A team of fire ecologists released a report this week titled “Everything You Wanted To Know About Wildland Fires” summarizing the state of knowledge about forest fires on public lands. This report comes just days after the US Congress passed the Wildfire Suppression Funding and Forest Management Activities Act as part of the federal omnibus appropriations bill, and calls into question the activities prescribed in the Act and the faulty reasoning behind them. The Act categorizes wildland fires as ‘disasters’, increases annual fire suppression funding, weakens environmental protection laws to increase logging, and allows logging projects on thousands of acres without full environmental impact analysis or meaningful public disclosure, all in the name of reducing the risk or extent of wildfires. Dr. Dominick DellaSala, Director of Forest Legacies and one of the co-authors of the report, said, “The Wildfire Suppression Funding and Forest Management Activities Act ignored the past three decades of science that has found fires, including large high-severity fires, are an ecologically essential part of forest ecosystems and create highly biodiverse wildlife habitat.”