Forest Service scrubs website of references to climate change

Several recently active U.S. Forest Service web pages about climate change and its impacts on things like wildfires and ecosystems were either blocked or taken down by the agency Friday.

People attempting to access the pages were shown messages saying “You are not allowed to access this page” or “Looks like you wandered off trail.” The blocked pages were active earlier this month, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — a digital library that archives the Internet.

While some of the agency's climate change web pages were still accessible for much of Friday, by late afternoon, the agency’s entire website crashed temporarily.

Both Politico and the Hot Shot Wake Up, a news site specializing in wildfire coverage, reported employees across all agencies overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were instructed by email to delete landing pages about climate change and those that track climate change references.

The reason wasn’t immediately clear but it may be linked to President Donald Trump’s skepticism that climate change is real and caused by burning fossil fuels. Several federal agencies have also deleted or blocked web pages with references to diversity, equity and inclusion. That action follows multiple executive orders from the president to terminate DEI programs.

However, the deletion of references to climate change doesn't appear to be directly linked to an executive order from the president. In addition, climate change web pages hosted by the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service that are overseen by the Department of Interior remained active and accessible Friday.

The Forest Service manages just shy of 200 million acres of land and is the nation’s largest fire fighting agency. Officials there and others across the West tasked with fighting and managing fire have long said climate change is making forests more prone to large fires and causing increasingly extreme and dangerous fire behavior.

Climate change and the attempt to slow it has also become a significant factor federal land management agencies consider when they are proposing projects or updating their guiding documents. Brian Hurlbutt, an attorney with the Boise-based environmental law firm Advocates of the West, said it would be folly for the agency to suddenly ignore climate change.

“Of course the Forest Service needs to consider climate change to manage our national forest and make good decisions about what is happening on our public lands and if they don't do it they are going to be opening themselves up to good legal claims under (the National Environmental Policy Act) and other laws,” he said.

Climate change is also frequently cited as partial justification for forest logging and thinning projects. The Forest Service declared a wildfire crisis under former President Joe Biden and Congress directed spending to help the agency thin forests and carry out prescribed burns. Even before that, the agency increasingly sought to implement projects aimed at reducing fire danger and often cited climate change as justification.

“Take away climate change and it sort of begs the question, ‘why are you doing this again?’ ” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “It takes one of the legs of the stool as justification to spend record amounts of money in the name of fire, and to landscape our national forests into whatever it is they are becoming.”

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com.