As part of our commitment on Earth Day to be more active as a church I’m offering an opportunity to be active, through phone calls and letter writing to Democratic congress people, to try to stop the Fix Our Forests bill. Here is what Rob Lewis, poet and activist, says about the bill:

“On May 6th, the Senate Agricultural Committee held a hearing on the Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA). I’ve never sat through a Senate hearing before, in person or virtually, and it was interesting to see the formality and expedience by which our instruments of governance move, something of a civics class. But I can’t say I enjoyed it, scrolling and scrolling through senate testimony, listening to dialog in which living ecosystems are referred to in terms of “hazardous fuels” and “biomass,” in need of constant “mechanical treatment.” But such hearings are important. They are the process that will determine whether the bill passes or not, and how it might be changed. 

A final vote is coming soon and according to what I observed, FOFA is being treated as something of a bipartisan darling. It won’t be too darling, however, for the forests subjected to the saws, feller bunchers, bulldozers, brush hogs and roads needed for all the proposed “fuels management.” Nor for the wildlife that depend on all that “biomass” for food and home. Nor for the soil, ground up by heavy machinery, exposed to the sun, baking out carbon. And what it will do to the ability of forests to hold and recycle water seems yet to have been considered. 

And if passed, it will give the Donald Trump’s Forest Service statutory authority to bypass citizen review on millions of acres of public forest.”If you are interested in working on this, please contact me, Kathryn Alexander, at soilsmartsoilwise@gmail.com—time is of the essence.