Ground Truth Blog
The Camel’s Nose is Under the Tent
The Forest Service has the kind of problem that most of us wish we suffered from. It has more money than it can spend. Thanks to exceedingly generous appropriations by Congress to fix the Wildfire Crisis (sic), the agency is awash in cash. So what could be the problem...
Restoring the American Elm
Like the American chestnut, the American elm is threatened by an invasive species, but the future for the elms looks a bit brighter than the fate of the chestnuts. For elms the threat comes from Dutch Elm Disease, introduced in the 1930s, and researchers are making...
Federal Wildfire Commission Issues Report
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act established the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission and tasked the Commission with creating policy recommendations to address “the wildfire crisis.” In September, the Commission released a report with 148...
Forest Service Approves Logging Near Yellowstone
The Custer-Gallatin National Forest recently issued a Finding of No Significant Impact approving the South Plateau Landscape Area Treatment Project. The 16,462-acre logging project (to “improve forest resilience”) includes 5,531 acres of clear-cutting, 6,593...
FSEEE Featured in Fire Retardant Story
Susannah Frame with KING 5 News, Seattle's NBC affiliate, interviewed FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl for an in-depth feature on aerial fire retardant. Frame also spoke with Vertis Campbell of the Colville Tribe and Brandon Miller, CEO of GreenFire, which produces...
Tell Your Senators to Oppose S. 796
We need your help to stop the Forest Service from polluting invaluable water resources with aerial fire retardant. While our lawsuit has forced the Forest Service to apply for a permit as required by the Clean Water Act, members of Congress have introduced legislation...
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...