Dedicated to Protecting Our National Forests

We get the truth out about the importance of protecting forest ecosystems, the ecological benefits of natural processes, such as fire, for native biodiversity, and we expose why logging our forests does not create fire-safe communities. So, we fight every day to end the devastating logging practices that degrade and threaten our public forests, worsen the climate crisis, and put communities at risk.

What We Do

Scientific Research

We perform original scientific research to answer previously unanswered questions about forest ecology, wildfire and wildlife.

Forest Watch

We watchdog logging projects on National Forests, expose the harm they cause, and push for science to govern decision making.

Legal Pursuits

When necessary we take administrative or legal action to enforce environmental laws and protect species and forest ecosystems.

Education

We provide information to the public, journalists and Congress to increase knowledge, alter perspectives and facilitate change.

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Benefits of wildfire

Giant Sequoias are Serotinous

Which means they must have moderate and high intensity fire to effectively reproduce. Hot fires will kill mature trees, including sequoias, but this is necessary to create the bare mineral soil and open canopy that allow Sequoia seedlings to be born and thrive.

High Intensity Fire is Great For Wildlife

Patches of high intensity fire in mature and old forest create one of the richest forest habitat types ("complex early seral forest"), with abundant standing dead trees (snags), native shrubs, downed logs and naturally regenerating conifers essential to healthy and productive wildlife populations.

Black-Backed Woodpeckers Need It To Survive

Blacked Backed Woodpeckers like their mature and old growth forest well done. Each bird eats over 13,500 wood boring beetle larvae per year to survive - this means lots of dead trees (over 100 per acre) covering a large area (approximately 300 acres per pair).

California Spotted Owls Choose It For Foraging

Spotted owls prefer unburned mature forest or mature forest that burns at lower intensity for nesting and roosting, but use mature forest that burns at high intensity to hunt the small mammals that they need to eat to survive. Without this habitat in their territories, populations decline.

Pacific Fisher is a Very Rare Carnivore

Once thought to avoid higher intensity fire areas, it has been found to select dense old forest in both its unburned state (for denning and resting) and after it is burned in a higher intensity fire (for hunting small mammals).

Everything in Nature called destruction must be creation - a change from beauty to beauty.

John Muir. My first summer in the Sierra.
Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin company, 1911