Sequoia National Monument being logged!

The Sequoia Task Force of the Sierra Club is protesting the Forest Service's decision to allow commercial logging to go forward in a logging project that on Aug. 3 began bulldozing huge swathes and removing ancient trees, many several centuries old, on ridgetops adjacent to five giant-sequoia groves in the Giant Sequoia National Monument. This timber sale is called the Saddle Fuels Reduction Project and is all about removing big trees, not about fire control. This project will take more than five million board feet of big timber! On Aug. 4 the Sierra Club filed a request for a temporary restraining order to stop the logging.

The Giant Sequoia National Monument was proclaimed in April 2000. The proclamation was supposed to stop bulldozing, logging, and exploitation of Monument lands. It called for restoration from a century of logging. The proclamation did, however, allow completion of a few timber sales that had been approved prior to the creation of the monument, as a short-term transition for the timber industry. Secretary of agriculture Dan Glickman, whose department includes the Forest Service, announced that this logging was estimated to be completed within about two-and-a-half years.

At the signing of the proclamation, the Saddle Project contract termination date was March 2004. That meant that logging should have been completed by November 2003 because of seasonal closure of the forest for winter. But quietly in the backroom of the Forest Service, the contract deadline was changed giving the industry until 2005. The deadline was changed yet again so that the industry can now log until 2006.

Why did this happen? A Forest Service press release implies that the timber industry had some hazard trees to remove, but no documentation confirms any legal justification for these extensions. (The local McNally Fire occurred long after the contract extensions were given. )

Local activists have been investigating the logging site and have found stumps well over 30 inches in diameter. Such trees in the arid Southern Sierra can be extremely old, since there can be 10 or more annual growth rings to an inch on some sites. Logging these ancient trees means that it will be centuries before these areas will recover old-growth characteristics, and meanwhile species that depend on ancient unlogged forests will have no refuge. The Pacific fisher is making its last stand here in the southern Sierra; projects such as the Saddle could mean losing this valiant little creature forever.

The Sierra Club had already taken the Forest Service to court for approving a Sequoia Monument Management Plan that perpetuates logging instead of restoration from logging. In July a federal judge found that the Sequoia National Forest Fire Management Plan, the basis for much of the management of Sequoia National Forest and the Giant Sequoia National Monument, is illegal. We are grateful to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer for bringing this suit.

Now we find the Forest Service helping the industry to continue and extend the old damaging pre-Monument logging projects. The Forest Service is just as addicted to logging as the timber industry itself, and can not be allowed to continue to manage this national monument with its emerald meadows, sparkling streams, and over half the earth's groves of giant sequoia! We must turn over management of the Giant Sequoia National Monument to Sequoia National Park, which has a proven record of nurturing the resources in its care.

The Sierra Club cheered the creation of this monument as the realization of John Muir's dream to have all sequoias protected throughout their range. The Sierra Club will do its best to protect this magnificent national monument.

WhatYouCanDo

Write to your representative at:
House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515;

and to the supervisor of Sequoia National Forest at:
1500 W. Grand Ave.
Porterville, CA 93257.

Protest the ongoing logging, and urge that management of Sequoia National Monument be transferred to Sequoia National Park.

For the latest updates on the monument, see www.sierraclub.org/ca/sequoia

Carla Cloer