Many organizations oppose the Healthy Forest Initiative. They oppose the plan because, they feel, that it fails to promote sound forestry on federal forests. These groups note the following flaws in the bill. The lack of a comprehensive sivilcultural planning for long term fuel management. They feel that ignoring the impacts over time will open the door for the recreation of averstocked forests and other problems the legislation seeks to resovle. They also feel that the bill lacks an appropriate system for setting treatment priorities at the local level. They feel that this will result in the high-priority areas being overlooked or projects taking place in low-priority areas will receive to much attention. They also feel that the bill fails to establish monitoring requirements. They feel that monitoring the effectiveness of the initiative is essential to understanding the mangement of fuel over the long-term. Finally, they feel that the bill lacks safeguards to ensure that funding is restricted to legitimate fuel reduction treatments. They argue that there is no language in the bill that provides security against the bill's provisions beign used to conduct traditional commercial timber extraction, free of environmental safeguards.
These concerns, however, are unwarranted because the bill does have the language to stop these thing from happening. The bill, HR 1904, states that forest thinning practices will happen in areas where: federal lands located in such proximity to a community that there is a significant risk that the spread of fire would threaten human life and property; where federal lands are located near a municipal watter supply and a fire disturbance would have adverse effects on the water quality of the municipal water supply; where the existence or threat of disease or insect infestation, pose a significant threat to forest or rangeland health or adjacent private lands.
