Urge the Sierra Nevada Conservancy to STOP Funding Logging in California’s Forests! Ask Sierra Nevada Conservancy's Executive Officer Angela Avery to Protect California's Forests - Send Your Email Today! Read or Edit the Petition Dear Ms. Avery, We are hoping with the change in administration that the Sierra Nevada Conservancy will also change direction. For the past twelve years, SNC has contributed millions of California taxpayer dollars to degrade our native California forest ecosystems through logging. Under Governor Jerry Brown this focus on grants for logging reached an all-time high, utilizing the fear of wildland fire as justification. Fire is not the enemy of our forests, but logging is. Fires transform and rejuvenate our forest ecosystems. Returning nutrients to the system, increasing productivity and growth of native plants and ensuring that the most resilient trees are the ones that persist and reproduce. All fires burn in a mosaic pattern, mostly at low and moderate severity with some areas of high-severity, but it is these areas that burn at high-severity which support levels of wildlife biodiversity similar to or greater than the wildlife diversity found in old-growth forests. After a fire burns, there is typically a pulse of sedimentation that enters the streams and rivers, but this only happens the first year after the fire, is completely natural, and provides habitat for native fish and amphibians. Wildland fires that burn at mixed-intensity in our forests are not only natural but essential to the continued existence of our forest ecosystems and native wildlife. Logging, in contrast, extracts nutrients from the system, and the removal of key habitat components (live trees, dead trees, native shrubs, and downed logs) degrades our forests, making them unsuitable for many wildlife species and less resilient to a changing climate. In addition, logging often involves road building which, along with the logging itself, creates chronic sedimentation into Sierra Nevada waterways negatively impacting our watersheds for years if not decades. Logging also will not stop fires from burning, nor will it reduce fire effects in our forests during weather driven fires. We urge you, as the new Executive Officer, to help educate the Board Members on the importance of wildfire in our forest landscapes so that our watersheds and burned forests, such as those found in the Rim Fire, can be protected and rejuvenated by natural processes for the benefit of all Californians. Thank you, You can add formatting using markdown syntax - read more Add me to your mailing list Send Now Share this with your friends: Share this post: