In The News

“The truth is the Chevron decision has been a mixed bag for the environment because deference to agency interpretations of environmental laws is only helpful if the agencies are trying to protect the environment,” said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist with the Earth Island Institute’s John Muir Project.

“These unchecked logging practices would lead to increased wildfire risk while also weakening environmental safeguards … that are crucial to maintaining these ecosystems and ensuring that these activities don’t harm endangered species or degrade the environment,” said Jennifer Mamola, the advocacy and policy director, for the John Muir Project.

By Grace Toohey
Los Angeles Times

California’s summer is off to a fiery start after an explosion of wildfire activity across the state this week, with blazes stretching firefighting resources thin, forcing evacuations and scorching several homes, businesses and bone-dry hillsides.

By Adam Popescu
NewScientist: Life

Recent years have seen some of the largest wildfires in California’s history, and one of the best approaches to limiting their damage is controlled burns that reduce natural fuel for the fires. But now, it seems these burns are destroying the state’s iconic sequoia trees.

By Samantha Hawkins
Bloomberg Law

The US Forest Service approved a logging project in the Plumas National Forest without adequately assessing its environmental effects, environmental groups said in a lawsuit filed Friday in California federal court. The $650 million Central/West Slope Project plans to log and burn 217,721 acres of mature and old-growth habitat in Plumas National Forest, located in the northern Sierra Nevadas, John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute and other groups said in the lawsuit.

By Hunter Sowards
CBS13 News

Wildfires were once seen as the downfall of the treasured giant sequoia trees in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, but a team of researchers with the John Muir Project released a recent study outlining how they could be our best shot at saving them.

By Carmen Kohlruss
The Magazine of the Sierra Club

The sequoia groves and endangered animals found in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument are imperiled by a pair of logging projects, conservation groups argue in a new lawsuit that asks a federal judge to put a stop to the proposed tree cutting.

By Andrew J. Campa
Los Angeles Times

High-intensity fires in 2020 and 2021 devastated the adult sequoia tree population globally, particularly at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in Southern California. That is one of the few things that National Park Service staffers and the environmentalists who are suing the agency can agree on.

By Jonathan Park & Janna Van Vranken
CNN

The National Park Service wants to replant sequoia groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, where wildfires in 2020 and 2021 inflicted lasting damage on the iconic sequoia forests. Environmentalists in California say its a huge mistake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.