Scope of Logging in Sequoia Monument Plan Angers Critics

When 34 groves of giant sequoias and 300,000 surrounding acres were named a national monument by President Clinton during his final year in office, a long fight over protection of some of Earth’s most majestic trees appeared to end.

It didn’t. Last month, the U.S. Forest Service released a proposal for managing the Giant Sequoia National Monument that has flabbergasted environmentalists and revived their quarrel with the agency’s stewardship of sequoias, which can live for millennia and reach skyscraper heights.

Though the monument designation bans commercial logging, the management blueprint would allow, in the name of reduced fire risk, the cutting of enough commercial timber to fill 3,000 logging trucks a year.

It would permit the felling of trees, including sequoias, as much as 30 inches in diameter -- a size the Forest Service is now barred from cutting in much of the rest of the Sierra Nevada. It would allow loggers to clear openings as large as two acres and to use heavy equipment in the groves.

The Forest Service describes the proposal, which also calls for a significant amount of deliberately set, controlled burning to rid the forest floor of flammable brush and saplings, as the best and fastest way to address the two most pressing issues in the monument, which lies in the 1.1-million-acre Sequoia National Forest at the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada.

One is the risk of a catastrophic wildfire, highlighted last summer when a 150,000-acre blaze burned for weeks in the forest, coming within half a mile of one of the monument’s groves. The other is a long-term decline in sequoia regeneration caused by suppression of the natural cycle of frequent, small fires that sequoias need to reproduce.

Conservationists agree that the fire risk needs to be addressed. But they say that, by allowing so much logging, the Forest Service would be thumbing its nose at the monument charter, which prohibits removal of trees unless “clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety.”

“The Forest Service has made a mockery of the proclamation that established the monument,” said Jay Watson, the Wilderness Society’s regional director. “It’s as if it doesn’t even exist. I find that not only astonishing, but pretty darn arrogant. They’re trying to shoehorn in timber management of the past and call it something different.”

Under the plan, about 10 million board feet of lumber a year could be cut by commercial loggers contracting with the Forest Service.

That is as much timber as was logged in the entire Sequoia National Forest in 1998, before the monument’s establishment in 2000.

Art Gaffrey, supervisor of the monument and the national forest, dismisses the criticism of the logging plan as unwarranted political spin.

He said the proposed timber cutting is necessary to improve forest conditions.

“No longer do we manage this public land based on market demands,” Gaffrey said.

“It will be to maintain forest health and protect objects of interest from wildfire.”

The management plan is the approach favored by the agency among six alternatives discussed in a draft environmental impact statement released for public review last month.

It is the most aggressive of the six in terms of total acreage that would be thinned or burned in the monument over a decade -- 79,900 acres -- and the most expensive -- $31.7 million.

According to the document, it also would produce more air pollution, in the form of smoke from burning logging debris and naturally accumulated brush, than all but one of the other alternatives.

Precisely because it would log and burn more overall acreage than the other options, the Forest Service contends that it would save the most land from wildfires that could destroy sequoias and wildlife habitat.

The argument that you must cut down a lot of trees to reduce forest fire danger is one that the Bush administration is using throughout the West as it moves to reverse Clinton-era policies. Those policies slashed the amount of timber cutting in federal forests to a fraction of what it was in the 1980s.

It was logging of sequoia groves, sanctioned by the Forest Service, in that decade that led to the conservation drive that brought the monument designation. The Clinton document cited not only the grandeur of the sequoias -- the most massive trees on the planet -- but the forest’s rare wildlife and rich array of plants.

Of about 38,000 acres of giant sequoia groves scattered through the Sierra Nevada, roughly two-thirds lie in the monument. Most of the rest are just to the north, in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Logging is banned in the parks, which have for decades successfully used controlled burning to rid groves of flammable undergrowth and to encourage regeneration of sequoias. The giant trees need bursts of heat from fire to open their cones and release showers of seeds, as well as sunny openings to foster sapling growth.

But Gaffrey, the monument’s supervisor, said that using only prescribed burns would not treat enough land quickly enough.

More than a century of suppressing wildfire on public land has allowed the buildup of dense growth in forests all over the West, but it has been particularly problematic for fire-dependent sequoias.

Indeed, some have said it might not have been a bad thing if flames had entered a grove during last summer’s blaze.

During its first decade, the Forest Service’s logging plan for the monument would open up 1,800 acres of the sequoia groves with mechanized thinning operations or controlled fires.

Of that amount, 180 acres of gaps as large as two acres apiece, would be created to encourage the establishment of young sequoias.

Half the openings would be made with controlled burns and half with mechanical clearing, Gaffrey said.

But using logging rather than fire for the gaps won’t get you many sequoia seeds, according to research conducted by Scott Stephens, an assistant professor of fire science at UC Berkeley.

Studying logging clearings among sequoias at Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest, Stephens found a paltry supply of seedlings. Mild prescribed fires don’t help much either, scientists say, as flames have to be intense enough to send heat up into the branches of towering mature sequoias to release great numbers of seeds.

In an interview, Stephens, who is involved in a national research project examining the environmental effects of different methods of reducing wildfire risk, also questioned the need to cut trees as big as 30 inches in diameter or to clear openings as large as two acres.

“I can’t imagine why you need to go up to two acres. Two acres is a big hole,” he said, adding that most stands could be adequately thinned of fire-prone growth by removing trees no larger than 20 inches in diameter.

The monument proposal borrows heavily from work by Douglas Piirto, a forestry professor who heads Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s natural resources management department and sits on a scientific advisory board of the monument.

He said conditions in the monument are so varied that it would be wrong to tie the hands of the Forest Service with too many limits.

“I have said publicly for a long, long time, you don’t want to tell managers the only thing they have available is prescribed burning,” Piirto said.

“There’s no one fix that is going to help the monument. You can’t do it any one way.”

Calling Stephens a friend with whom he disagreed, Piirto said it may be necessary to take out 30-inch trees to clear openings, and that gaps as large as two acres would foster the sunny conditions that a young sequoia likes.

Environmentalists say they are not against any thinning, but that chopping down fire-resistant big trees is about logging, not forest health.

Moreover, they say the plan would erode habitat of such rare animals as the Pacific fisher, which likes old growth and dense cover and whose California population has shrunk to the southern Sierra and the state’s northwestern forests.

“Going after the big trees is going to hurt the fisher,” said Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project.

“They want to do logging like they’ve always done. If they don’t back off, we’ll be in court.”