Lawsuits Against Yosemite National Park
JMP, represented by EarthRise Law Center, filed suit against Yosemite National Park to halt two unprecedented commercial logging projects, totaling 3,400 acres ("Earth Island Institute v. Muldoon"), after JMP's Forest Policy Advocate, Jennifer Mamola, discovered and documented the logging in May of 2022.
JMP uncovered the fact that the Park is selling mature trees to logging companies and keeping the revenue for its budget, including trees within the Merced Giant Sequoia Grove.
JMP's lawsuit halted the logging for most of 2022, but in the fall of 2022 the federal district court judge allowed the logging to resume, in a preliminary injunction ruling that JMP is now appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Park is trying to convince the press and public that they are only conducting prescribed fires and some "thinning" of "small trees" and "underbrush".
JMP is now documenting the fact that the Park's logging is much closer to clearcutting, and mature trees are being removed on a widespread basis and sold to lumber and biomass energy companies.
In support of this lawsuit JMP's colleague, biologist Maya Khosla, thoroughly discredited Yosemite National Park's baseless claims about the large trees they were removing being so called "ladder fuels" in a powerful declaration which proved that the Park made false statements to the court and the public.
Unfortunately fear of fire based on false statements from Park personnel have so far convinced the Courts to refuse to enjoin the logging. We are hopefully that the Ninth Circuit will reverse this travesty.
In a parallel case, John Muir Project, again represented by EarthRise Law Center, has sued Yosemite National Park under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for refusing to provide basic documents and information, including the locations of endangered Pacific fishers and the impacts of the logging on them, as well as correspondence by Park staff related to the planning and implementation of the logging projects.
The Park's initial response to our FOIA lawsuit indicates they know they broke the law; months later they finally produced thousands of pages of documents, but still have not provided all the documents that were requested. What is the Park trying to hide?