Ground Truth
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...
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...