WILDFIRES LOOK TO BE A NEW NORMAL IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE. 2/4: Fix America’s Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests and Tackle the Wildfire Crisis. Holly Fretwell, Jonathan Wood
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
1930
https://www.aol.com/news/europe-wildfires-map-where-summer-142925461.html
https://www.perc.org/2021/04/12/fix-americas-forests-reforms-to-restore-national-forests-and-tackle-the-wildfire-crisis/
Across the West, more than 10 million acres burned in 2020—a record in modern history. These fires consumed more than 17,500 structures and more than $3.5 billion in firefighting costs.Tragically, dozens of lives were lost, and many more people were displaced by evacuation orders. Fires released smoke that degraded air quality nearby and hundreds of miles away. They also destroyed wildlife habitat, including for imperiled species, and the fires’ aftereffects will soon lead to erosion that harms water quality in local watersheds.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:11.4 | This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network. |
| 0:14.0 | Holly Fretwell and her colleague Jonathan Wood published Fix America's Forests, |
| 0:18.2 | reforms to restore national forests and tackle the wildfire crisis from the |
| 0:22.7 | property, environmental research center of Bozeman, Montana. We've established that we have |
| 0:27.5 | drivers for creating wildfires, which get in the news. But more to the point, forests are |
| 0:33.7 | not healthy that are dense. There are other contributing factors besides the sun and the water and mother nature. |
| 0:40.8 | The first one is that there seem to be limitations on what you can and can't do with forests. |
| 0:47.4 | I'm not exactly sure what all of this means, except for the fact that there are national laws that limit common-sensical |
| 0:56.1 | forestry. |
| 0:57.4 | Holly, you mentioned the one that is overwhelming, which is NEPA. |
| 1:01.3 | What is NEPA? |
| 1:02.4 | What does it mean for the forest? |
| 1:04.4 | NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, and what NEPA does is it actually requires |
| 1:09.5 | the agency to go through various steps in 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. |
| 1:24.8 | And so NEPA in and of itself is a fine lawn. It's something |
| 1:28.4 | that's really important. We want to make sure that when we're out there managing our forests or |
| 1:32.1 | other federal lands, that we are considering the environmental impacts of those landscapes. |
| 1:36.1 | What's interesting about NEPA is it also opens the door for red tape and litigation. |
| 1:40.7 | 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. |
| 1:47.7 | 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 restoration projects that are litigated are here in my region, in region one. |
| 2:03.7 | California, region five, gets about 30% of all the forest restoration cases that are litigated. |
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