This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 8th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Western wildfires rage, the feds get involved to put it out.

But the U.S. Forest Service is largely just a firefighting service and forest management is at best a second tier priority.

Jonathan Wood of the Property and Environment Research Center says litigation often prevents the kind of management

that would protect habitats and prevent the most destructive fires.

We spoke last week.

In the West, people deal with fires in a way that out east here, we don't really have to.

Fires are much easier to put out in the east than they are in the west, and the federal

government obviously owns a vast chunk of the 13 Western states.

And so when you have federal management,

state management of forests, and the salience of a fire is raging right now and we have to put it out.

Give us just a picture of the lay of the land of what that regulatory environment looks like.

Yeah, it's a very serious problem. So right now we have

about 80 million acres of Western forests that are in need and restoration, but we're

not doing anything like the scale needed to address that problem. And the reason why is that if you want to do any work on the forest you have to go through an extensive

environmental review process that may take years anyone can object and anyone can in fact sue you. And so you see project

for project especially the ambitious projects that might actually do something

to reduce wildfire risk are constantly locked up in bureaucratic red tape and

litigation risk so that a project that everyone agree almost everyone agrees

makes sense may take a decade or more just to get through the paperwork part.

All right, so if that's the backdrop and we understand that when there's a fire raging,

...