Earlier in July, my wife and I took our evening walk around our East Helena neighborhood and noticed a small plume of smoke rising up from the mountains.
Lawfare Threatens Clean, Healthful Environment
Lawfare Threatens Clean, Healthful Environment
"Our chronically ambiguous federal and state environmental permitting laws have enabled fringe anti-forest management groups to weaponize the courts and shut down critical projects, even projects that are good for our forests and our environment."
A wildfire had started on federal land on the other side of the Missouri River. Over the next few days that small fire quickly grew into the massive Horse Gulch wildfire that has since threatened homes, forced evacuations, and even led to a firefighter losing their life. As I write this, the fire has now burned over 14,000 acres. The Helena valley sky remains blanketed in an unhealthy haze of smoke.
While it’s impossible to predict with 100% accuracy when and where catastrophic wildfires are going to start, the Forest Service anticipated this tragedy years ago. It turns out that the Horse Gulch fire is burning the exact area that was previously slated for a huge forest management project to mitigate wildfire risk that was drastically scaled back this year due to litigation by radical environmentalist litigants.
The Horse Gulch fire is another sad reminder that our federal and state environmental permitting laws have been hijacked with lawfare — and our forests, communities, and even our climate are paying the price.
Forest Service scoping for the Middleman Forest Management Project in the Big Belt Mountains started in 2020, noting in their Environmental Assessment the area contains accumulations of hazardous fuels that “pose a risk to the communities of York and Nelson (including outlying developed subdivisions of El Dorado Heights and American Bar), as well as to public and firefighter safety in the event of a wildfire.”
The Forest Service also identified the risk of potential loss of elk and mule deer habitat, threat to watershed quality, and even increased carbon emissions if existing conditions were continued.
The Middleman Project proposed to address these risks directly via a combination of active forest management strategies to improve the forest health, including logging and prescribed burns conducted on over 53,000 acres.