Your ability to weigh in on what happens to California’s national forests just got way more complicated. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and eight other state attorneys general are pushing back hard against a federal proposal that would seriously limit how much say everyday people, Indigenous tribes, and environmental groups get when decisions are made about national forest projects.

The U.S. Forest Service is trying to rush through a rule that would slash public comment periods in half. We’re talking about cutting the time to submit feedback from 30 days down to just 10 days in some cases, and from 45 days to 20 days in others. If you’ve ever tried to organize community input or do research on a project in that timeframe, you know how unrealistic that is.

But here’s where it gets really sketchy: the proposal would also ditch the requirement that neutral officials review objections to forest projects. Instead, the same person proposing the project would get to evaluate complaints about their own work. Yeah, that’s the kind of conflict of interest that should make anyone’s alarm bells go off.

“Responsibility for reviewing objections should lie not with the person proposing a project, but with a neutral party”, the coalition of attorneys general wrote in their official response. When you think about it, having someone judge whether their own decisions were fair is basically a recipe for rubber-stamping whatever they want to do.

This matters for California specifically because we’re home to roughly 20 million acres of national forest land. That includes massive stretches like the Mendocino National Forest. The decisions made about timber sales, road construction, and wildfire fuel reduction projects on these lands shape the future of some of our most important ecosystems.

Bonta didn’t go solo on this fight either. He teamed up with attorneys general from Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington to send a unified message to the feds that this proposal is a bad move. Having that many states pushing back shows this isn’t some regional squabble, it’s a nationwide concern about transparency and fairness in how our public lands are managed.

The timing of this proposal is suspicious too. While the country is supposedly focused on other issues, the Forest Service is trying to quietly move forward with rules that would make it way harder for regular people to have a voice in decisions affecting their own backyards. That’s not how public participation in democracy is supposed to work.

If you care about what happens to California’s forests and want to stay informed about decisions that affect these spaces, paying attention to stories like this is crucial. The fight over who gets to have a say in managing our public lands is far from over.