I'm John Bachelor.

I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network,

colleague Freckwell, and her colleague Jonathan Wood published Fix America's

forests, reforms to restore national forests and tackle the wildfire crisis.

From the Property environment and research

center of Bozeman, Montana. We've established that we have a drivers for

creating wildfires which get in the news, but more to the point, forests are not healthy that are dense.

There are other contributing factors besides the sun and the water and mother nature.

The first one is that there seem to be limitations on what you can and can't do with forests.

I'm not exactly sure what all of this means except for the fact that there are national laws that limit common

sensical forestry.

Holly you mentioned the one that is overwhelming which is NEPA. What is NEA? What does it mean for the force?

NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act and what NEPA does is it actually requires

the agency to go through various steps and a process to ensure that the actions that they're doing

are not going to have a major environmental impact and that if they do we've examined what

that impact is and we've accepted some of the different alternatives that we could actually think about.

And so NEPA in and of itself is a fine law and that's something that's really important.

We want to make sure that when we're out there managing our forests or other federal lands that we are

considering the environmental impacts of those landscapes. What's interesting

about NEPA is it also opens the door for red tape and litigation and one of the

things that we found as we were working through this report is that NEPA is much more problematic in some regions than it is in other regions.

So if you're up here in Montana, that's what's called Region 1 for the Forest Service, we get the majority, well, we get something like 40% of all forest

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