In The News
Conservation Groups Seek to Block Logging Projects in Giant Sequoia National Monument
By Carmen Kohlruss
The Magazine of the Sierra Club
Conservation groups argue in a new lawsuit that logging projects threaten the sequoia groves and endangered animals in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument.
Read MoreNPS Wants to Plant Sequoias; Environmentalists Sue, Say There’s No Need to Butt In
By Andrew J. Campa
Los Angeles Times
High-intensity fires in 2020 and 2021 devastated adult sequoias, especially in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, a point of agreement among environmentalists and NPS.
Read MoreWhy Environmentalists are Suing the National Park Service to Prevent It From Planting Trees
By Jonathan Park & Janna Van Vranken
CNN
The National Park Service wants to replant sequoia groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, but environmentalists argue it’s a huge mistake after wildfires.
Read MoreThe Logjam in Biden’s $50 Billion Dollar Wildfire Plan
By Paul Koberstein & Jessica Applegate
Undark Op-Ed
On Maui, a solitary beachfront home, unscorched by the wildfire that devastated the town of Lahaina in August, stands amid the ashes of dozens of incinerated homes. And in Northern California, a large, mostly unscathed forest mysteriously surrounds the devastated town of Paradise, lost five years ago to another wildfire.
Read MoreClimate Activists Seek to Save the Planet by Cutting, Burying Trees
By Autumn Spredemann
The Epoch Times
Tree thinning is a disputed procedure that has drawn as much criticism within the environmental community as it has support. Many scientists, researchers, and conservationists are against it, saying that tree thinning can even worsen wildfires.
Read MoreAfter More Than 100 Years, Gray Wolves Reappear in Giant Sequoia National Monument
By Louis Sahagún
Los Angeles Times
On the morning of July 6, Michelle Harris saw a huge canid with yellow eyes dash across a fire road lined with charred snags and giant sequoias blackened by recent wildfires. The animal “paused, started to pace and made clipped barking sounds — like it was very worried about something,” recalled Harris, a biologist who was working on a restoration project in the area.
Read MoreLogging for Fire Mitigation Stokes Anger Among Residents
By John Aguilar
The Denver Post
Hundreds of freshly cut ponderosa logs lay stacked in rows in Elk Meadow Park, some measuring several feet in diameter — and more than a century old. Not far away, wood chips and slash litter a clearing where trees once stood.
Read MoreScientist: Trees Felled in Vain in Name of Fire Control
By Dana Gentry
Nevada Current
An alliance between governments and the commercial logging industry under the guise of fire management is decimating forests, wreaking ecological havoc, and exacerbating risks for people and property, according to scientists at odds with what they call archaic methods that are futile in controlling fires.
Read MoreBillions in Feds’ Spending on Megafire Risks Seen as Misdirected
By Bobby Magill
Bloomberg Law
Congress is spending billions to save communities from Western megafires by thinning large swaths of forests even as scientists say climate change-driven drought and heat are too extreme for it to work.
Read MoreAre California’s Wildfires Really “Disasters”–or Just Something Natural?
By Piper McDaniel
Mother Jones
When a forest is torched by wildfire, what’s left behind is something resembling a dystopian hellscape. There are no green things, just a carpet of scorched earth and telltale piles of ash and debris: Here was a house, here a garden, here the shell of a car–and thousands of trees, stripped and blackened.
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