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ACTION ALERT:

Urge Lassen National Forest to Respect Wildlife, Salmon Habitat, Roadless Areas, and Local Communities

Lassen National Forest. Public domain.

The Lassen National Forest has proposed a massive post-fire project which intends to “treat” over 48,000 acres of forest through salvage logging, thinning unburned forests, and broadcasting herbicides. The Dixie Fire Community Protection and Swain Mountain Experimental Forest Vegetation Management Project purports to help local communities by providing fuels-reduction treatments in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). Generally, this project would:

Conduct extensive salvage logging on over 48,000 acres of Lassen National Forest
Broadly deploy herbicides (indaziflam, imazapyr, glyphosate, fluazifop-p-butyl, etc.) with known health and safety risks, in an area that provides drinking water to millions of Californians
Develop new log landings, improve and widen existing forest roads, and possibly develop new temporary roads
Ignore prescriptions and guidance from the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan

The Forest Service describes the primary intent of this project as reducing fuel loads near communities, and for the benefit of those communities. But the process and the project details paint an entirely different picture. Consider that:

Local communities (Westwood, Chester, Lake Almanor) have hardly been consulted or solicited for input on this project
The Forest Service has avoided consulting with local stakeholder groups and the South Lassen Watershed Group collaborative, which includes subject matter experts, local communities, and representatives from other government agencies
Nearly half of the project is not within the WUI, and the Forest Service has unilaterally expanded the definition of WUI to include many outlying areas far-removed from any structure or residence
Many of the “treatments” identified in this project have already been attempted and found ineffective; none of the proposed treatments forestalled the catastrophic effects of the 2021 Dixie Fire
The project treats Inventoried Roadless Areas as possible targets for thinning and herbicide use
The Forest Service has failed to provide key information on this project (detailed maps, baseline survey, etc.), preventing the public from fully assessing the impacts of this project on our forests, community, and watershed

Unlike less invasive projects, the Dixie Fire Community Protection and Swain Mountain Experimental Forest Vegetation Management Project is driven primarily by a perceived need to extract as much economic value from the forest as possible. The project scoping document is thin on details and priorities, and hides likely future actions behind “Conditions-Based Management”, where Forest Service employees and contractors (e.g., logging companies) make decisions in the field, in an opaque process which satisfies neither the spirit nor the letter of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Why does this matter? The Dixie Fire swept through vast portions of Lassen National Forest in 2021, burning nearly a million acres and destroying nearly 1,000 homes. The remaining forest landscape is now highly altered and demands careful planning through thoughtful discussion. This area is a critical location at the headwaters of the Feather River, a key source of water for millions of Californians and an essential ingredient to California’s agricultural economy. More recently, tributaries to the North Fork of the Feather River have been identified for potential reintroduction of spring-run Chinook salmon. The Lassen National Forest is at a crossroads for wildlife, and has enabled the southbound migration of key species such as the gray wolf and wolverine. This project represents an important opportunity to protect and restore this habitat connectivity while protecting old growth forest, creating future forests that are fire resilient, while also providing reasonable fire and fuels management for local communities.

Critically, it is not too late to change this project so that it accomplishes forest management goals while respecting wildlife and involving local communities. You can act today and send a message requesting that Lassen National Forest return to a collaborative process with local communities, adopt best-in-class standards for herbicide use, respect the need to keep herbicide out of drinking water, and protect key habitat and migration corridors for wildlife. Send a message today!

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Lassen National Forest Supervisor

Subject: Please Rethink the Dixie Fire Community Protection Project

Message:

Dear Supervisor Bumpus, Lassen National Forest is a special place which suffered major landscape-scale consequences from the Dixie Fire. Local communities also suffered. I urge you to include those communities in a collaborative consultation process to refine and develop the specific details of the Dixie Fire Community Protection and Swain Mountain Experimental Forest Vegetation Management Project. To date, this project has not involved local communities and does not represent their wishes or interests. Conditions-Based Management (CBM) was never devised as a tool to hide information from the public and avoid consultation with communities. As it stands, the Dixie Fire Community Protection and Swain Mountain Experimental Forest Vegetation Management Project provides insufficient information to generate productive consultations with the public. I urge you to take a different approach which describes site-specific plans and treatment units while deploying Adaptive Management to create opportunities for improvement and feedback over time. Herbicides such as glyphosate are known carcinogens and do not belong in the headwaters of the Feather River. I urge you to work with communities to provide buffers and exclusion zones for herbicide use, while also committing to a comprehensive monitoring program which detects herbicide residue and evaluates impacts to wildlife and human health. Inventoried Roadless Areas do not belong in this project footprint; these areas should be immediately removed from this project. The North Fork of the Feather River was once salmon habitat. It may be so again, thanks to recent efforts from the California Department of Water Resources. I urge you to revise your proposed treatments to consider this watershed as a future home to anadromous fish. Similarly, despite the massive scale of this project, it includes insufficient consideration to wildlife needs, both for resident populations and transient populations in search of new homes. Please take these recommended actions for the long-term benefit of Lassen National Forest, a special place that belongs to the American people. Sincerely,

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Environmental Information Protection Center (EPIC) is a tax-exempt non-profit organization, under the section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and therefore all charitable donations are deductible to the full extent allowed by law.

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ACTION ALERT:

Urge Lassen National Forest to Respect Wildlife, Salmon Habitat, Roadless Areas, and Local Communities

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