Sick Trees and Global Warming Science

“We will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. … We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

(President Barack Obama’s Inaguration Day Speech, January 20, 2008)

President Obama’s inspiring words about science and green infrastructure have brought new hope to Sierra Club California – even amid bad news today that global warming is decimating western forests.

Our hope? That this Administration will apply science and technology to the problem of global warming – just as his predecessor’s administration disregarded science – in time to turn back the threat to our trees.

Last year, then-President Bush’s U.S. EPA denied California’s automobile greenhouse gas waiver request. The waiver would have allowed California and other states to implement a plan to fight greenhouse gases created by cars, trucks and vehicles – the top source of the pollution that causes global warming in our state, scientific studies have shown.

California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols has written the Obama Administration a letter requesting that the waiver be granted. Quick action on this matter will allow other states to follow in California’s lead – and perhaps prompt the production of cleaner cars.

At the same time, we need to keep in mind that harm to our forests has already begun, and is unlikely to stop even if we begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why Sierra Club California started working with state officials to craft a plan to lessen the inevitable effects of global warming on habitats and wildlife.

Obama’s Administration can also follow California’s path in this – or work with our state’s leaders to ensure that science and protection prevails. As our new President said during his inauguration, “With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to .. roll back the specter of a warming planet.”

Let that work begin now.

Big Win For Big Trees!

Some of California's largest "residents" got a special break last week.

Big trees in California's Giant Sequioa National Monument won't be logged, following timber companies' eleventh-hour withdrawal of their lawsuit -- just hours before Sierra Club's team would have clashed with them before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sierra Club activists, including California's own Sequoia Task Force, challenged the Bush Administration's plans allowing logging within the monument. Sierra Club triumphed in federal court, successfully arguing that Bush's "Management Plan" for the monument really added up to for-profit logging. Following that victory, the Forest Service has begun crafting a new, hopefully better, plan for protecting the monument.

Logging companies appealed the case, but dropped their appeal just before the June 10 hearing. Their decision to back away from efforts to plunder California's wilderness sends a profound signal to those who would cloak outright giveaways of our national treasures in the costume of "management practices."

Sierra Club's National Director, Carl Pope, just sent a note congratulating California activists for their June 10 victory:

"After years of fighting to keep our towering sequoia trees safe from the timber industry's saws, we have finally won. Thanks to this hard-earned victory, our children and grandchildren will be able to stand in awe of these noble giants for generations to come."

Learn more about Sierra Club's historic victory here.

Your donation helps us triumph in court and in the California Legislature.

Weak Green Building "Rules" Make A Bad Foundation

Sierra Club California is seeing red over new green building “rules” currently under consideration.

The California Building Standards Commission meets Tuesday, May 6 to decide whether to adopt weak, voluntary green building standards. Sierra Club California, along with a number of key legislative leaders and environmental groups, opposes the rules.

For years, California builders and architects have led the nation in designing safe, inspiring buildings. Now we have a chance to tower over the rest of the world in sustainable design as well. We're urging commissioners to reverse their current course and begin to engage in continued discussions of meaningful, enforceable standards.

Reasons Not To Like The New Standards

• Through their use of energy, residential and commercial buildings in California produce about 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Increased energy efficiencies in buildings could cut a minimum of 3 million metric tons of emissions by 2020 -- if the changes are done right.

• As a sector, commercial and residential buildings account for more greenhouse gas emissions than industry or transportation, according to a report by the federal Energy Information Administration. Spiking energy use by U.S. buildings accounted for 48 percent of the nation’s total increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

• The standards use the term “bio-based," which isn’t reality-based. Simply because a product comes from biologically based sources doesn’t make it sustainable. For example, the Chinook salmon is “biologically based,” yet harvest of the population wouldn’t be sustainable because its numbers are so low. You won't find this term used anywhere else, including EPA's “Terminology Reference System,” the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system, the Build It Green “GreenPoint Rated” system, or The Construction Specifications Institute “GreenFormat” sustainable product reporting form.

• Widespread clear cutting, logging in endangered species habitat, conversion of forests to plantations and other harmful forest practices aren’t “green” by anyone’s definition. Wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a certification approved by the U.S. Green Building Council, cannot be harvested in those ways. But the Building Standards Commission’s voluntary rules would allow the use of wood certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), Canadian Standards Association (CSA), the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC), or American Tree Farm – none of which have the same, strict certification standards.

• Currently, tens of thousands of acres of FSC-certified forest in California and many hundreds of California-based distributors, manufacturers, retailers and other companies that service the building industry. Integration of FSC certification into the state’s standards could drive the industry to embrace these attainable, sustainable practices.

• During a contentious March meeting, the BSC removed all talk of sustainable land use from even these voluntary green building standards – even though it’s universally acknowledged that infill development is “greener” because it lessens commute time. This further weakened these already watered-down voluntary “rules.”

Your Secure Donation Helps Us Build Our Resistance To Soft Standards

Victory at Long Last for Jackson State Forest!!!

After a seemingly endless saga of court cases, environmental documents and hearings spanning the past eight years, the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection today finally approved a new and improved management plan for Jackson State Forest. Sierra Club has been following this issue since 1996, has been intimately involved with this process, and is very pleased with the outcome.

At nearly 50,000 acres, Jackson State Forest in Mendocino County is California’s largest state-owned forest, and is by far the largest public redwood forest between San Francisco Bay and Humboldt County.

A working group of industry and enviro reps in Mendocino County worked for 18 months to craft consensus recommendations aimed at resolving much of the ongoing controversy surrounding the management of Jackson Forest. The Board, recognizing a historic level of agreement between disparate interest groups, followed nearly all of these recommendations.

The Board of Forestry adopted the new approach to Jackson on an 8-1 vote, with Tom Walz, the representative from Sierra Pacific Industries, opposing all aspects of this historic agreement. We wish we were surprised… On the other hand, we commend Board members David Nawi and Pam Giacomini who comprised the Jackson Forest Sub-committee and put endless hours into this effort over the past few years.

Major kudos need to go to Vince Taylor at the Campaign to Restore Jackson State Forest for his years of work to bring the mis-management of Jackson Forest to the attention of the courts and the public. Check their website Thursday for a more extensive update. We have worked closely over the past several years both at the Board of Forestry and in the Legislature to fundamentally change the management direction at Jackson, and we’ve finally cleared a historic hurdle.

Victories in the realm of state-regulated forestry are few and far between, but this is clearly significant progress on a long-festering issue. Here’s to more successes in the near future.

Paul Mason & Kathy Bailey
Sierra Club California

Big Victory for National Forests

Sierra Club Victory in Ninth Circuit Deals Blow to Bush Administration’s So-Called "Healthy Forests" Initiative

Court Rules That Administration Cannot Ignore Environmental Laws to Log Forests

San Francisco, California--In the case of Sierra Club v. Bosworth, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Forest Service erred when it conducted logging projects nationwide without prior analysis of their effects on the environment.

Sierra Club and Sierra Forest Legacy (formerly named Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign) filed the suit in October 2004 challenging the Bush Administration's "Healthy Forest Initiative" rule that eliminated a 30-year-old Forest Service practice of analyzing the environmental effects of timber sales up to 1,000 acres and prescribed burns up to 4,500 acres
before allowing such projects to proceed.

Today’s ruling from the Ninth Circuit said the U.S. Forest Service erred because it:

• Exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act a huge class of logging classified as "fuels reduction" first, and then later gathered the environmental impact data
• Failed to assess the cumulative effects of logging 1.2 million acres per year nationwide
• Failed to assess highly controversial and uncertain risks of impacts
• Failed to put more specific constraints on what can be logged

Statement of Eric Huber, Senior Staff Attorney, Sierra Club

"This victory is a blow to the Bush Administration's cynical "Healthy Forests" initiative and will help protect millions of acres of national forest each year from destructive and unnecessary logging projects. This ruling will help ensure that vast swaths of our national forests are not logged without environmental reviews under the guise of forest management or fuel suppression. The Sierra Club supports forest management practices that actually seek to protect communities and our precious wild forests and minimize the risk of wildfires, but this case is just one more example of the Bush administration's disastrous overreach on environmental issues.

The courts have once again had to tell the administration that it simply cannot ignore laws--environmental and otherwise--simply because it finds them inconvenient."

Statement of Craig Thomas, Executive Director of Sierra Forest Legacy
"In California, since the adoption of the Bush Administration rule, we have witnessed the gross abuse of discretion and ramp-up of logging with limited environmental review that we feared. Logging without environmental safeguards damages our forests and the public's trust in Forest Service management."

The full opinion can be viewed here.

Conservation Groups Sue State to Block Effort to Streamline Killing of Endangered Coho Salmon

With coho salmon teetering on the brink of extinction, the California Board of Forestry recently adopted new rules to make it easier to kill the remaining coho, without addressing the well-known shortcomings of the state’s logging rules.

The Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) and Sierra Club brought suit against the salmon-killing rules in San Francisco Superior Court today, arguing that the Board has a legal responsibility to protect fish, wildlife and resources, and that rules focused exclusively on making it easier to kill endangered salmon are beyond the Board’s authority.

California’s logging rules have long been identified by state and federal wildlife agencies as allowing harm to endangered salmon. See declaration of Joe Blum, NMFS. In the summer of 2006, the Secretary of the Resources Agency proposed a broad statewide rule package to address the shortcomings of California’s Forest Practice Rules as they relate to salmon. Shortly thereafter, the Governor’s Office apparently intervened on behalf of the timber industry, and the proposed habitat protection approach was abandoned.

The coho salmon rules being challenged in this lawsuit make no improvements to logging rules to protect salmon habitat, and only apply when coho will actually be killed by the logging operation. If the logging plan will kill coho salmon, the rules require only certain limited mitigations – regardless of site conditions, nothing more can be required.

“The Board of Forestry should be tightening lax logging rules that allow even more habitat damage. Instead, they’re giving away permission to kill threatened salmon,” said Scott Greacen, Executive Director of EPIC.

Sierra Club California’s forestry advocate Paul Mason observed, “We need to protect and restore salmon habitat, not limit environmental protections and make it easier to kill endangered coho.”

The suit also seeks to overturn new Road Management Plan (RMP) regulations that do not provide for independent review, implementation, monitoring, approval, or amendment. The importance of correcting roads that adversely impact salmon and steelhead habitat with sediment is well known. Richard Gienger, long-time salmon and watershed advocate, points out that "The existing rules, if properly implemented, will prevent sedimentation from roads. Without an independent process or adequate standards, the Board of Forestry's RMP is an unwarranted and confusing duplication and a travesty compared to a real Road Management Plan that would actually have utility and long-term positive effects."