The Environmental Justice Implications of Managing Hazardous Fuels on Federal Forest Lands

U.S. federal government agencies play an important role in mitigating some risks posed to communities by natural hazard events, especially communities with high proportions of low-income or minority residents. Ongoing efforts of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to reduce the buildup of forest fuels on national forests, particularly in dry mixed-conifer forests of the U.S. West, are an example. Federal land management agencies must comply with the Executive Order on Environmental Justice (EJ Order, 59 Fed. Reg 7629, 1994), but there is scant documentation of whether these agencies have substantively complied with the EJ Order in implementing land management activities. There is also little quantitative environmental justice (EJ) research on dispersed rural populations, such as those often found adjacent to national forests. Our research addresses these gaps. We apply a novel mixed-methods approach, including quantitative pattern analysis and interviews with forest managers, to examine whether the benefits of wildfire risk reduction created on twelve national forests in four western U.S. states were equitably distributed among nearby populations. We found that EJ impacts might have occurred on all twelve forests, but they tended to be localized and context specific. We also learned from interviewees that EJ was not considered in decisions about where and how to conduct wildfire hazard reduction and that EJ populations rarely engaged in collaborative project planning apart from the formal tribal consultation process. Our research expands the range of quantitative geographical analysis of EJ issues and our methods could be adopted by land management agencies to achieve more equitable distribution of costs and benefits from their management activities.