Volume 2, Number 64 - Thursday, July 18, 2024
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
SCIENTIFIC AND LEGAL DOCUMENTS can be daunting, but I spent some time with both over the last few days.
A Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition news release drew my attention to two giant sequoia regeneration studies. You can read the release HERE and a related article in the Foothills Sun-Gazette (Exeter), HERE.
A couple of months ago, a reader whose work I admire wrote me, saying that I “seem to be on a personal journey in search of a fact-based understanding about the current status and future outlook for our Big Trees. Such understanding is far from easy to develop, with the questions on the table being a complex mix of hard science and personal philosophy.”
In many ways, this is my personal journey, and when I write under the heading of “perspective” in this newsletter, I am often sharing just that — what I’m seeing, learning, and reading about at a given time.
This morning, in the interest of time and attention spans, I will try to sum up my journey since receiving the Coalition's latest news release. (If you’re not familiar with the GSLC, there’s more information HERE.)
The news release calls attention to studies published in March and June, both having to do with giant sequoia regeneration following high-severity wildfire. Here’s an excerpt (from the news release):
Extreme wildfires have killed up to 20% of the world’s mature giant sequoias since 2015, a majority of which perished from three wildfires in 2020 and 2021.
The recent mega-fires burned at a size and severity far more extreme than the historic norm, and the new studies show that without intervention, some giant sequoia groves may experience a long-term or permanent loss of acreage as seed trees have died, and the number of new seedlings is exceptionally low.
“What we used to call high-severity fire does not compare to the unprecedented scale and severity of the wildfires we’ve experienced in recent years in the Sierra Nevada,” said one of the paper’s lead authors, Nathan Stephenson, Ph.D., scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center and one of the foremost experts on sequoias.
“Giant sequoias are the largest trees in the world. They’re fire-adapted and rely on fire to reproduce. But recent fires have killed thousands of mature trees and, in some cases, their seeds too.” The U.S. Geological Survey has provided scientific expertise and data-driven models to the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition to inform land management and restoration decisions.
In early May, Chad Hanson of the Earth Island Institute’s John Muir Project sent me copies of reports on two studies he and others published earlier this year. His reports also provide information about the post-fire reproduction of giant sequoias — one focused on the Nelder Grove in Sierra National Forest and the other based on a study within the Redwood Mountain Grove in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
I asked Hanson about the studies referenced in the Coalition’s news release this week, and he was dismissive of both.
If you’re a regular reader, you know that I covered a presentation by Hanson made in late April to the Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club — and that Camp70 Foresters wrote HERE, challenging Hanson’s point of view — and Hanson rebutted their comments HERE. (And readers have made more comments).
Regular readers also know that Hanson has ties to two pending lawsuits against the government related to giant sequoia management. One (1:23-cv-01045-JLT-EPG, US District Court, Eastern District of California) is concerned with Nelder Grove and the other (1:23-cv-01398-KES-BAM, same court) is concerned with SEKI’s fuels reduction and seedlings project following what even the lawsuit calls “a series of catastrophic wildfires” in 2020 and 2021. I’ve written about both previously. (And, yes, the reports on the studies he sent me relate to the lawsuits).
I try to keep up with the lawsuits and recently read the latest government and litigant filings. Like the scientific reports I’ve referenced here, they are dueling documents. Eventually, judges will decide these cases and the bottom line will likely be whether the government followed the law.
In other words, as I understand it, judges won’t tell us the best management for giant sequoias — whether dead trees should be removed or seedlings planted — they’ll determine whether the NPS and Forest Service did what the law requires in terms of paperwork.
The projects — fuels reduction and replanting — are continuing as resources and conditions allow. There has not been an injunction to stop them.
Like many of my readers, I’m just an ordinary person — not a lawyer, scientist, forester or governmental decision-maker. What are we ordinary people to make of these dueling documents — scientists who disagree and environmental organizations challenging the government in court?
We could say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. We could say more, but it wouldn’t make any difference.
In the meantime, there is still tons of dry vegetation on the Sierra Nevada, some of it sitting in and around giant sequoia groves, just waiting for the next wildfire.
I’m not happy about that.
Wildfire, water & weather update
If you’re anywhere in California, you’ve probably seen fire equipment on the move lately. Many new fires were caused recently by dry lightning. In Tehachapi, south of the Sierra Nevada), CalFire and Kern County Fire set up a huge fire camp at the high school barely a mile from my house earlier this week. The camp provides a base for attacking two nearby wildfires in the Tehachapi Mountains. It’s been amazing to watch the equipment move in, and I noticed firefighters sleeping in everything from pup tents to yurts to mobile sleeping quarters (with every hotel room in town taken, too). I wrote about it HERE.
Speaking of yurts, Alex Wigglesworth of the LA Times wrote about firefighters dealing with extreme heat and using yurts as emergency cooling stations during the Basin Fire on Sierra National Forest recently. Read her piece in the LA Times HERE or HERE (Yahoo News).
Wildfire information is online HERE and HERE and HERE (WatchDuty, Cal Fire and Inciweb).
Extreme heat in the San Joaquin Valley, extreme heat in the Mojave Desert and the southern Sierra Nevada in between — with even hotter temperatures in the forecast. That’s not a pretty picture. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
It’s not surprising that we’re moving toward drought. The latest California drought map is HERE.
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