Ground Truth
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,...
New Panel Will Review Landmark Forest Plan
The Forest Service is forming a new advisory committee for national forests managed under the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP). The 20-member board will recommend changes to the 1994 plan, which dictates management of 19 national forests in Washington, Oregon, and...
White River National Forest is Nation’s Busiest
A recently published economic analysis shows White River National Forest attracts the most visitors and produces the greatest economic impact of any U.S. national forest. Based on pre-pandemic data from fiscal year 2019, the report attributes more than 12 million...
Boundary Waters Wilderness Protected From Copper Mining for 20 Years
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed a mineral withdrawal order protecting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Superior National Forest from sulfide-ore copper mining. Sulfide-ore copper mining generates waste rock full of sulfates, which, when exposed to...
Biden Administration Restores Tongass Protections
The Department of Agriculture finalized protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. The final rule, announced Jan. 25, repeals the Trump Administration's 2020 Alaska Roadless Rule, restoring protections to...
Forest Service Admits Fire Retardant Use Violates Clean Water Act
Declines to reduce usage of the chemical pollutant The preliminary response to FSEEE’s fire retardant lawsuit acknowledges that the Forest Service is acting illegally but then “denies each and every allegation of the [FSEEE] Complaint.” The FSEEE lawsuit alleges...
Collaboratives are a Failed Experiment
“If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” — Elizabeth Warren It is no coincidence that the rise of collaborative groups described in Christopher Ketcham’s guest essay followed the demise of the Forest Service’s logging-at-all-costs era....
Excerpted from ‘This Land’
When Congress passed the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act, one of Barack Obama’s major public lands initiatives, it included a provision for a new program of management of national forests that promised “collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration” of...
The Peshtigo Firestorm
On the night of October 8, 1871, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, “all hell rode into town on the back of a wind.” In two hours, the Peshtigo Fire decimated a swath of forest 10 miles wide by 40 miles long and obliterated the towns of Peshtigo and Brussels in northeastern...
Mining Proposal Threatens Okefenokee
If approved, a proposal to mine titanium and zirconium in southern Georgia will threaten the integrity of the Okefenokee Swamp, designated a Wetland of International Importance through the Ramsar Convention. Ninety percent of the massive wetland lies within the...
Oregon High Court Rejects Timber Lawsuit
The Oregon Supreme Court rejected an appeal in a $1 billion lawsuit that sought to define the “greatest permanent value” of forests as timber revenue. The 13 counties that brought the lawsuit gave forestland to the state in the 1930s and ’40s. Oregon manages the land...
Urge Your U.S. Senators to Support HR 803 and Protect Wilderness
Please call both of your U.S. Senators today and urge them to support the Protecting America’s Wilderness and Public Lands Act, HR 803, which the House of Representatives has passed. We have an important window of opportunity to protect new national forest wilderness...
Forest Service Completes Prescribed Fire Review
After the Forest Service ignited a prescribed fire that became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, Chief Randy Moore ordered a national review of the agency’s prescribed fire program. Published this fall, the review identifies 52 recommendations. Seven...
Phos-Chek in Sespe Creek Draws Attention to FSEEE Lawsuit
Alex Wilson, reporting for VC Reporter, recently covered our lawsuit against the Forest Service challenging its use of aerial fire retardant. He writes, "When environmental activist Andy Stahl heard that last month’s battle to extinguish the Howard Fire in the rugged...