U.S. federal government agencies play an important role in mitigating some risks posed to communities by natural hazard events, especially communities with high proportions of low-income or minority residents. Ongoing efforts of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to reduce the buildup of forest fuels on national forests, particularly in dry mixed-conifer forests of the U.S. West, are an example. Federal land management agencies must comply with the Executive Order on Environmental Justice (EJ Order, 59 Fed. Reg 7629, 1994), but there is scant documentation of whether these agencies have substantively complied with the EJ Order in implementing land management activities. There is also little quantitative environmental justice (EJ) research on dispersed rural populations, such as those often found adjacent to national forests. Our research addresses these gaps. We apply a novel mixed-methods approach, including quantitative pattern analysis and interviews with forest managers, to examine whether the benefits of wildfire risk reduction created on twelve national forests in four western U.S. states were equitably distributed among nearby populations. We found that EJ impacts might have occurred on all twelve forests, but they tended to be localized and context specific. We also learned from interviewees that EJ was not considered in decisions about where and how to conduct wildfire hazard reduction and that EJ populations rarely engaged in collaborative project planning apart from the formal tribal consultation process. Our research expands the range of quantitative geographical analysis of EJ issues and our methods could be adopted by land management agencies to achieve more equitable distribution of costs and benefits from their management activities.

美国联邦政府机构在减轻自然灾害事件给社区带来的某些风险方面发挥着重要作用，特别是低收入或少数民族居民比例较高的社区。例如，美国森林服务局（USFS）不断努力减少国家森林（尤其是美国西部干混针叶林）中森林燃料的积累。联邦土地管理机构必须遵守《环境司法行政命令》（EJ Order，联邦纪事第59号，联邦法规7629，1994年），但很少有文件证明这些机构在实施土地管理活动时是否实质上遵守了EJ令。对于分散的农村人口（例如经常在国家森林附近发现的人口）的定量环境正义研究也很少。我们的研究解决了这些差距。我们采用了一种新颖的混合方法，包括定量模式分析和与森林经理的访谈，以研究在美国西部四个州的十二个国家森林中减少野火风险的收益是否在附近的人群中平均分配。我们发现EJ影响可能发生在所有十二个森林上，但它们往往是本地化的且因情况而异。我们还从受访者那里了解到，在决定何时何地减少野火危害方面未考虑EJ，而且除了正式的部落协商程序外，EJ人群很少参与协作项目规划。