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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Map: These wild California forests could open to logging under Trump plan
The Trump administration is seeking to undo a 25-year-old rule that shields nearly a third of U.S. Forest Service lands from roads and logging, including large swaths of California, notably areas near Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and Giant Sequoia National Monument. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who announced the plan to rescind the 'roadless rule' this week, called the protections outdated, saying they were preventing responsible timber production and necessary wildfire prevention work. Conservation groups, however, shot back that the move would simply encourage destructive logging ventures in ecologically important areas. They pledged to fight the action as it winds through what promises to be a lengthy and litigious repeal process. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule covers about 59 million acres of Forest Service lands, mostly in Western states. The protections were initiated by President Bill Clinton to try to stop the encroachment of industry in some of the last untouched parts of national forests. Many have criticized the measure, though, as an end run on the Wilderness Act because it establishes safeguards similar to wilderness areas without getting congressional approval as required by the act. In California, 4.4 million acres across 20 national forests are protected by the rule, according to the Forest Service. It's nearly 5% of the state's total lands and includes stretches of such heavily visited forests as the Tahoe, Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Inyo. Many of the spots that are protected border wilderness areas and national parks. 'Most people think they're in wilderness when they step in,' said John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy landscapes. 'People use them as gateways to go through to get to wilderness areas' and to parks. Buckley and others describe some of the protected lands as ecological hot spots where the development of roads and timber operations would fragment sensitive habitat, disrupt wildlife and pollute watersheds. 'It would be short-sighted and arrogant for the American people to support the unleashing of chainsaws and the bulldozing of new roads into the small percentage of our public lands that have managed to stay pristine, wild, roadless areas,' Buckley said. While enterprises such as oil drilling and mining aren't expressly prohibited under the roadless rule, the policy has served as a de facto ban because roads are required for such endeavors. Supporters of the rule say new roads would inevitably bring these commercial activities. Speaking this week at a meeting of the Western Governors' Association, Secretary Rollins said not building roads into these areas is worse. It prevents the Forest Service from ensuring that important firefighting and fire mitigation work is done, she said. She also said it stifles economic development, which is at odds with President Trump's many executive orders calling for greater resource extraction on federal lands. 'This move opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation's forests,' Rollins said. 'It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.' The timber trade widely welcomed the proposed rollback, though opening new public lands for private logging is no guarantee of increased timber production. Building roads into these areas will be costly. Under the Trump administration, the Forest Service has cut the staffing that helps plan and oversee logging contracts. The timber industry, especially in California, has lost capacity to harvest wood. Matt Dias, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, said foresters would be happy to have more opportunities to work with the federal government on projects that can increase forest health and fire safety. 'We are very pleased that they're considering rolling back this particular policy, if it will help us get to where we want to be,' he said. The announcement of the repeal kicks off an administrative process that requires a technical review of what the impact would be as well as inviting public comment. This could take months, a year or even longer. If the rule is changed or eliminated, litigation will almost certainly follow. Environmentalists insist that little good will come of revoking the rule. They say the Trump administration's promotion of the action as a fire prevention measure is simply propaganda. 'Logging, that's what this is about,' said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. 'They don't like anything that puts a stop to commercialization and exploitation. … Stripping protections from these last unfragmented national forests risks our drinking water, plants, animals and some of America's most beautiful wild places.'
San Francisco Chronicle
18-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump wants to let chain saws loose in California national forests. Here's how it could go
The Trump administration is calling in the chain saws at scores of national forests, including the 18 in California, hoping to ramp up timber production in places that millions of Americans visit each year. But the effort will only get so far. Despite fears of vicious clear-cutting, forestry experts say too many things are working against today's timber trade to expect a vast expansion of logging, especially in California, whether it's the forests around Lake Tahoe, near Yosemite or at Big Sur. For starters, the industry has lost capacity to process wood. There are also issues with the trees, which have been degraded by wildfires and drought or set aside for protection. Additionally, recent federal staffing cuts are likely to hobble the Forest Service's ability to prepare logging contracts. 'Operationally, they're not going to get much done,' said Bill Stewart, emeritus forestry specialist at UC Berkeley. The inability to significantly increase timber operations, while sparing trees, comes with downsides. Foremost may be a failure to reduce wildfire risk. Targeted tree removal, though often controversial, is sometimes used as a tactic to make wildlands less combustible by thinning overgrown vegetation. With so much of the West burning in recent years, the need to safeguard forests and nearby communities is indisputable. California has seen nine of its 10 biggest blazes in the past decade. Just months ago, parts of Los Angeles were obliterated by flames. The Trump administration cites fire danger as one of the reasons for wanting more trees cut, alongside wanting to 'fully exploit' public lands for wood supplies and revive the domestic timber industry. 'Increasing logging, in and of itself, is not a terrible threat,' said John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy mountain landscapes. 'If it is consistently (done) in a fashion that keeps environmental protection measures, it may result in a more fire-resistant forest.' The president's push for logging comes alongside a handful of other major initiatives intended to harden forests to fire, each of which may involve removing trees. They include the bipartisan Fix our Forests Act and Save our Sequoias Act, both being taken up by Congress. In addition, Gov. Gavin Newsom is directing expedited fire-prevention work, including tree removal, on state and private lands. Many environmental groups remain wary of these efforts. Despite headwinds facing the timber industry, the groups say profit-driven logging companies will find ways to use the policies to cut down high-value trees that have little to do with fire danger. Even a small amount of logging, they say, can sometimes cause great damage to forests and ecosystems. A steady decline. Then, an executive order President Donald Trump's executive order to boost logging was issued March 1 and has since crystalized into a U.S. Forest Service directive to increase timber production by 25% over five years. Plans for how and where the additional logging will occur are yet to be drafted. Forest Service officials, though, confirmed that all of California's national forests will play a role in meeting the target. The agency manages about 20 million acres in California, from the Cleveland National Forest near Mexico to the Klamath National Forest along the Oregon border. The federal lands, which are obliged to serve several purposes, including recreation, wilderness and commercial activity, constitute more than half of the state's forests. 'Active management has long been at the core of Forest Service efforts to address the many challenges faced by the people and communities we serve,' agency officials said in an emailed response to the Chronicle about the proposed increase in timber production. While logging is a staple in national forests, the practice has subsided considerably in recent decades. Nationwide, timber sales on agency lands averaged about 3 billion board feet annually over the past few years compared to almost four times that amount in the logging heydays of the 1970s and '80s, federal data show. The drop in sales has come with a decline in infrastructure. In California, there are about 30 medium-to-large sawmills today, down from more than 100 last century. Most of the existing mills have been retooled to process smaller trees. Scott Stephens, a professor of fire ecology and forestry at UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, said the industry simply doesn't have the capacity to quickly rebound. He said a few mills in California's far north may be able to increase output but that does little good for the rest of the state. 'They've actually tried putting (logs) on train cars and shipping them to Northern California or all the way up to Oregon, and it turned out to be fiscally implausible,' he said. Biomass plants, which turn wood into energy and have been lauded as an alternative way to bring trees to market, are yet to prove viable on a large scale. Even if the timber industry was able to process more trees, logging companies wouldn't necessarily source the additional wood from national forests. The industry has increasingly shifted to private lands for supplies, with federal lands now accounting for less than 10% of the wood produced in California, compared to more than 40% in the 1980s. Among the reasons that federal lands have fallen out of favor are that many high-value trees have burned or been marred by insects and disease, or they remain off-limits to loggers or are too hard to get to. The smaller, more accessible trees aren't worth the cost of cutting. Some forests, including the Los Padres National Forest, which is home to Big Sur, and the Angeles National Forest in Southern California haven't seen significant interest from logging companies in decades. The challenge of turning things around on federal lands would likely be complicated by staff reductions at the Forest Service. The Trump administration, as part of a broad effort to streamline government, has enacted layoffs, early retirements and forced leaves. The number of employees lost at the 35,000-person Forest Service is unclear, with union officials initially estimating that 10% of the workforce was cut though some workers have since been reinstated and others have accepted buyouts. Even before the new administration, the agency was short staffed. More reductions are expected. While logging in national forests is generally done by private companies, federal employees select the sites, bid out the projects, manage the permitting and keep tabs on the work — all responsibilities that would be slowed with fewer scientists and forestry technicians. Already, staff cuts are prompting forest managers to plan for fewer recreation services. The largest logging company in California, Sierra Pacific Industries, declined an interview with the Chronicle to discuss the prospects for timber production under the new administration. George Gentry, the senior vice president of the trade group California Forestry Association, acknowledged that the industry faces challenges but said he welcomes the overtures at both the federal and state levels to support logging and forest restoration. What exactly this will mean for timber production, he said, depends on how the policies play out. A war on red tape Last month, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins set the stage for expedited approvals of logging projects by declaring an emergency across 113 million acres of national forests, citing wildfires, disease and insect infestation. The designated area represents 59% of the agency's total lands. Forest Service officials have since detailed how new timber proposals on emergency lands will be advanced through scaled-back environmental reviews, public input and expert consultation, when legally possible. While it's unclear whether the streamlined approval process will spur more logging, the Trump administration isn't alone in deeming red tape an obstacle to forestry work. Political leaders on both sides of the aisle, wanting to do more to address the wildfire crisis, are pushing to fast-track approvals of tree projects. Both the Fix our Forests Act, with bipartisan authorship that includes Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and the Save our Sequoias Act, similarly sponsored by Democrats and Republicans, call for comprehensive forest management strategies on federal lands. In doing so, they codify rollbacks of project reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act for a range of activities. These include creating fuel breaks, proactively burning flammable vegetation and cutting down trees. (The Trump administration's agenda is focused almost solely on cutting down trees.) Newsom in March issued an emergency proclamation that supports a similar multifaceted approach to confronting wildfires on state-governed lands. Issued on the same day as Trump's executive order on timber production, the directive suspends provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act and Coastal Act to accelerate forestry projects. A raft of environmental groups, which includes the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity, is concerned not only about the ecological harm that can come with efforts to sidestep regulation but that much of the intended forestry work, particularly removing trees, won't temper wildfire danger. It's a subject of increasing debate among scientists. 'Logging is not going to curb fires, not in the era of climate change,' said Chad Hanson, research ecologist and director of the John Muir Project. 'It tends to make them burn faster and hotter and toward towns.' Studies have shown that active timber sites can readily carry flames, as they did during the massive 2021 Dixie Fire. In many logged areas, the larger, fire-resistant trees have been removed while the smaller trees that replace them are more susceptible to burning. Also, tree removal can leave forests hotter and windier and hence more prone to an extreme fire, especially as the planet warms. At the same time, studies have shown that many forests are dangerously overgrown, largely due to decades of putting out wildfires that would have otherwise cleared vegetation, and that selective logging would reduce the threat. 'Excess timber will come out of the forest in only two ways: Either we will carry it out, or nature will burn it out,' said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-El Dorado Hills, who represents parts of the Sierra Nevada and is a co-sponsor of both the Fix our Forests Act and Save our Sequoias Act. The congressman supports Trump's order for more logging. Stephens, who researches wildfire prevention methods at UC Berkeley, said logging can be good or bad for a forest, depending on how it's done. 'The untreated forest is vulnerable to calamity. If you go in there and just focus on restoration and trying to reduce surface fuels, you can make it better,' he said. 'But if you go in there and say we need to cut this many board feet, you miss' the point. While opposition to logging is inevitable, some environmental groups have warmed to the idea as part of a holistic approach to improving forest conditions and lessening fire risk. The National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund and Save the Redwoods League are among those that are supportive of an all-of-the-above strategy. Each is backing at least one of the forestry bills in Congress. The directives issued by the Trump administration, however, have not found favor with the environmental community. Many groups see the president's interest in wildfire safety as simply a pretext to do more commercial logging. Stephens said he's not 'alarmed' by the push for logging, underscoring the logistical constraints facing the timber industry. He's happy to see any fire-mitigation strategies get off the ground at this point, after years with little progress improving forest health and more wildfires. 'Look at what we've endured,' he said. 'The costs are so high. The restoration of our forests is paramount. I just don't know what else to say. We need to address the condition of our forest.'
Los Angeles Times
17-04-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Lessons from Yosemite, a decade after the Rim fire
Happy Thursday. I'm Corinne Purtill, a science and health reporter for The Times, filling in this week for the incomparable Sammy Roth. Last week my family drove north from Los Angeles on State Route 99 toward Yosemite, exactly 157 years and five days after a 29-year-old John Muir set out on foot for the same destination from San Francisco. There have, admittedly, been some changes in what is now Yosemite National Park since the Scottish-born naturalist began his hike equipped with little more than a pocket map and the confident assurance, he later wrote, 'that Yosemite Valley lay to the east and that I should surely find it.' Muir encountered a valley floor uncluttered by paved roads, or cars, or clusters of tourists gaping at the rock climbers dangling from El Capitan's sheer face. But on the timescale of the geologic and glacial processes that shaped Yosemite, our visits occurred hardly a breath apart. Muir's description of the marvel he found upon could have easily been written last week. 'The Valley, comprehensively seen, looks like an immense hall or temple lighted from above,' Muir wrote of his first impressions. 'But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life . . . while the snow and waterfalls, the winds and avalanches and clouds shine and sing and wreathe about them.' Yosemite's timeless granite cathedrals and snow-melt-swollen waterfalls are awe-inspiring. Yet as we drove each day from our rented cabin in the nearby Stanislaus National Forest to the park's western entrances, a very different sight rendered us speechless: acres upon acres of scorched landscape and charred, dead trees, the remains of once-lush forests devastated in the 2013 Rim fire. The forests of the high Sierras have evolved to co-exist with fire. Blazes sparked by lightning or intentionally lit as part of indigenous land-management practices have been part of the ecosystem for millennia, clearing away invasive species and excess vegetation and encouraging new growth. Some native trees are 'serotinous,' which means they rely on wildfire heat to trigger the dispersal of new seeds from their cones. But the kind of massive, high-intensity, out-of-control wildfires sparked by a changing climate are something else entirely. Ignited by a hunter's illegal campfire on Aug. 17, 2013, the Rim fire consumed more than 257,000 acres (400 square miles) overall, including some 77,000 in the bounds of Yosemite. One-third of that acreage burned hot enough to entirely destroy 75% to 100% of the standing trees, leaving essentially nothing of the original forest alive to regenerate, said John Buckley, a former hotshot firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service who is executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit that works on wildlife, water and ecology in the northern Yosemite region. While controlled burns and wildfire management efforts carried out in previous years helped keep the Rim fire's spread in check to some degree, the its and intensity still led to massive tree mortality in some areas, creating conditions ripe for the next megafire. 'Those are the places that really haunt us today,' said Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley professor of fire science and forest policy. More than a decade later, there are still up to 300 snags — dead standing trees — per acre in some of Yosemite's most intensely affected areas, Stephens said. That translates to about 150 tons per acre of dead biomass in addition to any new growth that have sprung up, all of it a spark away from the next conflagration. 'So,' he said, 'the next fire in that system will be an intense one.' There will undoubtedly be a next one. At the time it occurred, the Rim fire was the third-biggest in California's recorded history. Some 12 fiery years later, it doesn't even crack the top 10. A national park is a miracle of time, a place to marvel that our puny run as a species managed to intersect with the eons-long processes that shaped these breathtaking landscapes. Right now, they are also places that lay bare how rapidly human-caused climate change can transform these ecosystems in ways that render them inaccessible for the duration of our lifetimes. I last visited Yosemite as a child with my parents, but my children did not see the same park I did, and they never will. The Rim fire made sure of that. Within the blip of a single generation, swaths of millennia-old forest were transformed into charred landscape that physically cannot return to their former state within the course of my lifetime, or that of my children. With careful stewardship, replanting and responsible fire management, it would be possible to nurture a young forest that 'would be probably pretty darn beautiful' within the course of a few generations, Stephens said. But that takes investment and personnel, things that are highly imperiled in the National Park Service under the current Trump administration. Representatives of the park contacted for this story declined to speak. 'If we did that work in there proactively, when the next Rim fire comes, I think easily 50% of the [tallest] trees would survive. It'd be a victory,' Stephens said. 'But in the current condition, it's just as vulnerable as what we saw the Rim fire burn into.' Here's what's happening elsewhere in the world of climate change and the environment. Last week, as my colleagues Tony Briscoe and Hayley Smith reported, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released preliminary test results from hundreds of soil samples collected in areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. In somewhat encouraging news, samples from the Palisades area returned little evidence of contamination beyond some isolated spikes of heavy metals and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. The same could not be said for neighborhoods affected by the Eaton fire. More than one-third of samples collected within the Eaton burn scar exceeded California's health standard of 80 milligrams of lead per kilogram of soil. Nearly half of samples just outside the burn scar's boundary had lead levels above the state limit. And downwind of the fire's boundary, between 70% and 80% of samples surpassed that limit. The county is for now shouldering the responsibility of contaminant testing because, as Tony first reported in The Times, the federal government has departed from a nearly two-decade tradition of testing soil on destroyed properties cleaned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after fires. Previously, the Army Corps would scrape 6 inches of topsoil from cleared properties and then test the remaining earth. If those tests revealed lingering contamination, it would scrape further. After 2018's Camp fire in Paradise, testing on 12,500 properties revealed that nearly one-third still contained dangerous levels of contaminants even after those first 6 inches of topsoil were removed. The county has so far shared only results from standing homes, which are not eligible for the Army Corps of Engineers cleanup. Results from parcels with damaged or destroyed structures are still pending. Frustrated with the slow trickle of data coming from the government, some Altadena residents are taking testing into their own hands. This week my colleague Noah Haggerty reported on the efforts of a grassroots organization called Eaton Fire Residents United, which found lead in every single one of the 90 homes for which they've collected test results. Of those, 76% were above EPA limits. On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to divert $3 million from the county's 2018 $134-million settlement with lead-paint manufacturers to test residential properties that are both downwind and within one mile of the Eaton burn scar boundary. This is an issue The Times is following closely, and we'll have a great deal more to tell you soon. All I can say for now is: Watch this space. That's what almond farmer Christine Gemperle told Times reporter Ian James on his visit to Ceres, Calif., a farming community near Modesto. She was speaking about the fear and uncertainty that Trump's tariff vacillations have created for farmers across California, the nation's top agricultural exporter. In 2022 alone, the state shipped nearly $24 billion of nuts, rice, tomatoes and other tasty goodness around the world. But as China, Canada and other countries retaliate against U.S. tariffs by imposing their own taxes on American goods, California's farming businesses could bear the costs, Ian reports.' Canada, one of several unexpected bogeymen in the second Trump administration, is the top foreign buyer of California's wine, strawberries, lettuce and oranges, among other agricultural exports, followed by the European Union and China. But this productive trade relationship is beginning to fall apart. In addition to Canada's 25% tariffs on many U.S. goods, Canadians have also begun to boycott American products. Gemperle's 135 acre farm is among the California growers who together produce more than three-quarters of the world's almonds. Things weren't easy under the first Trump administration, she told Ian. The adoption of U.S. tariffs in 2018 prompted China to retaliate. Gemperle watched business slip away to places like Australia instead, she said. It's too soon to know how this trade chaos will play out, but the uncertainty is already keeping her up at night. 'Farming is uncertain and a risk and a gamble, as it is. We don't need more of that,' she said. 'It's all just overwhelming.' The news from the sea has not been great lately. The remains of a dead gray whale washed ashore last week in Huntington Beach. At least 70 more have died this year in Baja California's lagoons. Scores of sea lions and dolphins have been fatally poisoned in recent months by domoic acid, a neurotoxin produced by harmful algal blooms. Animal rescue shelters are filling up with sick and starving brown pelicans and their malnourished orphaned chicks — further victims of the domoic acid outbreak. So props to Times wildlife reporter Lila Seidman for finding a piece of positive marine news. And yes, since you were wondering — it does involve sunflower sea star sperm! Sunflower sea stars thrived along the Pacific Coast until 2013, when a mysterious disease linked to a marine heat wave destroyed about 99% of California's population. With their former predators out of the picture, purple sea urchins proliferated. Kelp, the urchins' favorite food, collapsed. Lila reports on the efforts to revitalize the population through lab-raised sea stars. Read her fascinating story, which begins with an unexpected but well-timed release of sea star sperm just before a planned spawn. 'The nice thing is they had six males go off, and so [with] all that sperm . . . we can hit the ground running,' Lila's source told her. Finally, a sea story with a happy ending. This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our 'Boiling Point' podcast here.
