Study: Forest Service wildfire mitigation work in New Mexico and nationwide on decline

TAOS — Bobbie Scopa recalled the days when a 12,000-acre wildfire was still considered a big deal.

She was a 19-year-old, rookie wildland firefighter with the National Forest Service the year she first saw a wildfire that size. It was 1974, and she and a dozen other firefighters had been called to dig line in the Huachuca Mountains near Sierra Vista in southern Arizona.

They worked for 14 hours a day cutting line through stands of turbinella oak, juniper and dry brush. Flames licked the far side of the trench just beyond their boots, sometimes jumping right across it. A converted B-17 bomber rumbled low in the sky overhead, raining fire retardant the color of neon. The air was hot, thick with wood smoke.

The fire seemed huge at the time, Scopa remembered, and upon returning to their station, her boss told the crew they’d probably just seen the largest wildfire of their careers.

He was wrong.

Neither the firefighters nor even their crew manager that day could see what the future would hold for wildfires in the western U.S., where the total area burned by wildfires has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now retired and leading advocacy work for Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit, Scopa sees a dozen fires a year that size, and they often don’t even generate news headlines.

“We now have fires in the Southwest year-round — year-round — where that was never the case in the old days,” she told the Journal. “And on a bigger, national scale, a fire doesn’t even raise eyebrows unless it’s either burning down homes or hits about 100,000 acres.”

Decades of Forest Service policy that squelched both human-caused and naturally occurring wildfires, combined with the famous anti-fire campaign helmed by none other than Smokey Bear, have been well documented.

The result is that most of America’s forests are still overgrown today, with dense stands of trees and dry brush holding the potential to ignite catastrophic wildfires, such as the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, which at 341,471 acres is still the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.

To prevent fires of that scale, forest managers rely on wildfire mitigation work — prescribed burns, pile burns and forest thinning. Nevertheless, a recent study by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters found that this critical work in 2025 is 38% of the average of the previous four calendar years nationwide.

“That’s hugely significant,” Scopa said. “Some states, like Utah, dropped some 80%. It’s going to make a big difference in coming years.”

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters says the Trump administration and the federal funding reduction organization abbreviated as DOGE, are largely to blame, having cut or offered handsome exit packages to many federal workers this year, including Forest Service personnel.

Scott Fitzwilliams, the former supervisor for White River National Forest in Colorado, is one of a still unknown number of Forest Service workers who took what former DOGE head Elon Musk presented as a “fork in the road.”

Fitzwilliams was already eyeing retirement, so the timing made sense, he said. But he knows there are other Forest Service workers of all ranks and experience levels who left the agency this year in droves, either because they were pushed out or feared they would be fired if they stayed on.

“We’re down about a million acres in treatment,” he said. “My response is, ‘Well, of course — the agencies have lost thousands of employees, or whatever the true number is, because you can’t get a straight answer. Budgets have been turned upside down, money has been shifted around, and now we’re in a government shutdown. It’s not a surprise.”

Over a dozen wildfire mitigation projects are planned for New Mexico this fall through winter’s end, but the study shows the state has so far completed 53%, or 68,000 acres, of what it has in previous years.

J.R. Logan, Taos County’s forest and watershed program manager, urged caution regarding the Forest Service data cited in the study, saying the numbers can be misleading.

“It is technically accurate to say that the 68,000 acres where some kind of treatment was done in 2025 is less than the average of the four previous years,” he said. “But, I mean, to be honest, when I look at this, the thing that catches my eye is 2022, when we had only 23,000 acres treated in the state, which is like 12% of the previous year and, you know, almost 10% of the year afterwards.”

He said Forest Service data often only accounts for thinning work performed to reduce the risk of wildfire, yet there are activities that don’t make the final acreage tally, such as salvage logging, in which dead or damaged trees in a forest are sold off for lumber.

Scopa also said that a less active logging industry has exacerbated the problem of overly dense forests.

“Back in the old days, when there were sawmills everywhere, it was easier to sell logs because, you know, they weren’t hauling them for 100 miles to get to a mill,” she said. “They would have a steady supply that they were guaranteed... was always going to be there. There’s got to be the market. We’ve got to develop the markets.”

Reductions in wildfire personnel, she said, can also be attributed to larger and more intense wildfires that require crews to stay on fire lines longer, often through the payment of overtime. A separate study by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters found that firefighters are working sometimes 1,500 hours of overtime in a year.

“That is unsustainable. It’s unhealthy,” Scopa said. “You can’t raise a family, you can’t attend your kids’ baseball games.”

Those extended hours exposed to smoke and other dangers inherent to the profession can worsen health outcomes, she added, prompting wildland firefighters to leave their agencies to take early retirement or disability.

Over her 45-year career, she said “no one wore masks,” which a recent New York Times investigation found is still commonplace in the profession.

“We didn’t have good ones to wear,” she added. “A normal day for a wildland firefighter is 16 hours, and out of those 16 hours you’re on the line for, say, 14 or more. And while you’re on the line, you’re doing hard, physical work. You’re swinging an ax, you’re swinging a shovel, you’re swinging a Pulaski, you’re operating a chainsaw.”

One of the key methods to prevent catastrophic wildfires that place fire personnel in avoidable harm’s way is for individuals and their local communities to perform basic forest thinning work themselves and to clear brittle dry brush from around their homes.

“When the fires were burning in the Los Angeles area, I tried starting to make the point that people have an obligation to protect their homes themselves,” she said. “It shouldn’t have to be some young firefighter showing up because there’s brush and pine needles and all sorts of things surrounding their house.”

She recommended that people curious about how to perform their own local fire mitigation work visit Firewise USA, an organization that teaches strategies to protect homes and neighborhoods from fire.

It’s a strategy, Logan said, that some of New Mexico’s oldest communities have long embraced but that some have forgotten.

“In Taos County, we’ve done a good job working with Carson National Forest specifically to insulate ourselves from a lot of these effects, like creating ‘good neighbor’ agreements,” he said. “Those agreements give authority to these local governments to not just weigh in on work that’s happening in the National Forest, but actually to contribute to it, to do some of that work themselves.”