A controversial bill aimed at protecting American forests from wildfires and insects has cleared a key hurdle in the House of Representatives.
The house’s resources committee approved the Healthy Forests Restoration Act by 32 votes to 17.
The ‘forest thinning’ act calls for aggressive logging on up to 20 million acres of federal land at high risk of fire, would streamline public appeals to allow forest projects to be completed within months and gives the agriculture and interior secretaries power to approve timber harvests as big as 1,000 acres without environmental review in insect control programmes.
Republican Scott McInnis, the bill’s chief sponsor, said: “The exploding threat of large-scale catastrophic wildfires and massive insect and disease epidemics combine to pose the single largest challenge facing federal land and resources managers today.”
However, Democrats complain the bill would severely limit public participation and is being used to boost commercial logging. The bill now heads to the house agriculture committee.
