Forest Service

Low morale, staffing woes and health worries are among the top issues shared by hundreds of federal wildland firefighters who responded.

Wildland firefighters face extreme conditions. For those who identify as LGBTQ, there are challenges beyond the fireline. This Pride Month, the Mountain West News Bureau reports on how that community is responding.

The Cross-Boundary Wildfire Solutions Act is fairly simple: it directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study obstacles to conducting wildfire mitigation projects on land with multiple owners or jurisdictions. Within two years, the GAO is expected to share its report and recommendations.

“Suppression is always going to be there,” Chief Brian Fennessy told the Mountain West News Bureau. “But we're not going to suppress our way out of this situation.”

Ski areas with special-use permits must be primarily focused on skiing and other snow sports. But in a final rule, the U.S. Forest Service said that focus will no longer be determined by revenue, which could help ski areas to adapt business to a changing climate.

The Trump administration is trying to repeal the Roadless Rule, which prohibits new road construction in large swaths of national forests. They say this will aid fire response, but new research is calling that into question.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) has formally announced the establishment of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS), a development that came the same week that the U.S. Congress declined to fund it.

Data analyzed by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters shows that prescribed fires and other hazardous fuel reduction efforts have fallen by nearly 40% across the West this year.

Over the summer, an executive order from President Trump called for the consolidation of federal wildfire programs “to the maximum degree practicable.” The secretaries of Interior and Agriculture recently released their plans responding to that and other demands – and they’ve garnered praise and criticism.

For millennia, Indigenous peoples have intentionally set fires to care for the land. Colonization and fire exclusion largely put an end to those practices, though the tradition endured. Now, California tribes have opened the door to a new era of cultural burning - a potential model for the rest of the West.