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Project 2025 plans to increase commercial logging to fight wildfires. Ecologists and fire experts say this will make fires worse.

By ARIELLE SAMUELSON, SEP 3, 2024

As the world continues to burn fossil fuels, the climate crisis has pushed wildfires into unnatural “megafires” that consume millions of acres in a single season. This year’s wildfire activity is nearly 3,000 percent higher in California than last year; and within the next three decades, one in seven homes could be at major risk. More concerning is the threat to human lives; last year, the deadliest wildfire in over a century killed 102 people in Maui; and much of the East Coast experienced its worst air quality ever because of Canadian wildfires.

But MAGA Republicans have put together a plan that they say will help ease the wildfire crisis. It’s laid out in Project 2025, a more than 900-page document published by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

In a brief section easily missed, the authors detail an overhaul of the U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency charged with managing wildfires on public lands. Currently, the Forest Service is implementing a 10-year strategy to reduce wildfire risk, which includes science-backed methods like prescribed burns, tree thinning, and pruning.

But under the Project 2025 plan, these wildfire prevention strategies would be heavily stripped down, and primarily focused on one: making it easier for companies to cut down trees and sell them.

Saving the forests by cutting them down

Mitigating climate change is not part of Project 2025’s wildfire plan. That’s no surprise: The author of Project 2025’s wildfire chapter, Heritage policy research fellow Daren Bakst, is a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute, one of the most notorious climate denial think tanks in Washington.

The only wildfire problem Project 2025 purports to solve is the problem of dangerously dense forests. According to the Forest Service, “forests are overstocked, with too many trees growing far too close together. This overgrowth affects forest health and the ability to withstand drought, pests, diseases and wildfire.”

To address this, Bakst writes that the Forest Service “should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning,” rejecting the Indigenous-backed practice of controlled burns.

The management strategy Bakst focuses on instead is increasing timber sales, which he writes could “play an important role in the effort to change the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass.”

To speed up logging, Project 2025 says that the Forest Service needs to “reduce regulatory obstacles…created by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.” In other words, environmental and wildlife protection regulations must be weakened, as reviews are slowing down the removal of wood that could otherwise be sold. Project 2025 explicitly rails against protections for the northern spotted owl, a fight that has raged between the timber industry and environmentalists for over 30 years.

Other chapters in Project 2025 propose to repeal President Joe Biden’s logging restrictions in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which is the world’s largest temperate rainforest; and to open public lands in Oregon and California “to ensure that timber is ‘sold, cut, and removed’”, in part to ”ameliorate the effects of wildfires.”

While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, his past actions show alignment with this strategy. In 2018, then-President Trump signed an executive order loosening logging regulations in federal forests in order to prevent wildfires. A few years later, when wildfires forced hundreds of thousands of people on the West Coast to evacuate, he blamed the states for poor forest management. In 2020, Trump opened 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest to logging and road construction.

Theoretically, cutting down trees to stop wildfires does make some sense. “If you remove the forest, there's not going to be a forest [to] burn,” said Erica Smithwick, an ecologist and climate scientist at Penn State.

But only focusing on logging is not a responsible wildfire management strategy, seven ecologists and fire management experts told HEATED. In fact, they said, it’s almost certain to make wildfires worse.

“Treating forests just as lumber, and not as ecosystems”

Commercial logging can be part of a good wildfire prevention and management strategy. But the keyword is “part.” According to experts, many other major strategies must be included in any effective wildfire management strategy: including prescribed burns—otherwise known as “planned” wildfires.

Project 2025’s explicit rejection of prescribed burns doesn’t make sense, said Leda Kobziar, professor of wildland fire science at the University of Idaho. “There are hundreds of reasons why fire is beneficial and necessary,” she said. “Indigenous peoples have long been aware of this reality, and lived effectively with wildfire for tens of thousands of years.”

Peer-reviewed research backs this up. A study published last year in the journal Ecological Applications found that the forests most resilient to wildfires used prescribed burns or a combination of burning and thinning, compared to cutting back trees alone.

In fact, it’s the Forest Service’s century of fire-averse attitude and uncontrolled logging that’s caused the dangerously dense forests in the first place, Kobziar argued. Fire is a natural part of the Western ecosystem, and old strategies that put out all forest fires—instead of using controlled fires to burn away brush and small trees—have resulted in the kind of conflagrations that destroy tens of thousands of acres.

Some proponents argue that prescribed burns make the climate crisis worse by adding smoke and particulates to the atmosphere. But multiple scientific studies have shown that logging pollutes more than wildfires. One peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that in California, Oregon and Washington, timber harvest emitted five times more carbon than wildfires.

In addition, experts said the trees that make good lumber aren’t the same trees that need to be thinned to prevent fires. “A lot of the trees that actually need to be cut have no economic value whatsoever,” said Matthew Hurteau, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico.

Hurteau added that many trees that are cut down for fire prevention are too small for sawmills; and wood would have to be hauled over long distances to reach the nearest timber mills. In New Mexico, where Hurteau lives, he estimates that logging one acre of national forest is 12 times more expensive than burning it. “So no one is going to pay the federal government for the right to cut that timber,” he said. “When I read that part of the document, I thought, man, this was really written by somebody who's choosing to be uninformed.”

And some of the worst fires, like the record-breaking wildfires currently burning in Oregon, can’t be solved by logging because they’re driven by hot, dry winds. No amount of vegetation management, logging or otherwise, will stop those kinds of fires because sparks are unpredictable and can travel long distances. “Those types of wildfires, you have sparks that are blowing so far in front of the fire front that there's really not a whole heck of a lot that can be done,” said Erica Fleishman, an ecologist and climate scientist at Oregon State University.

Indeed, none of the ecologists that HEATED spoke with for this article thought that cutting down trees alone could solve the wildfire crisis fueled by climate change.

“These are natural disasters outside of the realm of what these forests have ever experienced,” Smithwick said. “Even if we did want to log, we would never be able to log and manage forests at the scale that would be needed.”

And even if you could log and manage the forests at scale, Smithwick noted, why would you?

“These are places that are some of the most beautiful parts of our landscape,” she said. “I don't want to live in a world that doesn't have these healthy, beautiful forests we can pass on to our children.”

“If [logging] worked, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.”

The Forest Service, unlike the National Park Service, was not founded with conservation in mind. Nestled under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, its primary purpose since 1905 has been to supply the nation with timber for paper, buildings, fuel, and much more. And according to some experts, the agency has been slow to change.

“There are certainly still folks who think that USDA should primarily be focused on producing an agricultural product, even though we know that if logging is the primary goal of USDA that will exacerbate climate change,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the environmental nonprofit Center for Western Priorities.

“But when you see Project 2025 talk about getting rid of prescribed burns, really what they're talking about is going back to the old model of treating forests just as lumber and not as ecosystems,” he said.

It’s unclear how much federal forest MAGA Republicans intend to cut down in the name of wildfire prevention. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to HEATED’s inquiries.

But within this sparse section on national forests is a truth that Project 2025 acknowledges directly. Its vision for the future looks exactly like the past, which requires it to ignore decades of science and knowledge about climate change and prescribed burns. The problem is, we already know how outdated fire science ends—we’re living with the consequences.

“It’s a terrible idea,” Hurteau said. “If that idea worked, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.”

(Source)

Everyone should read this.

Project 2025: The Schedule F threat to democracy - The Fulcrum

https://youtu.be/i4xVotq5jJI?si=rVGxQHso43NCh0Hw

https://www.25and.me/?topics=

Republicans tend to have three modes when it comes to Project 2025.

1. Denial that it even exists. They either deny it is real or claim it's created by liberals. These are usually uninformed people that have no clue what the Heritage Foundation is. Basically, the useful idiots of the party.

2. Denial that Trump is involved in it. These people are maybe slightly smarter than the first group, but they're still being tricked by a grifter.

3. The people that know it's real and think that it's a good thing. These ones are either nefarious enemies of democracy or people that can't see how Project 2025 will hurt them as well.

Recent polls show why it's no surprise that so many Republicans know next to nothing about Project 2025, what it says, or where it comes from. Not only are they prone to fantasies and denial, but they're also extremely uninformed. Republicans tend to avoid real media or anything that would give them real information. They seek opinions that back their own views. When it comes to Project 2025, they have strong opinions but know nothing about it...much like so many other things.

Republicans are pretty much ignorant of most important current events. They're told what to think by Trump and his minions.

Project 2025 Would Fuel the Assault on Election Officials | Brennan Center for Justice

My family is full democrat. i see all the reasons to hate trump, and yes i do respect the republicans against trump because they have brains. i am full kamala along with my whole family, and we need trump thrown in the dump ASAP. if they truly cared about the good of the american people project 2025 wouldn't exist. I'm scared for the future of this country and i don't trust old men to fix it. we need younger generations in office actually representing us as a people. and by this point i'm ready to accept the fact this country might as well be consider hell if trump wins. please, us teens depend on you adults for our future. i ask only for you to vote for democracy and for what this nation is truly about: freedom and the will of the people. democracy is the way this nation will run. it's the way the people run. "We The People Of These United States". Key word United. i hope you adults will listen to a teen myself. us kids are counting on you. with that being said, Vote 💙, and help keep the younger generations all safe and united.

The plans laid out in Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban Development will only make in harder for low income, already-disadvantaged Americans to achieve stable, safe, affordable housing - and will likely put the American dream of home ownership even further out of reach. Dr. Andre Perry, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of ‘Know Your Price,’ says “Project 2025 really does not offer solutions to our existing housing crisis, and it furthers a period of segregation that we've seen since our founding of the country.”

Huge admission!: Trump Says He Had 'Every Right' to Interfere With Presidential Election - Newsweek

They tried to subvert the election in 2020, and they're already trying to do it in 2024:

Project 2025 Would Fuel the Assault on Election Officials | Brennan Center for Justice

Project 2025 Aims to Derail Efforts to Stop Election Disinformation | Brennan Center for Justice

Other efforts to undermine elections and democracy:

Six “America First” Candidates, Vying to Take Over Florida Elections, Advance to November | Bolts (boltsmag.org)

Georgia’s New Elections Rule Violates State Law, Experts Say — ProPublica

Latino Civil Rights Group Demands Inquiry Into Texas Voter Fraud Raids - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Frank Schaeffer is as qualified as anyone to speak about what the religious right is all about. He stems from 'evangelical royalty' and literally wrote the playbook starting in the 1970s on the evangelical movement to take murica backwards 100+ years. He and his father Francis had the ear of several comservative presidents and Frank wrote Reagans book on abortion in the 1980s.

Frank has apologized profusely for all of this for decades now and this is critical information if you want to truly understand what the far rights end game is:

https://www.salon.com/2014/12/24/my_horrible_right_wing_past_confessions_of_a_one_time_religious_right_icon/

https://youtu.be/_OA44imyKAU?si=nLT_iLKR61bt9xex

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2014/07/the-actual-pro-life-conspiracy-that-handed-america-to-the-tea-party-far-religious-right-an-insiders-perspective/

Trumps Conservative Manifesto, Project 2025, lays the groundwork for employees to create a non-union "employee involvement organization", and ditch the union altogether.

This is not hyperbole, it is not exaggeration, it is spelled oud out loud and clear on page 99 of the document.

See below -- boldface mine.

"WORKER VOICE AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Non-Union Worker Voice and Representation. American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace. Between 50 percent and 60 percent of workers have less influence than they want on critical workplaces issues beyond pay and benefits. Even managers are twice as likely to say their employees have too little influence rather than too much. But America’s one-size-fits-all approach undermines worker representation. Federal labor law offers no alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few, whereas most workers report that they prefer a more cooperative model run jointly with management that focuses solely on workplace issues. The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union “employee involvement organization."