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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.

Today, as public concern grows over their future in a changing climate, new science is confirming what these trees have been showing us all along: that high-intensity fire is essential to their survival story. These forests, shaped by varied natural disturbance processes over evolutionary timescales, carry within them a remarkable ability not just to persist, but to thrive after intense wildfire.