In The News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Adam Aton
E&E News

The West is burning, and Congress is responding with a fire hose of money. The bipartisan infrastructure deal that advanced yesterday through the Senate would spend billions of dollars on wildfire policy, with much of it earmarked for cutting trees and planting new ones. Some experts warn that approach could backfire.

By Christopher Ketcham
The New Republic

The Bear fire was one of the largest of the over 8,000 wildfires that have beset California this year. Now incorporated into the still-burning North Complex Fire, the Bear started in the Plumas National Forest, sparked by a series of lightning strikes on August 17 across the northern Sierra Nevada.