Lockyer Suit Seeks to Save Sequoias

State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to block a U.S. Forest Service plan to permit commercial logging in the Giant Sequoia National Monument.

The suit, which follows a similar one filed in January by conservation groups, alleges that the Forest Service is violating protections granted in 2000 by President Clinton, when he established the 328,000-acre monument in the southern Sierra northeast of Bakersfield.

Clinton’s declaration barred timber production, saying that trees could be removed in the monument “only if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety.”

The Forest Service’s 2003 management plan nonetheless allows enough timber-cutting to fill more than 2,000 logging trucks a year. Ancient sequoias could not be cut, but sequoias and other trees up to 30 inches in diameter and a century old could be logged.

The Forest Service said the logging was not being done for commercial purposes but to restore the monument’s 34 groves of giant sequoias, which contain the largest -- and some of the oldest -- trees in the world. The agency said the groves grew too dense under the government’s longtime policy of putting out wildfires that naturally clean out smaller trees and underbrush.

“There are an unnatural number of small trees that can carry fire from the ground up to the lower branches of the giant sequoia trees and from there the fire can carry into the top, killing the needles and thereby killing the giant sequoias themselves,” said regional Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes.

But the U.S. District Court suit contends that the management plan is confusing and fails to justify the timber-cutting.

The suit says that the proposed annual logging levels amount to 42% of the average annual timber yield in the last 10 years for the entire Sequoia National Forest. Yet the monument covers less than a third of the forest.