Save the Redwoods League's Ben Blom
Giant sequoia stewardship is part of his job
Volume 2, Number 39 - Monday, April 22, 2024
It’s Earth Day!
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
TODAY IS EARTH DAY, and I’m old enough to remember the first observance of this day 54 years ago. According to EarthDay.org, the day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. April 22 was chosen to maximize the participation of college students as it was a weekday falling between spring break and final exams, and the founders wanted to recruit student activists.
It’s also the day after John Muir’s birthday (in 1838), and the two celebrations have been observed together in some places through the years.
Yesterday, while driving from my home in Tehachapi to the San Joaquin Valley community of Hanford, I decided that April is a particularly fitting time to celebrate Earth Day because the foothills were bright green, and I could see the snowy crest of the Sierra Nevada from miles away as I drove north on Highway 99. It is a glorious sight we don’t get to enjoy that often.
Spring takes its time coming to the mountains, but the valley below was lush with new growth, and canals were full, moving water from mountain rivers to irrigate crops.
Soon, the foothills will turn golden, and most of the snow in the mountains will melt. Rivers and reservoirs will fill with water, and people will swarm the Sierra Nevada, in search of respite from busy lives.
This is the cycle we know in California. It’s a modern cycle but bears some resemblance to earlier days when native people moved from the valley to the foothills to the mountains, then back to the warmer valley for the winter.
The annual changes are part of longer cycles that many of us notice only when the extremes become inconvenient. We notice drought. We notice wildfires. And — often with little knowledge or understanding — we argue about causes.
Earth Day is a good time to consider these things. It’s also a good time to check out the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University (HERE).
I loved this intro from the lab’s website:
You’re looking at me, but are you really seeing me? — Earth
Our world is speaking to us, but for too long we have not listened.
To shape a thriving future, we must rediscover our relationship with our planet. We are immersed in the infinite and complex network of systems that make up our world, and our mandate is to keep these systems in balance so that all life on Earth may thrive. This requires a vision for better that brings all of our voices together to craft long-term, sustainable solutions.
The website has lots more information, and one of the most important things they’re doing at this laboratory is studying extremes. (You can read more HERE.) We’ve certainly seen extremes in the Sierra Nevada (and elsewhere) in recent years.
Giant sequoias have seen extremes before. Their tree rings tell the stories. Are we listening to those stories?
This month, on April 15, was also the 24th anniversary of the establishment of Giant Sequoia National Monument. President Bill Clinton’s proclamation was intended to protect the giant sequoias (and other “objects” on the land). You can read it HERE, and an excerpt:
These giant sequoia groves and the surrounding forest provide an excellent opportunity to understand the consequences of different approaches to forest restoration. 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. Outstanding opportunities exist for studying the consequences of different approaches to mitigating these conditions and restoring natural forest resilience.
Since this proclamation, we have seen the severe wildfires that had long been predicted and have lost thousands of giant sequoias.
This newsletter was established to report on the challenges faced by giant sequoias — not the least being that there is disagreement about how the lands where they grow should be managed.
My challenge this Earth Day is for everyone with an opinion to step back and consider, as the Global Futures laboratory asks — is there a way to “bring our voices together to craft long-term, sustainable solutions” for giant sequoias and the rest of our planet? — Claudia Elliott
Meet Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration for Save the Redwoods League
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
BEN BLOM brought more than 15 years of restoration and forestry management experience and a master’s degree in forestry from the Yale School of the Environment to Save the Redwoods League when he became its director of stewardship and restoration in June 2022.
His work with giant sequoias includes oversight of the League’s activities at its Alder Creek property and its stewardship agreements with the Forest Service for work in the Long Meadow and Packsaddle giant sequoia groves.
The League was first known for its work to protect the coast redwood of (Sequoia sempervirens), beginning in 1918. By 1954, the nonprofit organization had expanded its focus to include California’s other redwoods — the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada — assisting in the purchase of the South Grove of giant sequoias to be added to Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
Additional efforts throughout the years focused on giant sequoias, including the League’s 2001 purchase of the 1,540-acre Dillonwood giant sequoia grove for $10.3 million. The property was almost immediately transferred to Sequoia National Park.
The League’s December 2019 purchase of the 530-acre Alder Creek property in the mountains east of Porterville for $15.25 million came with the news that it planned to own and manage the property for five to 10 years before transferring it to the Forest Service for inclusion in Giant Sequoia National Monument.
The League reported that it would develop and implement forest restoration and stewardship activities and develop public access plans for the land.
The Castle Fire proved that plans don’t mean much.
In September 2020 — less than a year after the League purchased the Alder Creek property, the Castle Fire, part of the SQF Complex Fire, reached the giant sequoias and other trees growing there. (It burned through Dillonwood, as well).
According to the National Park Service, the Castle Fire burned 171,000 acres, including more than 9,530 acres of giant sequoia groves, representing about a third of all giant sequoia grove areas in the Sierra Nevada.
“About half of the (Alder Creek) property burned at very high severity — where we had close to 100% mortality of all of our trees on the property,” Blom said in a telephone interview on April 19.
“The other half of the property burned at lower severity with a pretty healthy resource burn,” he added.
According to an article published by the League in 2015 — when Blom was manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s Headwaters Forest Reserve — the Boston native was on a pre-med track at Colgate University and discovered his passion for forests and forest ecosystems after graduation while working as a wildlife surveyor for Mendocino Redwood Company.
That passion led him to Yale and then to a BLM fellowship, where he spent three years developing a management plan for the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area in Colorado before accepting the Headwaters Forest Reserve job.
Before joining the League, his last job with the BLM was as the central coast field office manager in Marina, California, where he oversaw restoration and management operations across 300,000 acres of public land in ten California counties.
Blom is assisted in his work with giant sequoias by staff who regularly work on League property and projects in nearby areas, including a giant sequoia stewardship manager, two forest fellows and a forester who oversees the operational side of the work.
He reported that Luis Vidal will begin work today as the giant sequoia stewardship manager. Vidal most recently worked as the Northern California reforestation manager for American Forests. He replaces Tim Borden, who left the League late last year.
Post Castle-fire activity
Blom said that after the Castle Fire, the League focused on the high-severity burn area at Alder Creek bordering the Sequoia Crest community.
“We did a large multi-year reforestation project there, trying to reestablish trees in the area where we basically had 100% mortality from the fire,” he noted. “That involved removing a lot of the dead standing trees while retaining some for wildlife habitat.”
The work drew criticism on a website called ILoveTrees.net created by Sue Cag, who lost her home in Sequoia Crest in the Castle Fire.
An unsigned article published Sept. 9, 2023, on Cag’s website, alleged that illegal logging was taking place in the redwood grove. The League responded HERE to those claims, saying that they were “at best inaccurate and, worse, dangerously misleading.”
Blom said reforestation efforts are continuing at Alder Creek. About 50,000 seedlings were planted there last spring, and about 10,000 more will be planted this year, in part to make up for some of the seedling mortality.
There are also two experiments underway on the property in cooperation with the League’s research partners.
A project by the University of California, Berkeley, involved planting trees at different densities.
“They’re looking at how those seedlings will survive over time at those different densities of planting,” Blom said.
A second experiment is related to the fact that giant sequoia seedlings grown from Alder Creek grove seeds were not available.
“We were able to get giant sequoia seeds from different groves, and we planted them in an experiment to see if the different genetic stocks of those seedlings impact mortality,” he said.
With the multi-year reforestation project in that area largely complete, “at this point, we’re just letting those trees grow.”
Referencing the side of the Alder Creek property that burned at low severity, Blom said the Sierra Nevada Conservancy provided a grant to assist with that land.
“We finished the first year of implementation there, and that's really focused around fuels reduction,” he said. The work included pile burning of dead and down tree material and smaller trees — particularly shade-tolerant trees like white fir that have grown thick as a result of fire suppression.
“We finished close to 50 acres of that last year, and we have another 200 acres that we're hoping to finish this year,” he said. Another grant will fund prescribed burning in that area.
Climate and fire resiliency
“One of the most incredible things about these trees is just how long they live, and it's always humbling to me just to think about how many cycles of drought, how many cycles of fire, how many cycles of extreme storms, these trees have survived,” Blom said. “They’re incredible in their resilience.”
Still, the loss of about 20% of the world’s largest, oldest giant sequoias caused many, including Joanna Nelson, the League’s director of science and conservation, to call for action in 2021, describing the problem as an emergency.
Blom attributes the fires that ripped through giant sequoia groves in recent years to a century of fire suppression.
“We as a society, by suppressing fire for 100 years, created a very interesting experiment, and we're really testing the resilience of these trees,” he said. “We're really pushing these systems outside of what would be a natural range of variability to the point that as fire-adapted as the giant sequoia is, (trees are) dying in huge numbers.”
He said the goal of the work is to rebuild a mutually beneficial relationship between fire and giant sequoias.
“Sometimes, to get us back to that point where we can bring back healthy, good fire, we have to go in with chainsaws,” he said — to reduce some of the accumulated fuel that's been building up for 100 years.
“Once that initial work is done, we hope that the future management of these groves can be with fire as the primary tool — prescribed fire and cultural burning (and) managed wildfire in certain cases.”
Although California has had better-than-average snowpack and precipitation the last two years and milder than typical wildfire seasons, drought and more wildfires are certain to return.
“We can’t control the next drought,” Blom said. But we can control the forest conditions to make our forests more resilient when the next drought happens.
Noting that climate models show that drought will likely be more frequent and probably more intense in the future, with more intense storms in the winter, Blom said it’s important to take advantage of wet periods to help build forest resiliency.
He pointed to the work of the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, with which the League is involved and noted that fewer large fires in the past two years helped all involved get more work done.
“We probably wouldn't have been able to achieve so much if we had busy fire seasons because a lot of the same people who do this work are also working on fires,” he said. “We seized this opportunity in the last two years to really get a good start on rebuilding some of that resiliency, and once we get these groves back into what's more of a natural state, we can allow them to coexist again with fire as a natural part of the system.” (A report about the Coalition’s work last year is HERE).
Contrary views
Not everyone agrees with the work done by the League or other members of the Coalition, including Sequoia and Kings National Parks and Sierra and Sequoia National Forests.
Litigation against some projects, including tree-cutting and planting, is pending, and litigants — including the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations — have suggested that the forests where the giant sequoia grow will recover on their own over time and should largely be left alone.
Among critics is Chad T. Hanson of Earth Island Institute’s John Muir Project, who appears in the news regularly and has been especially critical of reforestation efforts.
In one article, HERE, he is quoted as saying that “these recent fires have not been a disaster in the Sequoia groves. They have not. They're not the doom of Sequoias. They're the salvation of the giant sequoias.” And in February, NPR carried this REPORT, where Hanson said, "I'm not worried about it because the system is massively and redundantly resilient to these sorts of disturbances.”
Blom said he’s familiar with Hanson’s views.
“Some of his views come from a very philosophical perspective on the role of people in nature that I fundamentally disagree with,” Blom said.
He added that it’s sometimes a struggle to realize that the forests were in an unnatural state before the big fires.
“All of the research and literature points to us being way far outside of natural conditions in terms of the number of trees per acre and the amount of fuels that we have per acre,” he said.
“When you talk to our indigenous partners, they'll tell you these places have been managed for thousands of years,” he said. “They may not have replanted like we did… but we wouldn't have to (replant) if we hadn't pushed these forests so far outside of natural conditions.”
Blom added that he thinks there is a glimpse of truth to some of Hanson’s opinions, particularly related to the trees being dependent on fire and the post-fire regeneration.
“But when you have these entire landscapes, entire groves that burn at high severity, they don't regenerate as well,” he said. “They do really well in patches of high-severity fire where you have kind of a mosaic — high, low and medium severity fire. But when you have entire landscapes … that burned at such a high severity, we're not seeing regeneration at nearly the rate or the density that we would need (for the land) to move forward as a forest in the future.”
He said the League surveys areas before replanting, to see where natural seedlings may be — or where they might not be.
“There are areas where we have decided not to replant because we have natural regeneration,” he said. But in other areas land managers are seeing regeneration failure.
“We're not seeing the next cohort of trees coming in. And so those are the areas that we are focused on replanting because we think that in the absence of human intervention, they will convert to a different vegetation type — conversion to shrub vegetation. In some areas, that's okay; that's a natural thing that happens. But across entire landscapes, that is not something that has happened for thousands of years.
“We're tinkering with things where we feel like we need to… And when the fire hits, you know, the system may need a little bit of human intervention to get it back within that natural range of variability.”
Wildfire, water & weather update
Stormy weather isn’t over for the Sierra Nevada. The forecasts for this week include the possibility of thunderstorms, rain and snow at higher elevations. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE. In Central California, we’re moving from winter weather advisories to forecasts of unseasonably warm weather.
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Thanks for reading!
Another fascinating and well researched article! Anne Marie Novinger