On Wednesday a federal judge ruled to allow the U.S. Forest Service to proceed with its supposed “thinning” of 755 acres of prime pines on Pine Mountain’s Reyes Peak. The Forest Service’s proposal is to log an unlimited number of larger old-growth conifers growing along the 7,000-foot elevation of Reyes Peak, 6 miles east of the summit of Highway 33 north of Ojai.
The government’s logging plan had been legally challenged in federal court by several environmental and indigenous groups including Keep the Sespe Wild and Los Padres Forest Watch. This writer was among the 16,000 individuals who submitted comments to the Forest Service decrying their ill-considered plans to log these large old-growth trees.
The Forest Service proposal includes mowing to the ground about 315 acres of chaparral, as well as chopping down an unspecified number of very old large trees on 423 acres closer to Reyes Peak than the chaparral mowing.
Plaintiffs emphasized, to no avail, that about one-third of their project area is proposed as “wilderness” in Rep. Salud Carbajal’s upcoming legislation and should not be logged before becoming federal wilderness (in which no cutting is ever allowed).
Peter Frankopan’s magisterial “The Earth Transformed” makes clear the terrible impact of global deforestation on our planet. He paraphrases the great 19th century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s prescient concern about the link between aridity and deforestation.
“By the felling of trees that cover the tops and sides of mountains men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; the want of fuel and a scarcity of water.”
At one time the Department of Agriculture (which includes the USFS) claimed the logging was needed to protect communities from forest fires, but the nearest community is Camp Scheideck which has fewer than 20 year-round residents. Ojai is 14 miles away.
Scheideck, which I have visited many times, is also marooned across the wide Cuyama River; you have to drive over the dry riverbed to get there. So if the Department of Agriculture folks are determined to protect Scheideck why not build a bridge over the Cuyama since it’s often closed to vehicles for months at a time in the winter? You can chop down the forest and avoid fires, but the residents cannot get out in winter in any case and we now know wildfire season is 12 months a year.
The Department of Agriculture’s thinking is decidedly “20th century” and casts an unpleasant light on Los Padres National Forest’s antiquated motto, “Land of Many Uses.” I guess this includes the support of logging over 400 acres of old-growth pines with diameters over 24 inches. A 24-inch diameter Jeffrey pine or Douglas fir is a very large tree, and there are also magnificent sugar pines in the now-approved mauling area.
The Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service biologists defend their decision to cut down these beautiful ancient trees here.
It’s difficult to agree with the feds’ concept of fuel reduction and “defensible forest thinning,” because these very efforts heavily damage a precious old-growth area and, in the case of a large fire like Thomas or Zaca, such thinning and even firebreaks are useless.
There is certainly some argument for mowing the chaparral, yet that chaparral and the dead timber littering the area provide soil enrichment, nutrients for various small animals that also serve as food for the condors flying overhead. The ecology is very complex, and human hubris often intervenes at a cost to the environment as well as the humans.
This logging and chaparral mowing proposal came in at priority number 150 out of Los Padres Forest’s 163 fuels projects listed in their “Southern Districts Strategic Fuel Break Assessment.”
My friends at Keep the Sespe Wild (KSW) ask intriguing questions about how such pressure to cut these trees came about — 750 acres is not actually a large area in terms of logging, yet it’s a critical “sky island” zone here in this remote area.
KSW writes, “What is clear is that orders came down from the U.S. Forest Service’s HQ in Washington D.C. to log more trees in Southern California, where forests only grow at high elevations, and where forest access roads, like the one-lane road from Hwy. 33 to Reyes Peak, are few and far between. Are our local forests being targeted simply because a road runs by them?”
Los Padres National Forest staff are decidedly wrong in placing the Reyes Peak project into a type of region with fires supposedly every 35 years or fewer — this is demonstrably untrue. There is zero evidence backing the staff’s claim that the most recent fire there was between 81 and 109 years ago — this is a false claim, and not based on an on-the-ground study.
I have walked the area many times and there is very little evidence of “recent” (last 50 years) fires. When staff decided there are too many trees in parts of the Reyes Peak project area, they were using simulated historical vegetation conditions but have provided no references or links for these “simulations.”
In my 2021 critical comment to the Forest Service about their “make the Earth productive” proposal, I wrote that we should keep these precious “sky islands” of primeval forest as unaffected as possible: no thinning or cutting. With the best intentions, the USFS will achieve the opposite of their goal to preserve these very old sky island conifer stands and we will all be the losers.
4.1.1.
Peter Frankopan, “The Earth Transformed” (Knopf 2023) – von Humboldt quote from p. 464; among groups opposing the now-approved plan we see Los Padres Forest-Watch (LPFW), Keep Sespe Wild, Earth Island Institute, American Alpine Club, Center for Biological Diversity, California Chaparral Institute, Patagonia Works, and two local municipalities (Ojai and Ventura.
