The Wild Line: Wildfire, Broken Promises and Reconciliation

Unknown Speaker 0:00 The following is a production of wild idea media. Bill Hodge 0:06 Welcome to the wild line, where land stories are the lead stories. This is our report for June 20, 2025 last week, right after we finished recording the wild line, the White House issued the following Executive Order empowering common sense wildfire prevention and response, an order that, while seemingly consolidates wildland firefighting into a new entity, maybe actually doesn't change much of what is already happening in the wildland firefighting world. Here's Bill Avey, retired long tenured Forest Supervisor and former acting National Fire director for United States Forest Service, Speaker 1 0:41 the biggest thing about the executive order that creates challenges is the timing. We're right now moving into a very active part of what appears to be a very active fire year. If you look at the Predictive Services map across the entire northern tier and California of the country, we're expecting an above average fire behavior, and what we're seeing right now is fires burning in heavy fuels in a way that they don't normally do that until late July or August. So the fact they've gave the leadership of the agencies 90 days to figure it out. It's the worst 90 days of time they could have picked to roll this out. Now, as far as the order itself, what it called for in section two, it talked about streamlining process, processes, consolidating budgets as appropriate, as appropriate. Excuse me, streamlining processes. That's not all bad, but a lot of that's already being done. And so it just calls on the agencies to do, in many ways, what they've already been doing. I think the issue is, I think people have already done that to the extent where it was not real problematic to do. And we'll see where this goes. But again, they picked the busiest 90 days they could pick to drop this on people, Bill Hodge 2:00 while the executive order from the White House is limited to promoting activities mostly already in place in some spots across the country, there is a substantial shift in wildfire response strategies from the hill with the fit for purpose wildfire readiness Act introduced back in February by Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican from Montana and Alex Padilla Democrat, from California, this bill does force the creation of a new agency within the Department of Interior to be called the National wildland firefighting service, and would sweep up significant funds from the already drained United States Forest Service budget. Again, here's Bill Avey, Speaker 1 2:39 the fit for purpose act. Look, unfortunately, we cannot suppress our way out of the fire situation we're in today. Climate change has taken that option off the table. We're paying the price for years of fire suppression and not enough forward thinking mitigation efforts, right? Both mechanical treatment and prescribed burning, the fit for purpose Act would take the organization that has the largest amount of firefighters, the Forest Service, which puts on the table, traditionally about 11,572 primary firefighters, plus the majority of the support folks that aren't red, that aren't primary firefighters, but go out as secondary firefighters or in support functions, they would take the primary piece of that organization away, give it to the Department of Interior, which has a far smaller organization. It puts about 6000 firefighters on the table nationally. In addition, the Forest Service, not only provides the majority of folks that support large wildfires that well, how would you make that work? Are you going to move all of them over and away from their day jobs in the Forest Service? Are you going to hire a bunch of extra people to do that, which would cost even more money? But the other thing it doesn't speak to is a forest service runs about 70% of fire contracting all the large aviation contracts, with the exception of the ones run by the state, the helicopter contracts, all of the camp crews, all of the contract fire crews, contract fire engines, those are all done by the Forest Service. So again, you're you're taking the agency that has the majority of the resources, and you're taking those resources away from that agency and moving them to an interior which has a far smaller footprint and small, far smaller organizational operation and experience. And then finally, the other piece I have, while I do support, and I think we do need to look at efforts to continually make organizations more efficient. The fit for purpose. Act does not speak at all to fire mitigation. If you really want to make a difference in in the fire situation, we have we need to spend more money up front and more efforts in fire mitigation. Do things like the force. Service strategy, wildfire crisis strategy of 2020, that came out with do much more prescribed burning up front, much more mechanical treatment, not just timber sales, but mechanical treatments for fuels. You cannot divorce fire management from the land management, because fire is part of the land. These lands, particularly in the West, evolved with fire and if you think you know, you're going to set up this big suppression force that's actually taking us backwards, and it's going to be far more expensive and far less effective. Bill Hodge 5:31 The actions required in this bill demonstrates a disconnect between centuries of fire suppression leading to fuel buildup and today's growing populations within the wildland urban interface, they also decouple lowering catastrophic wildfire risk through active restoration work by emphasizing an industrialized firefighting service. It should be noted that Senator Sheehy started a company that holds significant contracts within the wildland firefighting world for Aviation Services. He did step down as CEO of Bridger aerospace once he was sworn in as a US senator back in January, the United States broke another agreement with tribal nations last week when the Trump administration withdrew from a plan to help save salmon populations in the Columbia River Basin. The agreement, which was reached during the Biden administration, was over a decade in the making and focused on providing the resources and framework for tribal nations to address the loss of life sustaining salmon runs in the basin. The agreement was also meant to resolve broken treaties and subsequent lawsuits involving 15 recognized tribes of the Pacific Northwest and their rights to the fish on and off tribal lands. While the agreement had not resolved an effort to remove four dams on the Lower Snake River to restore fish habitat, the Trump action stated that the agreement set up their removal of dams, something the administration opposes. The Broken agreement also cuts tribal nations out of access to investments in renewable energy programs. Quote, this action tries to hide from the truth. The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now, stated Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce tribe, people from across the Northwest know this, and the people across the nation have supported us in a vision for preventing salmon extinction that would at the same time create a stronger and better future for the northwest. This remains the shared vision of the states of Washington and Oregon and the Yakima Umatilla Warm Springs and Nez Perce tribes, as set out in our Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. It is a vision that we believe is supported publicly or privately by most people in the Northwest, and it is a vision underlaid by the treaties of our Northwest tribes, by the US Constitution that protects those treaties, and by the Federal statutes enacted by Congress to protect salmon and other species from extinction. End quote on next week's episode of the wild idea, we explore the intersection of tribal law and tribal sovereignty and public land law with Monty mills and Martin Nye, look for that episode on Tuesday. We continue following the budget reconciliation process and work on that bill in the Senate. While it has been widely reported that Senator Mike Lee drove a 3.2 million acre sell off plan for public lands through his chair role on the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee. What has just surfaced is just how many acres the bill actually puts at risk. Here's Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney and federal policy director for wild Montana. Speaker 2 8:32 I mean, certainly selling off land. Once you sell it, it's gone. And so that is that is rightfully incredibly important. But you know what came out of Senate ENR? It's, it's a lot a lot of pages, which means there's a lot of other bad stuff in there, including some really aggressive, egregious, just complete giveaways to oil and gas companies, fossil fuel companies that has nothing to do with energy security, has nothing to do with affordable energy, has nothing to do with jobs. It is all about control, and it's about letting private companies control our public lands for their private corporate benefit. So in the on the Senate side, there's a couple, a couple provisions. One of them would would require mandatory quarterly lease sales. It takes away the Secretary's discretionary authority that the Secretary has had since 1920 in the mineral Leasing Act to to decide if it is appropriate to hold a quarterly lease sale in a particular state. It takes that discretion away and says that there must be quarterly lease lease sales in states with lands that have been deemed available for leasing. That does not mean that those lands are suitable for leasing. That does not mean that those lands have. Or any amount of commercially available oil and gas resources. It just means that at one point in a resource management plan, for example, the BLM basically went, well, this isn't a wilderness area, this isn't a wildlife refuge, so I guess technically, it's available for leasing, but we'll, we'll decide later on down the road, and this bill would would take that, take that authority away. It also takes away any sort of notice requirement for private landowners in Split estate situations where there's a, like, a certain amount of a federal mineral estate and private held surface estate in like, a particular area, which is like, it's a pretty big encroachment on private property rights that a company doesn't even have to give notice to A rancher that they want to drill in this area, that they have a lease in this area, that will, you know, drastically inform how the surface land is managed to facilitate this property right to drill. And it definitely raises concerns about the use of eminent domain, about, if you know, if energy dominance is the name of the game, if we're in this energy emergency, then that would create a situation where the government may be able to seize, seize interest, seize lands, to to facilitate this, this emergency, which is super, super troubling. And then another provision in the Senate Bill is it could not be more antithetical to raising revenue, which is the whole point of the budget bill is to lower the federal royalty rate on production of oil and gas on federal leases, lower that back down to 12.5% which is what it was in 1920 when the federal government first started regulating oil and gas as its own industry. And it stayed that way until two years ago, in 2022 with the inflation Reduction Act, and that bill finally brought that royalty rate up to like a much more competitive market rate of 16.67% which is what the state of Montana charges for production on state leases. And it's actually about half of what other states, like Texas charge, which can be 25% but for some, for some reason, that doesn't make any any sense to me, the Senate wants to reduce that royalty rate, which is a pretty quick way to like not raise any revenue Bill Hodge 12:58 the full court press put on by Mike Lee and others to press public lands solely for energy dominance. May not just be selling off our public estate, but selling out our public estate as well. That is the wild line for June 20, 2025 next Tuesday on the next release of the wild idea podcast, we talk about the CO evolution of American Tribal Law and US public land law with two scholars in the field, Martin Nye from the University of Montana and Monty Mills from the University of Washington. And next Friday, we will be back with another edition of The Wild line, until then act up and run wild. Speaker 3 13:35 The wild line is a production of wild idea media production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkoshevsky at daypac Digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skeehan. The executive producer is Laura Hodge. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you Transcribed by https://otter.ai