national forests
A Better Approach to Wildfire on Public Lands
Why our proposal improves on Fix Our Forests.
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States. The first post is here. The second post is here. The …
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CONTINUE READINGWildfire and Air Quality Law
Reforming how the Clean Air Act handles smoke from wildfires
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States. The first post is here. The second post is here. The …
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CONTINUE READINGWildfire and National Forests
Reforming federal forest management to address wildfire
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. This is the third in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States. The first post is here. The second post is here. Federally …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Challenges of Wildfire
Why wildfire management is so difficult to reform
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. This is the second in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States. The first post is here. Why is fire such a hard …
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CONTINUE READINGFixing Wildfire Law
The urgent challenge of reforming how we manage wildfire
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. Every year brings another reminder of why fire is at the top of environmental and natural resource issues for the United States, and how our legal system struggles to adjust to fire. …
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CONTINUE READINGOff the Road Again?
Trump Administration revocations of ORV Executive Orders won’t have direct effects on the ground, yet.
Last month the Trump Administration revoked two executive orders over forty years old that directed federal agencies to restrict off-road vehicle use (ORV) on public lands in order to protect those lands’ environmental value. The revocation is, of course, controversial, and of a piece of a scorched earth approach to environmental regulation this Administration has …
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CONTINUE READINGFixing Fix Our Forests
The emergency provisions of Fix Our Forests are a key weakness in the bill
The permitting reform bill that has made the most progress through Congress is the Fix Our Forests Act, which I’ve written about here, here, and here. And as I’ve written before, fixing fire management on federal lands should be a top priority for any reforms. I’m not sure that the model of Fix Our Forests …
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CONTINUE READINGRoadless Rule Revisited
Rationale for revocation of the roadless rule does not add up
The roadless rule, promulgated in the Clinton Administration, but not free from litigation until the first term of the Obama Administration, set aside about 2% of the land area of the lower 48 United States from commercial development. It applies to roadless areas of National Forests, and prohibits commercial logging and road construction in those …
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CONTINUE READINGReconciliation and Public Lands Part 2
Final legislation is narrower than House bill, focused on fossil fuel leasing on federal lands.
As a (belated) follow-up from my post this summer about the House version of the reconciliation bill, here is a summary of the key public lands provisions of the reconciliation bill as finally enacted. In general, the scope of what is covered is substantially less than what was in the House bill, in part because …
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CONTINUE READINGReconciliation and public lands
Most changes would be to the leasing process for oil and gas development and reflect a partisan response to ping-pong governance
As the Senate takes up the House’s version of the reconciliation bill, I wanted to briefly summarize the main provisions that relate to public lands – in part so readers can be aware of the state of play as to what might (or might not) come to pass in the Senate. The bill as passed …
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