Enviros fight efforts that save sequoias
Despite years of tussles over land-management practices, California Democrats and Republicans — along with top forestry officials and mainstream environmental groups — now agree that stepped up forest-thinning efforts are the key to controlling wildfires.
That strategy also is necessary to save one of California’s great treasures — its groves of giant sequoias.
As an example, a bipartisan bill in Congress, the Save Our Sequoias Act, would remove bureaucratic hurdles for removing underbrush around those magnificent trees, as the Sacramento Bee reported.
But despite the broad scientific and political agreement, this approach is meeting a frustrating hurdle.
A Berkeley-based environmental group, the Earth Island Institute, last month filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service claiming that these targeted brush-clearance procedures are the equivalent of clearcutting and commercial logging efforts. That’s a fanciful take on what’s happening — one that will endanger the sequoias and nearby towns.
Virtually anyone can file a lawsuit, but the Bee explained that the “threat of lawsuits often delays forest thinning for years” and requires agencies to “create hundreds if not thousands of pages of scientific and legal analyses to explain and justify the work.” These environmental groups, it added, tend to be “philosophically opposed to almost all logging on public lands.”
In early July, the group’s lawsuit led to a temporary halt to tree cutting on 99% of the targeted 2,000-acre area within Yosemite National Park, even though the National Park Service explains that, “Immediate actions are needed to protect these areas from high severity fire.”
The goal specifically is to protect two major sequoia groves.
In other words, certain environmental activists are using the courts and administrative procedures to wage an ideological battle against one of the most promising, common sense and bipartisan efforts to get control of our ongoing wildfire crisis.
Severe drought is taking hold in every corner of California, so these litigation-related obstacles can be disastrous.
Lawmakers need to revisit environmental laws that do more to promote lawsuits than protect the environment.
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