Since 1944, Smokey, a cartoon bear in a ranger hat, has told generations of Americans that “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
But that’s not entirely true. Because Smokey Bear, like the rest of us, has overlooked the biggest villain behind today’s wildfires.
In fact, the greatest threat to America’s forests isn’t the family around a campfire. For decades, it’s been a federal system waging war on logging, turning public forests into tinderboxes one blocked timber sale and lawsuit at a time.
This year alone, over 7 million acres have burned nationwide across more than 49,000 wildfires, 68% more than the 10-year average.
Fires have already destroyed over 1,000 homes and structures, displacing families and stretching firefighting resources across the West.
Oregon alone has seen more than 2.3 million acres burned this year, breaking the state record set two years ago.
The damage doesn’t stop at the fire line: Smoke has blanketed the West, with Prineville, Ore., hitting an Air Quality Index reading of 670 (under 50 is considered “good”) on Aug. 5 — so extreme it’s barely measurable on the standard scale.
Tens of millions of Americans have been exposed to unhealthy air, and cities have repeatedly had the worst air quality on Earth.
“Climate change” has become the ultimate scapegoat, the explanation that lets everyone off the hook.
If the fires are climate’s fault, no one answers for the lawsuits or the delayed logging permits.
But here’s the number that blows that excuse apart: A wildfire on federal land is, on average, five times the size of one on nonfederal land nearby, per the Congressional Budget Office.
Same drought. Same heat. Same lightning. Weather doesn’t stop at a property line, but federal land burns five times bigger.
Bureaucracy has consequences.
Here’s what else you probably don’t know: Your tax dollars have funded the war on logging for decades.
It started with the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act, which was meant to help small businesses and veterans recover legal fees when they win a lawsuit against the federal government.
Instead, it became a tool environmental lawyers use to collect attorney’s fees from taxpayers instead of clients, while blocking efforts to thin out forests.
The Government Accountability Office admits it doesn’t have a full accounting of how much has been paid.
What we do know: From 2019 to 2024, the US Departments of Agriculture and Interior paid nearly $25 million under EAJA, much of it to groups suing to stop thinning and logging on public forests.
And they have succeeded. While the lawsuits piled up, harvests collapsed.
Federal timber harvests have fallen nearly 80% since their 1987 peak, from 11 billion board feet a year to under 3 billion today.
And average acreage burned nationwide has more than doubled since the 1990s, from 3.3 million acres a year to over 7 million.
These aren’t just trees. As Smokey himself said on a 1946 Forest Service poster: burned timber builds no homes.
A single well-stocked acre of timberland can hold enough board feet to frame an entire house.
Every acre that burns represents enormous waste — lumber that never reaches a sawmill, wages never earned, timber sales that never got approved, value that goes up in smoke instead of strengthening a local economy.
The same local economy that watched its sawmills close while forests holding millions of homes’ worth of timber turned to ash.
And yet we’re told these fires are inevitable, that logging wouldn’t stop them anyway.
That’s like saying dams don’t prevent floods. The forest equivalent of a levee is thinning overgrown stands, prescribed burning, removing insect-killed timber and responsible logging.
We know how to build that levee, but Congress has made it nearly impossible to get permission to do it.
This week, the Trump administration took a swing at building a forest-equivalent levee of its own.
The USDA proposed rescinding the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which has kept 59 million acres, nearly a third of the National Forest System, off-limits to fire management for a quarter century.
The process will take time, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Now Congress needs to do its part: The bipartisan SPEED Act would cut through the logging-permit delays and litigation windows that have allowed these fuel loads to pile up.
It passed the House in December, but Senate Democrats have blocked it since.
It’s time to send it to President Donald Trump’s desk.
But until we can manage our forests again, we’ll need to update Smokey’s slogan: “Only Congress can prevent the next megafire.”
Jesse Ramos is the state director of Americans for Prosperity-Montana and a former Missoula, Mont., city councilman.
