Lawsuit against massive backcountry logging project masquerading as "community protection"
on Plumas National Forest, Northern CA
John Muir Project, Feather River Action!, and Plumas Forest Project, represented by Stanford University's Environmental Law Clinic, filed suit against a giant 214,000-acre logging project that is heavily targeting mature and old-growth forests in remote wildlands.
The Plumas National Forest is attempting to spin this massive backcountry logging as a "community protection" project, claiming it is being done supposedly to save distant communities from wildfires.
The Forest Service refused to prepare an environmental impact statement and disregarded abundant evidence (including many studies by Forest Service scientists) submitted by JMP and our partners showing that:
a) this logging, conducted under the guise of "thinning", would not stop climate-driven wildfires and would make wildfires spread faster and more intensely toward towns, giving people less time to evacuate and increasing threats to public safety;
b) in several recent real-world examples on national forests in the northern Sierra Nevada, this same approach led to the loss of many dozens of lives and tens of thousands of homes; and
c) the only effective way to protect homes and lives from wildfires is to focus on the community itself and a narrow zone (up to 100 to 200 feet) around and adjacent to homes-beyond which forest management activities provide no added benefit for public safety.
