I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network. It's great pleasure to speak to Holly Fretwell with her colleague Jonathan Wood, publishing Fix America's Forest, Reforms to Restore National Forest, and

tackle the Wildfire Crisis.

We've touched on these eight recommendations in part, but I want to go through them for

Holly to explain more completely.

Holly, you encourage collaboration.

We've just talked about that, the Good Neighbor Act, avoiding analysis paralysis.

I like that.

What does it mean, Holly?

Well, analysis paralysis is one of those terms like the Gordian knot that our former chief of the Forest Service, several of them have come up with in the sense of there are so many layered regulations that overlap each other that make it really

difficult to get anything done on the ground.

We have the NEPA.

We have the Clean Air Act.

We have the Endangered Species Act.

We have the National Forest Management Act.

We have the Wilderness Act.

All these different laws have to be abided by the agency.

And by the time you get done trying to work your way through that, you're kind of tied

in a knot, and that's where the Gordian knot comes from. But there are things that we can do to reduce that.

And I think if you take all of our recommendations and you sum them up, what we're trying to

say is, you know what, we really just need to lower the transaction costs so that we can actually

get something done on the ground, and it's going to take some collaborative groups, it's going to take some public-private partnerships, and it's going to take the ability for

the Forest Service to have more flexibility with their contracts so that they can be longer,

...