Ground Truth Blog
Fire Retardant: Does Forest Service Pride Impair a Rational Retardant Decision?
With “water, water, everywhere,” the Forest Service still cannot rid itself of the fire retardant albatross around its neck. Ten years ago, in a study commissioned by the Forest Service, the Rand Corporation published Air Attack Against Wildfires: Understanding U.S....
Is Biochar a Forest Health Solution?
Biochar has become a hot topic in discussions ranging from forest health to carbon sequestration, but is it really a panacea for forest management and climate challenges? The Forest Service answers “Yes” in Biochar Basics, published by the agency in 2022. “By turning...
Andy Stahl Interviewed About Retardant Lawsuit
Peter O'Dowd recently interviewed FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl about our aerial fire retardant lawsuit on Here & Now, a live news broadcast produced by National Public Radio and Boston radio station WBUR. The Forest Service admits that its use of fire...
Tonto National Forest
In the Arizona Upland region of the Sonoran Desert, the Tonto National Forest enshrines a ruggedly beautiful landscape in central Arizona, where winter precipitation produced a “superbloom” of wildflowers this spring. Totaling almost 3 million acres, the Tonto...
Land Exchanges Serve the Wealthy
by Erica Rosenberg, Writers On The Range In 2017, the public lost 1,470 acres of wilderness-quality land at the base of Mount Sopris near Aspen, Colorado. For decades, people had hiked and hunted on the Sopris land, yet the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) handed it...
LA Times Reports on FSEEE Fire Retardant Lawsuit
Alex Wigglesworth, environment reporter with the Los Angeles Times, wrote a good news story about our fire retardant lawsuit. "As the use of aerially delivered retardant has soared in recent years," she writes, "some forest advocates say the substance does more harm...
Help Protect Our Water Resources From Forest Service Pollution
Contact Your Senators Today. We need your help to stop the Forest Service from polluting invaluable water resources with aerial fire retardant. In response to our lawsuit to force the Forest Service to follow the law, members of Congress have introduced HR 1586, which...
Reading the Rings
by Susan J. Tweit Say the word “dendrochronology,” and what comes to mind? Perhaps a tree cross-section showing concentric circles of annual rings, with arrows pointing to the rings from years that mark historical human events. But there is so much more to the science...
Sequoia Deaths Prompt Emergency Response
Giant sequoias are the most massive trees on Earth. They are also among the oldest, with the age of some trees exceeding 3,000 years. The trees grow in about 70-80 groves that cover less than 30,000 acres on the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada. In this...
Low-Tech Restoration Improves Forest Resilience
A recently published report concludes that restoring headwaters streams and wetlands enhances wildfire and drought resilience. The report, authored by Jackie Corday and published by American Rivers, reviews and synthesizes published and ongoing research on low-tech...
The Forest Service has Painted Itself Into a Corner
Half a century of logging high-value timber on public lands created an industry of federally dependent sawmills throughout the Western states. Concurrently, the Forest Service did its darnedest to stamp out forest fires. That was pretty easy during the mid-20th...
Forest Service Accepting Comments on Mountain Valley Pipeline
If approved, the Mountain Valley Pipeline will carry natural gas across 3.5 miles of the Jefferson National Forest and intersect the Appalachian Trail in Virgina. The Forest Service approved the right-of-way for the 42-inch-diameter pipeline in 2017 and again in 2021,...