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A sweeping bipartisan bill that seeks to prevent catastrophic wildfires and restore fire-ravaged forests has revealed a schism in the nation’s environmental movement as some conservation advocates find themselves allied with a longtime foe: loggers.

The Fix Our Forests Act, which Congress is close to passing, aims to speed up forest management projects on public and tribal lands by reducing regulatory and legal hurdles.

The proposed legislation comes at a time of increasingly devastating wildfires and has garnered wide support among Republicans and the timber industry.

However, the traditional Democratic coalition of environmental groups is split over the role humanity has to play in forest management. Some argue ecosystems are best protected when humans leave them alone — a view that dominated during the timber wars of the ’80s and ’90s. Others argue that humans have a responsibility to intervene — an increasingly popular idea as climate change threatens ecosystems around the world.

Among the major environmental groups that oppose the legislation are the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity. They worry that limiting environmental review and litigation will allow timber companies to heavily log these areas instead of gently thinning them. Meanwhile, some Southern California groups worry the bill would allow well-meaning land managers to approve misguided projects that ultimately harm local shrublands, which have a very different relationship with fire than the bill’s namesake, forests.

“It’s really handing the keys to the Trump administration to be able to push forward a lot of their timber agenda,” said Anna Medema, deputy legislative director for forests and public lands at the Sierra Club.

But the Nature Conservancy and other groups have voiced support for the bill, citing the constant and imminent threat that increasingly severe wildfires pose to communities and ecosystems.

“We do advocacy at a twofold level. We are doing defensive work to fight back against bad things, and we’re also trying to promote the good things that are happening on the ground,” said Morgan Cashwell, North America director of legislative affairs for the Nature Conservancy. Right now, that good work needs to “meet the moment in the current wildfire crisis.”

That sentiment appears to have motivated Western lawmakers in particular.

In the House of Representatives, roughly half of the Democrats from Western states voted for the bill, compared to about a quarter of Democrats from elsewhere in the country. Republicans voted overwhelmingly in favor. The legislation is now awaiting a final vote in the Senate. Congress has until Jan. 3, 2027, to pass it.

“Wildfires today are very different than wildfires from a generation ago,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who co-introduced the Senate version of the bill. “Oftentimes, they’re irreversibly devastating ecosystems and watersheds.”

“So,” he said, “ the status quo is clearly not working.”

Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), center, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, delivers remarks at the Capitol in March 2023.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The act was born when Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), a former forester, stole a seat on a plane next to Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego). He used the opportunity to talk Peters’ ear off about a beloved species of tree that is under threat from worsening wildfires: the giant sequoia.

The two introduced a bill to protect them, called the Save Our Sequoias Act, and quickly saw an opportunity for something bigger.

“I knew right away that this could be a gateway to talking about permit reform,” Peters said. So, “we started working on a bigger, nationwide reform of forestry practices which have been really, really clogged up.”

While California grasslands, shrublands and woodlands are adapted to different frequencies and intensities of wildfire, research has found that high-severity fires — which kill the vast majority of trees in their path — are scorching 30 times more land area than in the 1980s.

The result: California is losing, on average, more than 200,000 acres of forest every year — or roughly 2.5% of all woodlands in the state every decade. U.S. Forest Service efforts to resuscitate these ecosystems have failed to keep pace. In recent years, the agency has reforested only about 1% of woodlands that are unlikely to recover on their own.

Californian supporters of the Fix Our Forests Act argue the problem has more to do with permitting delays than finances.

Marin County firefighters train during a prescribed burn in June in San Rafael.

(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)

Rep. George Whitesides (D-Santa Clarita), who co-sponsored the Fix Our Forests Act, pointed to nonpartisan research that found it takes the Forest Service more than five years on average to complete a full environmental review and begin work on forest thinning projects that use mechanical equipment like bulldozers and wood chippers. For prescribed burns, it takes more than seven years on average.

“That’s insane,” he said, that it “takes as long as a kid growing up to be a first grader to be able to move on this.”

The Fix Our Forests Act would exempt projects from the full permitting process if they were in areas with the most extreme fire risk and would expand existing exemptions for projects under 3,000 acres to cover projects up to 10,000 acres. It also would limit the window during which environmental groups can sue over project approvals.

These projects tend to employ a combination of harvesting timber and thinning smaller trees and plants with heavy machinery (often the favored tools of Republicans and the timber industry) and using prescribed fire to clear out the forest floor (often favored by environmental groups).

The “environmental left” has “made it endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive to maintain our forests, all with the promise that this would improve the forest environment,” said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove), a co-sponsor who authored some of the permitting exclusions. “Well, after 50 years, I think we’re entitled to ask, how’s the forest environment doing?”

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that blamed “our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply” as a contributor to disastrous wildfires. In response, the U.S. Forest Service set a goal to increase the amount of timber open to logging by 25% nationwide over five years.

Scott Dane, executive director of the American Loggers Council, argued the nightmare scenarios of expansive clear-cutting from the timber wars are not on the table for America’s public lands.

“It’s a boogeyman position that they love to take from 100 years ago,” he said. “It’s not, in reality, in modern forest management at all.”

Watchdogs in Southern California have a different concern: While research shows forest thinning is an effective tool in overgrown Sierra Nevada woodlands, the state’s coastal shrublands are not denser than they historically have been. Consequently, the type of projects the Fix Our Forests Act would expedite are far more controversial and contested in shrublands. Local advocates fear the act would undermine their ability to push back on proposals with questionable scientific backing.

Goats and sheep graze on top of Kite Hill in May 2025 in Los Angeles for wildfire prevention.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

In contrast to projects in conifer forests that aim to decrease the density of trees and vegetation across the landscape, shrubland projects are typically centered on creating a network of corridors hundreds of feet wide with no vegetation throughout the wildlands and clearing plants away from existing buildings.

While firefighters rely on these networks of fuel breaks to access the wildlands during fires and build containment lines, research has found that when firefighters cannot reach the fuel breaks — which is often the case during extreme winds — the lines only stop fires about 13% of the time. If they are not routinely maintained, they also risk supporting the growth of flammable invasive grasses.

In Los Padres National Forest, near Santa Barbara, officials proposed in 2022 creating roughly 187,000 acres of fuel breaks and structure defense zones. After organizations like Los Padres ForestWatch pushed back on the plan through the environmental review process, the national forest ultimately scaled the proposal down to about 22,000 acres this July.

“You had community input, and you had the federal government incorporating that input into a plan that is grossly improved,” said Benjamin Pitterle, director of advocacy and field operations at Los Padres ForestWatch. “It’s arguably a perfect example of how the process should work.”

For decades scientists and researchers have been vexed by a sound emanating from cats. Not a call of the wild, a roar or a hiss. No, multiple academics have attempted to decipher the meaning behind the mightily adorable meow of the domestic house cat.

Cats, it turns out, are conversationalists. And good news for cat parents: Studies suggest they’re often attempting to talk to us.

“One of the biggest takeaways from scientific research is that meowing seems in many ways to be specialized for communication with humans,” says Jay Schwartz, an associate professor of psychological science at Western Oregon University. “In that sense, the meow holds the legacy of thousands of years of evolutionary change in cats to adapt to life with humans.”

A clowder of stories celebrating cats and the L.A. people who love them.

Adult cats, specifically, rarely meow to one another, instead preferring other vocal intonations or facial signifiers. The meow, in short, is meant for us.

“The exception is communication between kittens and mothers,” Schwartz says, “which is also the main context where we see meows in wild feline species. One hypothesis is that cats have this instinct to meow towards their mother, and humans in many cases sort of take on that mother role.”

But now that we know that cats are attempting to communicate with us, is there a way for pet caregivers to better understand what a cat is attempting to say? Research is ongoing, but many papers have sought to analyze not only the different pitches and tones of the meow, but also how good we — humans, that is — are at understanding them. There’s evidence at least that we’re listening. One European study indicated that cat owners often meow back at their pets. This is different than, say, dog providers, who were reported to rarely return a canine’s bark.

An informal polling of the researchers interviewed for this article found that, yes, cat parents are likely to return the meows of their feline. And I know from personal experience with my own cat that I am an avid meower.

Asked, for instance, if he meows to his cats, Jonathan B. Losos, an evolutionary biologist and author of the book, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved From the Savanna to Your Sofa,” wouldn’t deny it. “I’m sure they are deeply offended by my attempts, but yes, yes I do,” Losos says.

But there’s no need to mimic a cat’s meow, especially if one is hoping to train a cat or have them associate certain words with particular rewards — treats, playtime and affection work well for that. And besides, there’s a theory that, with the meow, the cats were evolving to imitate us.

“Our cats’ ancestors were already meowing when they began living alongside humans,” Schwartz says. “We know this because cats’ closest evolutionary relatives, African wild cats, meow.”

Yet there are key differences in the meows. Schwartz says the meow of a domestic cat is “cuter and less harsh” than those of a wild cat. The cats likely knew what they were doing.

“One hypothesis is the meow happened to share some acoustic similarities with the sounds of human infants,” Schwartz says, “and so nearby humans were responsive to it. This set the stage for a co-evolutionary relationship where, over generations, cats began to produce meows that are more fine-tuned for human communication. It’s a case of evolution taking a tool that already exists and modifying it for a new purpose as a species adapts to a different environment.”

And while meows, of course, vary from cat to cat, Kristyn Vitale, a certified applied animal behaviorist and founder of the Michigan-based Maueyes Cat Science and Education center, says there are ways to decode them. Vitale points to research out of a Swedish university that looked at the melody and tone of the meow.

“So when it dips down at the end,” Vitale says of the meow, “that’s often correlated with negative affective states. So, feeling stressed or fearful. You hear that if you’re trying to get your cat into the carrier or messing around with them, like at the vet. Then they’ll often have a downward pitch. And then for happy, more content states, there is an an uptick at the end. They found that to be pretty consistent in their vocalizing. Whether it goes up or down is indicating the cat’s mood.”

And yet the key to understanding a cat’s meow will often rest specifically with that cat’s caretaker. Losos in his book cites a number of papers on cat vocalizations, and one of his favorites is the work of Nicholas Nicastro and the series of studies that followed up on Nicastro’s research. Nicastro made recordings of a number of cat meows when the pets were in different states — being fed, for instance, or brushed. Nicastro also placed cats in unfamiliar environments, hoping to get meows of dissatisfaction.

Nicastro wanted to see whether humans could identify the emotional state of the cat based solely on the sound. “The people did no better than guessing,” Losos says. “They had no clue.” It was an indication, Losos argues, that cats have no uniform language.

But don’t despair, those who want to understand their cats better. Other research has advanced Nicastro’s work, including studies that paired a cat’s meows directly with their caretaker instead of random participants. When those who lived with the cat were involved, the results differed drastically. I joke that I like to think I can understand when my cat’s meow is asking me to open the bedroom window blinds, which is where her desired bird-watching perch is. Losos says I may be right — or at least not entirely wrong.

“The people who lived with the cat were quite good at saying, ‘Chester is unhappy with you,’ or ‘Oliver is very content right now,’ ” Losos says. “What that suggests is that there is a private language that develops between cats and the people they live with in order for cats to communicate what they want or what their mood is. That’s fascinating. You and your cat have worked out how to understand when she’s hungry, for instance.”

Research is continuing to better understand the communication between a cat and the cat’s owner. Schwartz and Vitale, for instance, are hoping to finalize a study soon that looks at how cats may greet their caretakers — or express a form of sadness or confusion when they leave.

“We looked specifically at meows in two contexts: separation from their human in an unfamiliar environment, and then the human’s return,” Schwartz says. “We found some subtle but consistent differences in the pitch and length of meows between those two contexts, suggesting maybe cats have different meows for ‘Where did you go?’ and ‘You’re back!’ ”

Yet there’s one thing that Schwartz wants to make clear. The meow, as cute and attuned as it may be to get a human’s attention, is not in his mind a tool for manipulation, as some have proffered.

“This idea that cats are trying to manipulate us is a big pet peeve of mine,” he says. “I don’t think cats are intentionally manipulating us in the sense of understanding the effects that their meows have on our psychology. However, they probably understand the link between their behavior and ours. If they have learned that meowing is a way to achieve a desired outcome, they’ll do it.”

In other words, cats just want to be heard.

Leidos (LDOS) on Tuesday highlighted a Navy contract worth as much as $56.7 million to study psychological health and operational readiness among U.S. military personnel.

The award isn’t new. The Department of Defense originally announced it on July 10, 2025, identifying it