Public Input Needed as Feds Miss the Mark on Old Growth Forest Protection
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Santa Barbara, CA – Environmental groups across the country, including Los Padres ForestWatch along California’s central coast, are urging community members to voice their opinions on a U.S. Forest Service proposal that affects old-growth forests in the Los Padres National Forest and throughout the United States. The final comment period of this multi-year effort ends on September 19, 2024.
Old-growth forests are complex, undisturbed ecosystems with large, mature trees that provide critical habitat for wildlife, store vast amounts of carbon, and help maintain biodiversity. They are considered by many scientists to be essential for combatting climate change.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to safeguard America’s last remnants of old-growth,” said Benjamin Pitterle, Director of Advocacy for ForestWatch. “But right now, the Forest Service’s proposal is so full of loopholes, it almost looks more like a logging proposal than a conservation plan.”
The draft Old Growth Amendment is the outcome of an initiative launched by the Biden Administration in 2022 to address impacts to forests from climate change and other threats. If adopted, the Amendment would establish new management criteria for old-growth forests in all 154 national forests.
Mature and old growth forests are found throughout conifer-dotted mountaintops of Los Padres National Forest, including well-known places like Pine Mountain, Mt. Pinos, Big Pine Mountain, and the Ventana Wilderness near the Big Sur coast. The Los Padres National Forest was not subject to much logging historically, so mature and old-growth forest can still be found scattered across its higher elevations. However, many of these areas are currently threatened by plans to cut and remove large trees.
A joint-letter to the Forest Service signed by 137 environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council, and 17 California-based groups warns that, “as written, the preferred alternative includes numerous opportunities for the agency to send these essential trees to the mill.” The groups point to provisions in the proposal that allow for logging and clearing within old-growth forests when these activities are proposed under the guise of wildfire management or “forest health.”
A 2022 report by the Climate Forests Coalition found “authorized logging” to be the current greatest avoidable threat to old and mature trees in the United States. The report goes on to highlight over a dozen major commercial logging proposals that currently target mature and old-growth forests on public lands. The current draft Amendment would not prevent any of the logging projects from moving forward since all of them are branded in some way as “healthy forest initiatives.”
“There’s no question,” Pitterle says, “that the logging industry exploits the government’s current policy of addressing wildfire, hurting America’s forests.”
In addition to containing loopholes that would allow continued logging in old-growth forests, the draft proposal also fails to protect mature forests at all. These forests may have been logged historically but are currently on track to become old-growth within the coming decades. Conservation organizations and forest ecologists have urged the Forest Service to include protections for mature forests so they have a chance of becoming old-growth in the future.
ForestWatch has created an easy-to-use, “one-click” commenting tool that can be accessed here. Community members can also submit comments to the Forest Service directly through the agency’s website.