Colorado’s U.S. Senator Michael Bennet needs to hear from YOU on Monday to encourage him to oppose the so-called “Fix Our Forests” Act by calling 303-455-7600 (the vote is Tuesday).

This disastrous bill is truly one of the worst things we’ve ever seen proposed for our public lands.

Marching lockstep with Trump’s executive order for “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” and his axing of the Roadless Rule, “Fix Our Forests” would decimate bedrock environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Adding insult to injury, the bill would arbitrarily expand the definition of “hazardous fuels management” to allow nearly all forms of forest clearing under the unscientific guise of “wildfire,” including clearcutting and removal of mature and old-growth trees.

Alarmingly, “Fix Our Forests” passed the House of Representatives in January and the Senate companion bill is now being floated by our very own Senator John Hickenlooper.

A consensus of peer reviewed studies show the ineffective or counterproductive nature of experimental “fuel reduction” logging in public forests to supposedly protect communities from wildfire (home hardening and defensible space pruning immediately around structures are the only actions proven to save homes from burning). These studies are bolstered by findings from the U.S. Forest Service, as well as local governments here in Colorado.

Yet “Fix Our Forests” ignores every bit of this scientific evidence to ensure a constant siphoning of your tax dollars to government “land management” agencies to get out the cut across potentially hundreds of millions of acres of public lands.  

If this bill passes, not only will more federal funding be taken away from effective home hardening and defensible space pruning, we’ll see an unprecedented scale of degradation and destruction in our biodiverse, carbon-storing public lands.

We truly don’t believe that the ecological, economic, and political aftermath of the passage of “Fix Our Forests” is something Senator Bennet is going to want his name attached to. Please call his Denver office on Monday at 303-455-7600 and give him the courage he needs to do the right thing by voting against “Fix Our Forests.”