Trump administration blames ‘environmental terrorist groups’ for wildfires. What’s really going on…

A new kind of thinking…
Patrick Koepele will put his environmentalist’s credentials up against anyone’s. He runs the Tuolumne River Trust, which is fighting to keep more water in the state’s rivers, drawing howls of protests from farmers and the Trump administration.

Yet he’s advocating for more chainsaws in the woods, through his work with Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, a group of environmentalists and loggers attempting to reduce fire risks in the region around Yosemite National Park.

The group’s members, who first convened in 2010, were wary about working together — until the disastrous Rim Fire, which burned 250,000 acres in Yosemite and the Stanislaus National Forest in 2013.

“That kind of cemented my sense of the forests in the Sierra as really overgrown,” Koepele said.

The group is now planning a project that will thin about 1,000 acres of forest east of Sonora.

“Before I lived in the foothills and became more closely acquainted with forests, I would have been skeptical of something like this,” said Koepele, who moved to Sonora from Davis in 2000. “Now I’ve gotten to see the forests, and spent time with researchers and spent time with some of the loggers.

“That’s my evolution. I think there’s a quite a bit of that among environmental groups in the Sierra.”