detection, and tracking work — as opposed to having the government try to build its own clunky system. We’ve modeled it after successful efforts elsewhere in government, such as the Defense Innovation Unit and other Department of Defense and NASA programs that have been great at harnessing private sector innovation for government use. There’s also a new pilot program in the bill, in Section 303, that would create a pathway for the Forest Service to start identifying and piloting new technologies and give them a path to scale across the agency if they find that it helps them do the job better, faster, and cheaper.
The timber industry has collaborated with the Forest Service on fire suppression since the 1920s. In the decades since, “forest management” has at times been used as a euphemism for industry-friendly practices like tree thinning, which many ecologists say would allow invasive species and brush to flourish, and would actually worsen wildfires. How would cutting the red tape around “vegetation management activities” not be a handout to the timber industry?
We all know that the best tool for mitigation is good fire, prescribed fire, beneficial fire, and — where appropriate — managed fire, as well. Unfortunately, because we’ve taken fire out of these landscapes, forested landscapes in particular are so overgrown that you couldn’t introduce good fire even if you wanted to. So mechanical thinning has to be a part of this.
One of the tensions here is that the timber industry wants merchantable timber. They want the big trees, and in a lot of cases, those are the ones we want to keep in the ground with these projects. What we’re focused on is invasive species, overgrown areas, and dead trees from morbidity events like recent droughts so that we can reintroduce good fire at scale. If we all let it burn, like some have proposed, you’d end up with hundreds of thousands of acres of landscape burning at a time, like we saw in the [2021] Caldor fire, where nothing will grow back in a way we recognize for at least decades — and given climate change, maybe not ever.
It’s important to make sure that we don’t go back to the timber wars [of the 1980s and 1990s between environmentalists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest], but at the same time, we need to recognize that the biggest threat to our forests right now is catastrophic fire, not the timber industry. We want to deal with the threat at hand and make sure the pendulum that swung during the timber wars — for very good reason — against the timber industry comes back a little, but doesn’t swing too far in the wrong direction, either. The Senate bill strikes the right balance there.
A number of major environmental groups initially came out in opposition to the Fix Our Forests Act over numerous concerns, including that it erodes Endangered Species Act protections by exempting the Forest Service and BLM from the requirement to adjust land management policies as new information about how projects could affect threatened species arises. What is the other side of this tradeoff? How would limiting the consultation requirement advance the goal of reducing wildfires?
The biggest challenge right now is that, because of all of the regulatory hurdles, it can take upwards of a thousand days to get a project off the ground anywhere in the country. One great example of that is in the Angeles National Forest. They announced a fuel break maintenance strategy in 2020, but they were not able to get the requisite approvals until the start of December 2024. It took four years — and then the last of the permits that were most relevant to Altadena didn’t get approved until March, two months after the fire. There are very real consequences to this kind of delay, both for the environment and for human health and safety, that need to be taken into account.
If you take a step back and look at the bill, the main tool that it uses is not broad NEPA exemptions or writ-large changes in the law. It utilizes categorical exclusions, a method that has been used for energy projects in other areas and is increasingly sought after to advance targeted projects with public benefits.
One great example is the Tahoe categorical exclusion, on which a significant portion of this bill is based. It was a 10,000-acre CE created in 2016, which allowed for work that protected communities and ecosystems and got good fire on the ground. It’s work that directly saved South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor Fire. But one of the challenges right now is that the current level for CE is 3,000 acres, and when we’re talking about landscapes in forests that are hundreds of thousands of miles big and a fireshed that nationwide is 50 million acres, then 3,000 acres is not enough for it to be worth it for the Forest Service and Park Service and DOI officials to go through the CE process — which takes six months and is very rigorous.
But we also wanted to show restraint here for environmental purposes. We wanted to make sure that this was as targeted as it needed to be, and not overly expansive.
Courtesy of Spiritus
Courtesy of Spiritus
