Category: Climate Crisis

We are Feather River Action!. Our group is based in Eastern Plumas County and we defend the watershed and help build community.

FRA! began 2 years ago to oppose not one but two ill-conceived proposals for asphalt plants next to Portola and on the Feather River in Delleker.

Now we are laser focused on extreme logging and resource extraction plans by the Forest Service that threaten more than a quarter million acres of forest lands within the Feather River watershed.

Ironically and perversely called “community protection,” the Forest Service plans a mechanical and chemical assault on wild habitat, degrading and drying out forests, and increasing wind speed and wildfire spread within the forest canopy, endangering both fire fighters and communities. This will not only damage views and natural features, it will also harm the tourism economy by turning wild landscapes in high demand with city dwellers into sterile tree plantations bereft of wildlife.

Congress, the president, and the USFS are essentially subsidizing the timber extraction industry with $650 million of our tax dollars, while leaving communities flammable and vulnerable to the next inevitable ember storm.

More than 70,000 acres have already been approved under an “emergency authorization” that short circuits the NEPA process and excludes the public from the decision process. This is the most extreme logging plan ever planned for Plumas National Forest, making significant amendments to the 2004 Forest Plan, stripping protections for spotted owl, all without a single public meeting.

You can have your own opinion about this project, but you can’t have your own facts. The facts are the facts, and the USFS has ignored the science by approving this project. Here are the facts and what the science says:

— Fuel reduction work has little to no effect on home survival when done more than 100 feet away from structures (Syphard et al 2014)

—Zald and Dunn 2018 found that in the dry western forests, logging intensity is the second most important predictor of wildfire intensity. 

—Bradley et al 2016 reported that across the entire western U.S., fires burn with less intensity on lands that have the highest protections from logging 

— Banerjee 2020 found that forest thinning uniformly increased in-forest wind speeds capable of carrying a wildfire through the crowns despite crown thinning and that fire moved fastest through thinned, dry forest. 

The direct loss of sequestered forest carbon is on average far higher annually than forest carbon losses from fire (Harris et al 2016)

The increase in area burned every year is primarily a climate related phenomena and is not something that we will be able to log our way out of (Zhuang et al 2021) 

The USFS has ignored this science in approving the CPP Project. The wild forest, our communities and our lives at stake. Please visit FeatherRiverAction.org to learn more about what the science tells us are the impacts of industrial thinning (AKA industrial logging) and how you can get involved in defending the forest from fear based logging that will only dig us deeper into a climate and extinction emergency.

Thank you.

Thank you to the Pacific Northwest Climate Alliance for these heartbreaking photos of USFS projects. Logging more than 100 feet from communities is not needed for “community protection” and in fact is putting human (and wild) communities at risk, while ignoring the imperative to harden communities themselves from wildfire.

We will not allow the Feather River watershed to share the fate of these other damaged and degraded areas! Stop the Community Destruction Project!

Mature, old growth forests near Strawberry Valley (around Lost Creek, above and Onion Creek, satellite image below) face up to 77% cutting (canopy reduction) by the USFS “Community Destruction Project” THIS FALL. The satellite photos you see represent large stores of carbon, much of which would be released to the atmosphere if the project goes ahead as planned (estimated at nearly 6 million tons of CO2 according to the Forest Service).

 

This would destroy the ecological integrity of these unique ecosystems, and allow faster and stronger drying winds and sun under the canopy, putting the forest (and nearby communities) at increased risk of climate devastation. These dense forests are adapted to hold in moisture and resist wildfire. They are already naturally protective of communities.

In addition to the Strawberry Valley area, areas to the north and south Mohawk Valley/ Graeagle/ Blairsden (especially to the north but also to the south) are at immediate risk of industrial logging as soon as November 2023. Please volunteer or donate to help us organize to stop this plan.

These areas are as close as the Sierra Nevada get to actual “rainforests” that include “lush understory of Pacific Dogwood, Big Leaf Maple, & vestiges of Tanoak, and perhaps most interesting of all Epithetic Lichens.”

More information and photos of very large trees in these areas, and specific mapping of threatened forests can be found here. Thanks to Joshua French for his work documenting these unique habitats before they are destroyed.

We need YOU to come to Plumas County and appreciate and defend these vital carbon-storing communities. Biomass is a false solution to the climate crisis!