Posts by Jennifer Mamola

Field season is in full swing, and what we found in Freeman Creek Grove stopped us cold. Inside a giant sequoia snag — a standing dead tree that spotted owls depend on for nesting — we found a pair. Two spotted owls, same hollow, two days running. We think we know what that means: an active nest tree. We notified the Forest Service. The tree is tagged, meaning the agency already knows it exists. What followed was silence: no Protected Activity Center established, no enforcement of the buffers that federal protocol requires.

We just returned from another round of visits to the giant sequoia groves of the southern Sierra Nevada, and we came back with field observations from four sites and two new studies that dismantle nearly everything the agencies have been telling the public about sequoias, fire, and what these forests actually need. Here is what we saw.

Democratic senators cannot continue lending credibility to the wildfire-as-extraction framework and then express surprise when that framework is used to extract. Every time a Democrat praises the underlying bill, cites its bipartisan credentials, or treats the Roadless Rule repeal as the only problem in the room, they provide institutional cover for a policy direction that degrades the ecosystems that regulate our climate and does nothing meaningful to protect the communities fire actually threatens.

Having correctly identified that our national forests are being managed like tree farms — that the Roundup exists to clear the way for commercially valuable conifers — the film’s conclusion pivoted to: our forests don’t need Roundup. They need replanting and thinning. I understand the impulse. You’ve spent a year documenting institutional failure and you want to hand the audience a solution. But that solution is just Roundup with better PR. It is, in the most precise sense of the phrase, missing the forest for the trees.

PIELC, The Public Interest Environmental Law Conference held at the University of Oregon, is a worthy experience, and I would recommend attending to any environmental attorney or activist.