Club sues state to stop salmon slaughter

With coho salmon teetering on the brink of extinction, the California Board of Forestry recently adopted new rules to make it easier to kill the remaining coho. These rules are such an aberration that Sierra Club California joined with our friends at the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) in a lawsuit to block them.

The suit, filed Nov. 15 in San Francisco Superior Court, argues that the Board has a legal responsibility to protect fish, wildlife, and resources, and that rules focused exclusively on making it easier to kill endangered salmon are beyond the Board's authority.

California's logging rules have long been identified by state and federal wildlife agencies as allowing harm to endangered salmon. In the summer of 2006, the secretary of the Resources Agency proposed a broad rule package to address the shortcomings of California's Forest Practice Rules as they relate to salmon. Shortly thereafter, the governor's office apparently intervened on behalf of the timber industry, and the proposed habitat-protection approach was abandoned.

The coho salmon rules being challenged in this lawsuit add no improvements to logging rules to protect salmon habitat, and only apply when coho will actually be killed by the logging operation. If the logging plan will kill coho salmon, the rules require only specific limited mitigations; regardless of site conditions, nothing more can be required.

Sierra Club California's forestry advocate Paul Mason observed, "We need to protect and restore salmon habitat, not limit environmental protections and make it easier to kill endangered coho."

The suit also seeks to overturn new Road Management Plan (RMP) regulations that do not provide for independent review, implementation, monitoring, approval, or amendment. The importance of correcting roads that adversely impact salmon and steelhead habitat with sediment is well-known.

The National Marine Fisheries Service declaration finding the California Forest Practice Rules inadequate is available here