Sierra Club, others, sue Forest Service
Sierra Club, others, sue Forest Service
Challenge to Castle and Windy Fire restoration plans
Volume 2, Number 31 - Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024
Publishing intermittently through March 2024
Perspective
I WAS NOT SURPRISED to hear last week that the Sierra Club, Earth Island Institute and Sequoia ForestKeeper have sued the Forest Service related to what the organizations call “two large logging and vegetation management projects in the Giant Sequoia National Monument and Sequoia National Forest.”
I was more surprised that the lawsuit wasn’t filed sooner. The plaintiffs have a long history of critical interaction with the Forest Service and this will not be the first time they have met in court.
You can read a report about the litigation from Courthouse News Service HERE and the Sierra Club’s view HERE.
The Forest Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment and probably won’t because the agency typically doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
As of yesterday, the online court tracker didn’t show a response from the government or any pending hearings.
Here’s a bit of background, and then I’ll go more into the claims made in the lawsuit:
• President William Jefferson Clinton designated the Giant Sequoia National Monument in April 2000. The monument originally encompassed 327,769 acres, but additional acreage has been acquired to bring it to 328,315 acres. The monument has two portions. The northern portion is on the Hume Lake Ranger District and is surrounded on three sides by Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The larger southern portion is on the Western Divide Ranger District and mostly in Tulare County.
• Sequoia National Forest (SQF) covers 1.1 million acres of Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties and includes the monument. A monument management plan approved in 2012 governs SQF lands that include giant sequoia groves.
• The proclamation establishing the monument provided direction for the management plan. You can read it HERE. Pertinent to the discussion at hand, the proclamation included:
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.
Here is a little more important background — Congress established the Forest Service in 1905 to provide quality water and timber for the nation’s benefit and later directed the Forest Service to broaden its management scope for additional multiple uses and benefits and for the sustained yield of renewable resources such as water, forage, wildlife, wood and recreation.
The presidential direction that “no portion of the monument shall be considered to be suited for timber production” changed the legal purpose of the land.
In other words, logging was off-limits on monument lands.
But there is a caveat: “Removal of trees … may take place only if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance of public safety.”
If everyone could agree on what is “clearly needed,” there would be no conflict. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
During the development of the first monument management plan — which I covered for the Southern Sierra Messenger — there was considerable debate about this. And to make a long story short, litigation resulted in the Forest Service being required to rewrite the management plan.
The new plan — like the one rejected by the court — was created in concert with an environmental impact statement that noted the purpose and need for action. Among the great concerns was concern that there was an unprecedented buildup of fuel on the land with a related risk of wildfire.
The presidential proclamation stated that “fire suppression has caused forests to become denser in many areas, with increased dominance of shade-tolerant species. And woody debris has accumulated, causing an unprecedented buildup of surface fuels.”
In other words, the president acknowledged — and everyone familiar with the land — knew there was plenty of fuel for a fire.
And there were fires — six huge fires between 2015 and 2021. They burned more than 85% of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada, compared to only 25% in the preceding century. In late July 2023, the National Park Service reported that thousands of giant sequoia trees were killed. The fires burned through giant sequoia groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Sierra National Forest, Giant Sequoia National Monument, Tulare County’s Balch Park, Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest, the Tule River Reservation and private lands.
I was certain that these fires would result in agreement about management to protect the remaining giant sequoias. I was wrong.
On July 22, 2022, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore approved an emergency response to expedite the implementation of approximately 13,377 acres of fuel reduction treatments in 12 giant sequoia groves to reduce the wildfire risk threatening the trees. According to information released by the agency at the time, the emergency fuels reduction treatments include hand cutting of brush and small trees, pulling duff away from the base of large giant sequoias, mechanical thinning, and prescribed burning.
I reported HERE (in the fourth issue of this newsletter) about a trip my husband and I made to the Black Mountain Grove near Camp Nelson in the mountains east of Porterville. The Forest Service responded quickly to the Chief’s direction, and we saw some of the first related fuel reduction work. Chainsaws were buzzing, and trees were falling as crews worked to remove vegetation around some Big Trees.
Another person on the field trip was Ara Marderosian of Sequoia Forest Keeper. I met him when the first monument management plan was being developed many years ago. His group was among those that successfully sued the Forest Service to require a rewrite of the first plan, which was characterized as the Bush administration’s logging plan.
I wondered if Marderosian’s views on forest management had changed after the massive wildfires. Apparently not. Sequoia ForestKeeper is one of the organizations suing the Forest Service in an attempt to block Issue implementation of the Castle and Windy Fire restoration projects “until such time as the Forest Service can demonstrate compliance with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and National Forest Management Act.”
The lawsuit
The lawsuit filed Feb. 22 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, references what the environmental organizations call “two large logging and vegetation management projects” in the monument and Sequoia National Forest. It notes that the Castle and Windy fire restoration projects are in addition to and in combination with the emergency actions authorized by Moore in July 2022.
According to the filing, “Plaintiffs did not challenge these emergency actions in the GSNM due to their scope, which was limited to a small radius around the larger giant sequoias in each sequoia grove, and because the Forest Service told the public that they would use hand tools and leave most felled trees on site and away from larger giant sequoias in burn piles or scattered away from the larger trees.”
The Castle and Windy fire restoration projects were approved by Sequoia National Forest late last year. The published decisions were among the first environmental documents to address the Yowlumni Pack of gray wolves discovered in Tulare County in August 2023 (a topic for another edition).
You can read more about the Castle Fire project HERE and the Windy Fire project HERE. And a copy of the lawsuit is HERE.
The environmental organizations claim in the lawsuit that “The Castle and Windy Projects constitute the largest logging projects proposed since the creation of the GSNM. In addition, actions would include vegetation management treatments in the form of pile burning, managed or prescribed burning, reforestation, and meadows restoration.”
Logging?
You may recall — as noted above — that logging is off-limits on monument lands.
By any definition I have found, the Forest Service doesn’t intend to log in Giant Sequoia National Monument as part of the Castle and Wind fire restoration projects.
It does intend to cut down a lot of trees. And it intends to plant trees in burned areas (also opposed by some of the same environmental groups with pending litigation against the Forest Service and NPS previously reported in this newsletter).
The environmental groups characterize the planned activity as logging and believe it violates the monument management plan.
The Forest Services believes the planned tree-cutting is needed for reasons allowed by the monument plan.
Forest Supervisor Teresa Benson, who signed the restoration plan decisions just before her retirement at the end of 2023, had met with representatives of the organizations before the plan was finalized and said, “We and the objectors did not come to a resolution of their concerns during the meeting.”
Further, she wrote, “The GSNM plan was written for a green forest not severely impacted by wildfire.”
Other issues
The Castle and Windy fire restoration plans were approved in concert with a finding of no significant impact (FONSI) by the Forest Service after the agency conducted environmental assessments. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, an EA is a lower-level review than an environmental impact statement (EIS).
The lawsuit claims that the analysis was insufficient and that an EIS should be conducted for each project.
The environmental organizations also believe that the projects would adversely affect several species listed or proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
Among other concerns are adverse effects on riparian areas, water quality, carbon storage and increased erosion that would substantially damage the natural regeneration of trees and other plant species in the areas.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare that the Forest Service violated NEPA, set aside the findings of no significance and decision notices for the projects, and compel the agency to prepare an EIS for both projects and issue an injunction against the projects.
Stay tuned …
You can download a copy of the lawsuit here:
Update! The lawsuit was later moved to a different court and has a new number. Details HERE.
Wildfire, water & weather update
We have an extra day in February (today) because it’s Leap Year, and we have three weeks of winter remaining. Weather watchers tell us El Niño may be on the way out, followed by La Niña, meaning that the ocean surface may warm up.
According to THIS Sacramento Bee article published a few days ago, “in the past, strong La Niñas can mean wet, dry or near normal weather conditions in Northern California. And, “in central and southern California, La Niña typically brings below-normal precipitation.”
Still, there are blizzard warnings for the Sierra Nevada this weekend — while snowpack levels remain unseasonably low (so far) despite recent storms.
The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
A new report from the National Interagency Fire Center tomorrow will update predictions for this year’s fire season.
Did you know you can comment here?
It’s easy to comment on items in this newsletter. Just scroll down, and you’ll find a comment box. You’re invited to join the conversation!
Giant sequoias in the news
• NPR has an excellent report HERE about giant sequoia planting in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks — and opposition to that planting. You can read it or listen to the six-minute report at the link. Here’s an excerpt:
A handful of conservation groups are suing to halt the effort, arguing that such intervention shouldn't occur in an area designated as federal wilderness and that the sequoia trees could possibly regenerate adequately on their own.
The debate is one occurring on public lands across the country as the impacts of climate change get worse. Land managers face a key question: As humans take an increasing toll on natural landscapes, how far should we go to fix it?
• You can read a fairly recent article by the National Park Service about the Booker T. Washington giant sequoia tree in Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, HERE.
• Listen to a podcast about giant sequoias produced by the National Parks Traveler HERE. Released earlier this month, the podcast features Savannah Boiano, the executive director of the Sequoia Parks Conservancy.
• The new film "California's Watershed Healing" documents the huge benefits of restoring forests to healthier densities. UC Merced's Sierra Nevada Research Institute partnered with the nonprofit Chronicles Group to tell the story of these efforts, the science behind them, and the pathways that dedicated individuals and groups are pioneering to scale up these urgent climate solutions. Read more HERE.
• From early December, the University of California, Berkeley, reported that a 20-year experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirmed that different forest management techniques — prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both — are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California. Read more HERE.
Dear readers …
Your patience is very much appreciated, dear readers. My life has been off-keel since the sudden and unexpected death of my husband in early December. I am working to right my course and hope to be back to regular twice-a-week posts by the end of March.
Thanks for reading!
Excellent coverage and summary of the Forest Service lawsuit!
Interesting article, thanks for posting!. I usually don’t side with the Sierra Club but sadly I feel they have a point here. I have seen first hand how the Forest Service used a much too heavy hand in “mitigation” in multiple areas of the Sierra. In many places they cut 70-85% of all trees & vegetation & it looks nothing like a healthy stand from control burns and / or healthy natural fire. It could easily be classified as “logging” & the Forest Service has a history of being “pro business”. In many areas hit by fire I’ve seen them clear cut areas that had a healthy burn (25-50% of the stand) then dump roundup on the areas (with plenty of streams nearby) to control brush as “restoration”. These areas are the most resistant to future fire & closest to a healthy stand but they clear cut them? And yes I saw the lumber on logging trucks leave the areas so I’ll believe my lying eyes here. Basically this is a complex issue & many studies have shown that the extremely low vapor content of ground fuels is a direct result of too much carbon in the atmosphere (climate change) which “mitigation” actually doesn’t solve, but contributes to. An argument could easily be made that the FS uses the fuel argument as optics to cover their pro business interests. Moreover, The Sierra Club wouldn’t exist without the heavy hand of the Forest Service, they are 2 extremes sides of the same coin & can’t exist in a vacuum. Native Americans used the lightest touch in their land management & controlled burns which is the polar opposite to how the Forest service “manages” so it’s a false equivalency. One of the biggest (if not the biggest) fire in New Mexico was a Forest Service control burn that got out of control. I think most people can get behind the extremely light touch & respect for the land approach Native American’s used but that’s in stark contrast to how both USFS & Sierra Club approach the issue. Respect for the land & living things should come before “resources” but regardless cutting trees that sequester carbon for “fire mitigation” or “logging” depending on your philosophical bias continues the current extreme climate cycle caused by too much carbon in the atmosphere. We need to consider ALL factors but historically Western man’s pro business, resource heavy, grow at all costs mindset has had an outsized negative impact on nature vs the Native American or even (hate to say it) Sierra Club mindset. YMMV.