Ground Truth Blog
Wood Vaults for ‘Forest Resilience’ and ‘Financial Returns’
The Forest Service recently approved a $250,000 grant for Kodama Systems, Inc., in collaboration with Blue Forest and The Trust for Public Land, to fund the creation of “wood vaults” in California. The pilot project will construct “engineered earthen wood vaults ......
Mature and Old-Growth Forest Inventory
The first national inventory of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands was completed this spring in response to Executive Order 14072, issued by President Joseph Biden on Earth Day 2022. The forest inventory report estimates that public lands managed by the...
Paying the Piper
In the 20th century, the Forest Service promised to build post-war America with logs cut from national forests. Logging would be sustainable, it promised, with no more timber removed in any decade than could be cut forever thereafter. Logging doubled in the 1940s,...
Jefferson Public Radio Interviews Andy Stahl About Fire Retardant
The Jefferson Exchange: The cavalry, or the contaminator? The debate over tankers dropping fire retardant FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl recently spoke about aerial fire retardant on Jefferson Public Radio in an extended interview with Geoffrey Riley, host of The...
Effectiveness of Landscape-Scale Fuel Treatments Questioned
A comprehensive 2021 Forest Service report by Theresa B. Jain, et al., identifies significant shortcomings in research supporting “fuel treatments” that focus on thinning our forests. Out of 2,240 research papers, the authors identified only 179 (8%) that evaluated...
FSEEE Featured on Front Page of LA Times
FSEEE is featured on the front page of the July 3 issue of the Los Angeles Times in Hayley Smith's article about fire retardant. Smith accurately points out some of the problems with Phos-Chek, the widely used red retardant that contains ammonium phosphate. "Studies...
Now Streaming: ‘Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire’
Elemental is a new documentary about wildfire in the drought-prone West. Directed by Trip Jennings, the film brings together respected experts from across the board — firefighters, wildfire survivors, research ecologists, indigenous elders, fire scientists, wildlife...
Mountains in Wilderness Don’t Need Hardware
by Dana Johnson, Writers on the Range We humans want the most out of life, so why shouldn’t we push to get more of what we want? That’s what some rock climbers must be thinking. They want to enter designated Wilderness in order to drill permanent anchors into...
Understanding Forest Succession
by Andy Kerr As public lands conservationists continue their fight to save the last of the mature and old-growth forests for the benefit of this and future generations, we must not forget the preforests. In 1988, fires in Yellowstone National Park caused the media to...
Judge Agrees with FSEEE: Forest Service Retardant Use Violates Clean Water Act
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ruled in our favor in our lawsuit challenging Forest Service use of aerial fire retardant, affirming that dumping the toxic slurry into water violates the Clean Water Act and that the Forest Service must acquire a Clean Water Act...
Wildlife and Wildfire Mitigation in Colorado
One of the justifications for cutting trees is that it improves wildlife habitat, a stance promoted by the National Wild Turkey Federation, which is now funding tree-thinning projects in Chaffee County, Colorado. When asked if tree-thinning is beneficial to wildlife,...
A New Kind of Collaborative in Colorado
How a Community Planning Project Spawned a Forest Health Collaborative Christopher Ketcham’s guest column in the Fall 2022 edition of Forest News struck a chord with me. Ketcham’s column, excerpted from his book, This Land, reveals how forest health collaboratives...