Overgrown forests are one of the key contributing factors to the current wildfire crisis in the West. The new Forest Service strategy on Confronting the Wildfire Crisis outlines the agency’s plan for increasing fuels and forest health treatments to create healthier forests and reduce the risk to communities. Read more at: Science says Thinned Forests are Healthy
YSS News
The Forest Service Has a Vision
The USDA Forest Service recently announced a 10-year strategy to confront the wildfire crisis and improve forest resilience. The agency will work with partners over the next decade to treat up to an additional 20 million acres on National Forest System lands and up to an additional 30 million acres of other Federal, State, Tribal, and private lands. This article highlights how partners come together to reduce risk of extreme wildfire and benefit local communities. Read more at: The Forest Service has a vision
Thinning is Needed by John Buckley
As an environmentalist, I am deeply frustrated by misinformation in the Feb. 15 Bee opinion piece by anti-logging activist Chad Hanson. The thrust of his claims was that a highly publicized new study by forest scientists intentionally omitted key information and that large Sierra Nevada wildfires supposedly kill few mature trees. He claimed the scientists who authored the study were funded by the U.S. Forest Service, and that the agency will benefit from the commercial logging promoted by the scientific study. Read more at: John Buckley Answers Chad Hanson 22-3
Forest Service takes major step forward on historically massive Tuolumne County project
The big project is named Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape, or SERAL, and it’s been born from an ongoing partnership between the federal Forest Service, the collaborative Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions group, and Tuolumne County. Other partners include Sierra Pacific Industries, the Tuolumne River Trust, and the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte. Read the full article at: Forest Service takes major step forward on historically massive Tuolumne County project 22-2
Middle Ground Needed on Forest Management Issues
by John Buckley
As rains dampen California’s drought-stressed forests and reduce the risk of high-severity wildfires, it’s critical for California residents to recognize some basic truths about forests, climate change, wildfires, smoke, and precious places on public forest lands. Read more here:Middle ground needed on forest management issues 21-10-31
Working Together
Representatives of Tuolumne County’s government and Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions are touting collaborative fuels reduction projects intended to protect communities in and near the Stanislaus National Forest, including Cedar Ridge and Big Hill. Read more here: Cedar Ridge Union Democrat 21-9
Eight years after Rim Fire, partners remain united for reforestation
August 17th marks the 8th anniversary of the Rim Fire, which, at the time, was the third largest fire in the history of California. The fire started at the confluence of the Tuolumne and Clavey rivers and burning 257,314 acres in forest and shrublands including 154,530 acres on the Stanislaus National Forest. Read the full press release here: Rim Fire 8th Anniversary (1)
Partnership Brings Dollars to the Forest
Sonora, Calif.— August 13, 2021. Tuolumne County and Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions received
$5 million for a CAL FIRE Healthy Forest grant to begin implementation of the Social and Ecological
Resilience Across the Landscape (SERAL) project designed to make local communities and forests
resilient to largescale fire, insect, and drought disturbances. Read more in this press release: YSS_TC_STF Partner NR_Final20210814
CAL FIRE Grants $10 Million for Forest Resilience Projects
About $5 million was designated to Tuolumne County and Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, a local collaborative working group of industry and environmental interests, which Peterson said will involve the installation of fuel breaks within the Stanislaus National Forest to slow or contain potentials fires within that region. Read more here: union democrat calfire grant 13aug21 (2)
Conservation groups call for more thinning, biomass removal and prescribed burning in national forests
The Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte and 14 other conservation groups are urging Randy Moore, the former Pacific Southwest regional forester who is now chief of the U.S. Forest Service, to increase prescribed burning, thinning of surface and ladder fuels, and biomass removal in the face of unnaturally severe megablazes and climate change.
Moore’s promotion to Forest Service chief was announced June 28. He is the 20th person and first African American to serve as Forest Service chief.
Moore was sworn in on July 26.
“Dear Randy,” the Aug. 2 letter begins, “As many of us have already communicated to you on behalf of our conservation organizations, we applaud your selection as the new Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Over the 14 years that you served as Regional Forester in Region 5, our groups worked closely with you on a broad range of issues.
“With this letter, we urge you — as the new Chief — to apply your leadership so that the Forest Service ramps up the pace and scale of needed actions to effectively address the pressing challenges of high-severity wildfires, climate change, and loss of biodiversity.”
Moore’s start as Forest Service chief coincides with the possibility that Congress is about to provide the agency with significantly increased funding that could enable it to more effectively address many challenges facing national forests and communities that rely on them, the conservationists note in their letter.
“We look forward to working with the Forest Service, national and state policymakers, tribes, and diverse stakeholder interests to ensure that taxpayer-funded investments are applied so that agency actions are carefully prioritized and science-based and provide beneficial social and ecological outcomes,” the open letter states. “By focusing on ecological restoration and science-based actions, the Forest Service can continue building trust so that individual national forests can ramp up the scale of forest treatments while minimizing controversy.”
Asked Tuesday to quantify how much conservationists want to see prescribed burning to increase, Jamie Ervin with Sierra Forest Legacy said, “The Forest Service and the state have set a goal of ramping up pace and scale forest restoration including prescribed burning to a million acres a year. That would be a good start. The actual fire regime — calls for more than that.”
Fire regime refers to the kind of fire and how much fire a particular ecosystem experiences historically, before European settlers arrived, Ervin said.
“Our best estimate is California would have had about 4.5 million acres burning annually,” Ervin said. “From lightning strikes and indigenous people burning intentionally for forest clearing and hunting.”
Prescribed burning right now is about 100,000 acres a year statewide, Ervin said, speaking from Nevada City, about 125 miles north of Sonora. It varies every year. An estimate of prescribed-burn acreage statewide so far this year was not available. Eighteen months ago, the California Air Resources Board reported there were 125,000 acres of prescribed burns statewide in 2019.
Fire is natural in California, and we need fire in the forests, Ervin emphasized. The issue right now is we’re experiencing unnaturally severe fires due to the fact we have suppressed fires for over a hundred years. Conservationists want more forest management, especially significant investment in federal and state prescribed fire programs.
The gigantic, 645-square-mile Bootleg Fire in Oregon, the 395-square-mile Dixie Fire in northern California, and other fires burning statewide are proving again that exceptionally dry weather conditions and extremely rugged terrain are creating giant wildfires of unprecedented size and intensity, John Buckley, executive director of CSERC, said Tuesday.
With their letter to Moore, the conservation groups share their collective agreement that it’s essential to significantly ramp up all three kinds of forest treatments — science-based thinning logging in appropriate areas; carefully planned prescribed burning during mild weather times of year; and the removal where economically possible of excess biomass fuels, Buckley said.
“This letter is a relatively unique sharing by a variety of conservation groups,” he said. “While our local organizations have been broadly supportive of those treatments, this is a strong sharing of agreement by groups that normally don’t emphasize endorsement of logging or biomass removal.”
Other groups that signed the letter with CSERC and Sierra Forest Legacy were the California Wilderness Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife, the Foothill Conservancy, Friends of the Inyo, the Training and Watershed Center, California Native Plant Society, Sierra Nevada Alliance, the Nature Conservancy, South Yuba River Citizens League, Sierra Business Council, the Tuolumne River Trust, American Rivers, and the Fire Restoration Group.
Moore was Pacific Southwest regional forester from 2007 to 2021. Since his promotion, Jennifer Eberlien is the new regional forester for the Pacific Southwest, which includes the Stanislaus National Forest and 17 other national forests in California.
Tuolumne County, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions Collaborative (YSS), will ramp up efforts to increase the pace and scale of landscape restoration on the Stanislaus National Forest, thanks to an infusion of federal funding.
In September, Tuolumne County received $ 8.67 million from the U.S. Forest Service, adding to the $11.2 million it already acquired from grants and direct funding to support fuels reduction and other restoration work on the Stanislaus National Forest. These projects and activities are part of a greater effort between the Stanislaus National Forest, Tuolumne County, YSS and other partners working together in shared stewardship of our National Forests. Read more at: USFS-Tuolumne County-YSS Partnership
Major project planned to reduce fuels in Middle, South Forks Stanislaus watersheds
Koepele also emphasized that Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions has been an outfront collaborative group, pushing and
working with the Forest Service to do more. It’s a diverse group that includes environmentalists, conservationists, loggers, recreational users, Tuolumne County government representatives, and biomass industry representatives.
“We’re committed to getting something done that benefits the environment, the economy, and the community,” Koepele said. Read more at: Major project planned to reduce fuels in Middle, South Forks (Spacing is off in article so keep moving down to see full post.)
The Trees and the Forest of New Towers
Building with mass timber can ameliorate climate change because it produces less in greenhouse gas emissions than construction with concrete and steel. And wood has the benefit of storing the carbon dioxide trees absorb during their growth, keeping it out of the atmosphere indefinitely. If you subscribe to the NYTimes, you can read the whole article at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/style/engineered-wood-tower-construction.html
Judge denies request for USFS to halt logging in Rim Fire scar
By Davis Harper / Calaveras Enterprise / Nov 6, 2019
In an ongoing legal battle over forest restoration efforts in the 2013 Rim Fire footprint in Tuolumne County, a federal judge on Oct. 7 denied a request to issue a temporary restraining order on the United States Forest Service (USFS) that would have halted a logging project for the time being.
National conservation groups Earth Island Institute (“EII”), Sequoia Forestkeeper and Greenpeace Inc., along with James Hansen, a climate change scientist, brought litigation against USFS, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in September of 2019.
The Rim Fire scorched more than 257,000 acres of Stanislaus National Forest land east of Sonora in 2013.
The following year, the Forest Service spearheaded the Rim Fire Recovery Project to “improve the land and local economies most affected by the Rim Fire.” That included the salvage of dead trees. EII and other environmental groups unsuccessfully challenged this project in court, alleging that the Forest Service should’ve prepared a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to assess impacts on spotted owl habitat, and that it should’ve taken a “hard look” at comments and evidence submitted during the review period of the project, according to court records.
In 2018, HUD allocated $28 million in disaster recovery grants to be administered by the state HCD to the Forest Service for removal of dead trees in areas of the Rim Fire scar that burned at a high intensity, according to the court filing. The grant also covers the construction costs of a biomass plant to incinerate the wood for power generation, the filing states.
In the current litigation, plaintiffs are alleging that the proposed logging activities on approximately 4,400 acres of forestland fall outside of a “disaster relief grant’s” scope, and that the three agencies broke environmental laws by accepting “outdated” Environmental Impact Statements from 2014 and 2016, which asserted that most of the forest proposed for logging would not regenerate naturally for several decades.
Dr. Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project, a project of EII, has been researching conifer regrowth in the Rim Fire footprint in recent years.
He claims that logging burned forests increases fire risk and destroys “postfire snag forest habitat, one of the most biodiverse and ecologically important forest habitat types.”
Commenting on the latest developments in the litigation, Hanson said, “The bar is very high to get a (temporary restraining order), so they are rarely granted. We disagree with the district court judge in the Northern District, who denied our request, but that’s water under the bridge at this point, as the case was transferred to the Eastern District, to Judge Drozd in Fresno.”
The lawsuit highlights a larger discussion over how and whether wildfire-ravaged public lands in the Sierra Nevada should be managed to protect watersheds, wildlife and communities from future fires. Both sides say the end goal is a healthy forest, but disagree on how to get there. The Forest Service advocates for “fuels reduction” (logging), prescribed fire and reforestation treatments to reduce buildup of flammable trees that compete for water and nutrients. By contrast, Hanson argues the forest should be left to regenerate on its own (with the exception of felling hazard trees around main roads and campgrounds), based, in part, on his documentation of trees sprouting up in the Rim Fire scar.
When asked for comment, a Forest Service representative told the Enterprise, “We cannot comment on ongoing litigation.”
John Buckley, executive director of the Twain Harte-based Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center (CSERC), has vocally opposed the litigation since it was filed.
Formed in 2010 with the goal of ramping up restoration efforts in the southern portion of the Stanislaus National Forest and adjacent landholdings, the Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions (YSS) collaborative stakeholder group includes representatives of the timber industry, grazing interests, local government, environmental organizations (including CSERC), business interests, motorized recreation groups, and state and federal agencies.
According to Buckley, YSS “unanimously supports moving forward to lower fuel levels in the Rim Fire area so as to reduce the risk of yet another devastating high severity wildfire in the future … Those who filed the suit are extreme environmental organizations actively working to block a wide range of forest restoration treatments that mainstream and local environmental groups believe are not only reasonable but highly needed.”
With the temporary restraining order denied, Buckley said there may only be approximately 1,000 acres – less than a quarter of the project area – left to be logged that could be affected by a court decision later this year.
The next court date is scheduled for Dec. 3 in Fresno. At that time, the court will determine whether or not the biomass removal of dead trees and fallen logs should be allowed to continue, whether pile burning in the forest is consistent with the Forest Service-approved plan, and whether the HUD grant is an appropriate funding source for the fuel reduction work, according to Buckley.
State Issues Nearly $2 Million in Grants to Build Local Capacity to Protect and Restore State Forests
March 21, 2019
SACRAMENTO – Eight organizations have received $1.85 million in grants to hire watershed coordinators who will build local capacity to improve forest health, the Department of Conservation (DOC) announced today.
“Healthy forests are essential to reduce catastrophic wildfires, supply clean water, and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” DOC Director David Bunn said. “Watershed coordinators can play a major role in ensuring the health of our forests by promoting collaboration, integrating watershed management efforts, and supporting local activities that restore resilience to forest lands.”
Local projects will support the state’s Forest Carbon Plan and Executive Order B-52-18 and help achieve the California Global Warming Solutions Act’s goal of reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The recipients, headquarters location, and amount of funding each received:
- YSS/Tuolumne River Trust, San Francisco, $235,000