The Fire Next Time: Land Use Planning in the Wildland/Urban Interface

Jamison E. Colburn, Western New England College, School of Law

Abstract

Wildfire is a growing threat to suburban and exurban communities, in part because fires have grown more severe and frequent as a result of land use and climatic influences and in part because more people are living in fire prone areas. The so-called Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA), the federal government’s response to this crisis, is a deeply flawed statute that will likely exacerbate wildfire risks at the same time it makes real ecological restoration even harder. While HFRA took halting, partial steps toward the integration of broad and small scale land use planning, it was clearly still the outgrowth of a dysfunctional legislative process in Washington. Before the governance of public lands adapts completely to HFRA, this law should be overhauled (or repealed). I suggest targeted reforms to bring about more transparency, greater clarity on what we mean by “restoration,” and more attention to the trade-offs entailed by further expansion into the “wildland/urban interface.”