Volume 2, Number 65 - Monday, July 22, 2024
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
I’M AWAY THIS WEEK, visiting family in Oregon, so the newsletters this week won’t have up-to-date reports about wildfires or weather.
It’s going to be hot in the Sierra Nevada, hot in Medford, and probably also smoky. That’s just how it is at this time of the year but I hope firefighters will be save and continue the fine job they’ve been doing.
Instead, I offer you an article today that I started writing some months ago about Del Pengilly, a district ranger on Sequoia National Forest when I began covering giant sequoias around 2000 and perhaps the first Forest Service employee I ever met. On Thursday, I’ll have an update on an area of SQF that drew international attention during the early 1990s.
You’ll see that the story (below) includes information about some of the first conflicts between the Forest Service and environmental organizations on the Sequoia — more than 35 years ago.
I’ve learned a lot researching and writing this story — and there is more to learn, more stories to share. But all journeys begin with a first step, and I’m starting this journey with Pengilly…
In 1987, a high-profile timber sale on Sequoia National Forest triggered a lawsuit. Would Del Pengilly, the district ranger, do things differently today?
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
Context is essential.
To consider what Springville, California, resident Del Pengilly says about forest management, you must know that he spent 42 years with the Forest Service. About 28 of those years were as a district ranger on Sequoia National Forest during a time when the national forest — commonly referred to as SQF — may have been the most politicized of more than 150 national forests in the country.
Pengilly launched his Forest Service career at the Mendocino National Forest in 1962 after earning a degree in forest management from the University of Minnesota. He worked in timber management there for seven years before transferring to Tahoe National Forest.
He was promoted to district ranger with SQF in 1976, then spent four years on the Hot Springs Ranger District, 21 years on the Tule River District and three years administering both ranger districts (known today as the Western Divide Ranger District).
Pengilly and his wife, Nancy, stayed in their foothill home after he retired in 2004 at 64. His family and friends live in the area, and he remains active in civic groups.
He also stays involved with the local chapter of the Society of American Foresters and has been active in the Giant Sequoia National Monument Association, which he helped found — although he’s not sure the organization has much of a future.
Environmental organizations were critical of some of Pengilly’s work while he was on the Sequoia. That’s an understatement. He was one of three district rangers who signed off on logging projects that drew fire from the Sierra Club, resulting in a 1987 lawsuit claiming that the Forest Service had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not completing environmental impact statements for the projects.
The district court ruled against the Sierra Club and didn’t issue an injunction to stop the logging. It also didn’t discuss NEPA requirements or whether the agency met them. Instead, it found that the parties “simply differed in their opinions on how the forest should be managed.”
The Ninth District Court of Appeals disagreed. It said the “Sierra Club has made a factual showing of irreparable injury; therefore, the balance of harms favors the issuance of an injunction to protect the environment.”
That was before two presidents visited SQF — George H.W. Bush in 1992 and William J. Clinton in 2000 — to sign proclamations protecting giant sequoias. It was also before a contentious 18-month mediation attempted to resolve multiple appeals of SQF’s 1988 Forest Management Plan.
And it was before six wildfires between 2015 and 2021 killed many large sequoias in numerous groves across the Sierra Nevada. According to the National Park Service, more than 85% of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada burned in wildfires between 2015 and 2021, compared to only one quarter in the preceding century.
In an interview at a downtown coffee shop in Porterville, Pengilly said he stands by most of his decisions, including logging in the Black Mountain Grove — the most high-profile of the timber sales that triggered the Sierra Club lawsuit.
Photos of the aftermath of the 1987 logging project on a 15-acre slope there — temporarily leaving three large giant sequoias known as the “Three Sisters” standing in the middle of a clear-cut — were featured in articles published in Audubon and National Geographic magazines and many newspapers in the early 1990s.
Pengilly recalls that mature whitewoods (conifers other than giant sequoias) surrounded large giant sequoias, creating a wildfire hazard and making it impossible for the trees to regenerate.
Most people would agree that the area around the “Three Sisters” was an ugly mess after the logging.
Pengilly saw it as a necessary step toward future forest health.
In 1992, San Francisco Examiner reporter Jane Kay interviewed Porterville resident and giant sequoia activist Carla Cloer about the logging.
“The cutting was probably a one-time harvest, because these trees are never going to grow back,” Cloer told the reporter. “What’s coming back is a high-mountain desert instead of a forest.”
Scientists say that giant sequoias need wildfire to reproduce. However, foresters report that soil disturbance caused by logging or road-building can have the same impact, which proved true around those three big trees.
In 2014, forester and writer William Wade Keye visited the Black Mountain Grove and reported finding “the Sisters nestled within a dense carpet of vigorous young saplings. Many are giant sequoia trees, both planted and naturally regenerated. They became established, as planned, following ‘grove enhancement’ harvests and site preparation,” Keye wrote. (More HERE)
Keye included photographs from 2010 and 2014 in his article. They show remarkable change from the post-logging photos. Instead of a desert, the “Three Sisters” tower above a young forest filled with younger giant sequoia and other conifers.
As the Ninth District Court found, the Forest Service did not comply with NEPA before the timber sales.
But was there irreparable injury to the forest? Keye’s photos suggest otherwise.
“We cut the whitewoods, pile burned the slash when conditions allowed and replanted when and where natural regeneration didn’t occur,” Pengilly recalls
He is still annoyed that the photographers and writers who responded to environmentalists’ calls to record what appeared to be devastation around the “Three Sisters” didn’t return to see young giant sequoias growing tall just a few years later.
Would he do things differently?
Pengilly shakes his head. No.
“At times, we made clear cuts too big,” he said. “Scientifically, was it right? Probably so. But realistically — socially — can you convince people this is a good way of doing it? No. So a smarter way to do it is just a bunch of smaller cuts.”
Pengilly’s plan for the area around the three big trees was to thin them later and do an underburn when conditions allowed. But he said those plans were scuttled, partly because of the creation of Giant Sequoia National Monument in 2000.
Rules for managing more than 325,000 acres of SQF changed with the creation of the Giant Sequoia National Monument.
Pengilly said the presidential proclamation didn’t include additional funding, even though it spoke to the need for restoration. Promised funding for that purpose didn’t materialize.
“Plans don’t give you money,” he noted. “About half of the forest budget at the time was from timber sales. Reduced budget means reduced staff. Now, with the big fires, they’re getting money.”
Although the wildfires from 2015 to 2021 were much larger, Pengilly saw two very large wildfires on the Sequoia while he was a district ranger.
The 74,439-acre Manter Fire in 2000 was the largest recorded fire in SQF history at the time. Two years later, a fire more than twice that size — the 150,696-acre McNally Fire — brought national news reporters back to the Sequoia as it threatened (but did not burn) giant sequoia groves. The McNally destroyed 14 structures, which cost about $50 million to put out. Restoration efforts are still underway.
Quoted in an LA Times article about the beginning of McNally restoration in November 2002, Pengilly called the aftermath of the McNally “a moonscape” during a post-fire tour for area residents.
President Clinton visited Long Meadow Grove on April 15, 2000, to sign the proclamation establishing the Giant Sequoia National Monument before the Manter and McNally fires. His proclamation spoke to wildfire risk — and ended the management of the land for timber production.
Although monument lands were removed from timber production, just under 80,000 acres of 1.1 million-acre SQF are considered suitable for timber production, according to the new forest plan approved last year.
“The forest is lucky if it sells four million board feet a year,” Pengilly said. “Before, it was 80 million.” He added that the 1988 forest plan, replaced just last year, noted that “the long-range solution to the ever-increasing demand for fire protection is in the management of the forest fuels.”
The 2000 presidential proclamation said, “A century of fire suppression has led to an unprecedented failure in sequoia reproduction in otherwise undisturbed groves,” and “These forests need restoration to counteract the effects of a century of fire suppression and logging. Fire suppression has caused forests to become denser in many areas, with increased dominance of shade-tolerant species. Woody debris has accumulated, causing an unprecedented buildup of surface fuels. One of the most immediate consequences of these changes is an increased hazard of wildfires of a severity that was rarely encountered in pre-Euroamerican times.”
It took the Forest Service two tries to create a plan to manage the new Monument.
In January 2004, just months before Pengilly’s retirement, the agency issued a management plan. In August 2006, a federal judge directed the Forest Service to rewrite the plan in response to legal challenges from the state of California, the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations. A new plan has been in place since September 2012.
While all that planning was going on, the trees continued to grow. Three prolonged droughts — conditions that scientists attribute to climate change — meant that forest fuels were drier. Eventually, giant sequoias — trees once believed to be invincible to fire — were killed by wildfire.
Pengilly’s projects in the late 1980s were not described as fuel reduction efforts. They were timber sales — sending logs to the mill and generating income for the government. He believes the timber sales in the groves also helped reduce the fire hazard and aid the natural regeneration of giant sequoias.
Was that work very different from the work the Forest Service is doing now — the emergency action in giant sequoia groves authorized by Forest Service Chief Randy Moore in July 2022, or the more extensive work planned as part of forest restoration related to the 2020 Castle and 2021 Windy Fires?
“Ecological restoration authorized by the monument proclamation – that’s what the Forest Service is trying to do,” Pengilly said. “That’s not logging.”
The Sierra Club and others filed suit again in late February, claiming the Castle and Windy Fire restoration plans are illegal logging plans. The government answered that complaint on May 13 and said the agency acted in accordance with the law. The case remains pending.
The Clinton Proclamation states: “No portion of the monument shall be considered to be suited for timber production, and no part of the monument shall be used in a calculation or provision of a sustained yield of timber from the Sequoia National Forest. Removal of trees, except for personal use fuel wood, from within the monument area may take place only if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety.”
Fuel reduction work sometimes involves cutting trees. Sometimes, that’s called thinning. Sometimes, it’s called mechanical treatment. And sometimes, the land looks pretty bad afterward.
Some environmentalists believe the Forest Service — and other managers of giant sequoia lands — should leave things alone and that the forest will recover on its own.
“Well, it can do it on its own,” Pengilly said. But you’re talking about hundreds of years in some places. The brush is going to come back. Even after a fire, if you don’t treat it, at first (the land) is bare. Then some vegetation is going to grow.”
Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration for Save the Redwoods League, said in an April interview that natural regeneration isn’t enough in places where “entire landscapes, entire groves” burned at high severity. The League, along with other members of the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, has advocated for active forest management in recent years, which seems a lot like what Pengilly said he aimed for in the late 1980s.
Pengilly will tell you he doesn’t trust the League.
Responding on Facebook to a Sequoia National Forest post in early November 2020, Pengilly wrote: “This is what the Sierra Club and Save the Redwoods League want.” The photo showed blackened skeletons of trees that once grew in the Freeman Creek Grove.
He’s heard that the Sierra Club and Save the Redwoods League were on opposite sides when the now-dead Save Our Sequoias bill was introduced in Congress (in 2022 and 2023).
Old grudges die hard on the Sequoia, and Pengilly thinks the League was in cahoots with the Sierra Club when it filed the lawsuit against the timber sales. He knows it was among the groups that appealed the 1988 Forest Plan.
He remembers, too, that the League purchased the 1,540-acre Dillonwood Grove in 2001 and passed it on to Sequoia National Park. The Forest Service had been trying to purchase the land. After the park service took over Dillonwood, there was no management or road access, Pengilly said.
Giant sequoias in the Dillonwood Grove were among those killed in the 2020 Castle Fire.
Still, Pengilly gives the League credit for recent work.
“I’m interested in what they’re doing,” he said. “At least they’re trying to do something.”
Any kind of management around giant sequoias will be controversial, he added.
“But I didn’t join the Forest Service to kill giant sequoias. I joined the Forest Service to help the forest grow forever.”
Next up
Check back on Thursday for an update on the area around the Three Sisters and how that part of the Black Mountain Grove fared in recent years. And watch for more articles based on interviews in the future.
Also, in last Thursday’s edition, I reported that Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project was dismissive of two giant sequoia studies discussed in a news release from the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition*. Hanson has asked to clarify his position on those studies, so I’ll have that on Thursday.
*An earlier version of this newsletter mistakenly reported that the news release was from Save the Redwoods League.
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