Clearcutting and Fuel Treatment in California: Will the California Forestry Association Call out Sierra Pacific’s Clearcuts?

This is land owned – and clearcut – by Sierra Pacific Industries. It is located approximately 15 miles north of the town of Paradise, California. The 2018 Camp Fire did not make it this far north.

Consider this a companion piece to the post that Sharon just made here.

In this piece from August 2018 – two months before the historic and deadly wildfires in Paradise, California – the following section caught my eye:

Push for regulatory relief

Meantime, the [California Forestry Association] wants to change rules and regulations to make it easier for private industry to thin forested land. The group also suggests increased logging could benefit rural areas in Northern California where poverty and job losses have been problems.

[Rich] Gordon, the [California Forestry Association president and] CEO, insists the industry isn’t pushing for more clear-cutting of forested lands — a practice the Sierra Club opposes. Rather, he said, the industry advocates “selectively removing smaller trees on a landscape so that the bigger trees (which are more resilient to fire and store more carbon) can survive and do better.”

Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club California, said the environmental group is not opposed to what she calls “selective logging and those sort of things. We’re opposed to going in and unnecessarily disrupting the environment and doing forest management practices that will lead to worse fires, and some forest practices do.”

She said the practice of clear-cutting and planting trees all at the same time creates added risk for the forest because “you don’t have diversity. That makes them more susceptible to fires. Older trees tend to burn less and slower. So you want to have a lot of diversity.”

Some conservative lawmakers believe environmental groups share blame for the state’s current fire risk.

Extreme environmental groups have for years stated that we shouldn’t thin our forests because of the benefits of carbon that is stored,” said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach. “However, the carbon that is currently being released with these out-of-control wildfires is dramatically greater than we would have if our forests were responsibly managed.”

As I posted as a comment over at Sharon’s original blog post, above and below are some visual examples of “responsibly managed” (?!?) Sierra Pacific Industries lands that are located within 10 to 25 miles, just north of Paradise, California. Will Rich Gordon, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association demand that Sierra Pacific Industries immediately halt all clearcutting and focus only on “selectively removing small trees?” Also, what type of “regulatory relief” is really needed to “selectively remove small trees?”

These clearcuts on Sierra Pacific Industries’ lands sit about 25 miles north of Paradise, CA.
Here’s a map of Sierra Pacific Industry’s land holdings, taken directly from the SPI website.

9 thoughts on “Clearcutting and Fuel Treatment in California: Will the California Forestry Association Call out Sierra Pacific’s Clearcuts?”

  1. I would imagine SPI would just keep doing what they have been doing, plus more thinning. It is possible if there was more timber coming off of public lands they would not need to clearcut as much of their own lands.

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  2. I’m not a fan of SPI and their monopoly over such a wide area. Some of their folks were not a fan of me, either *smirk* Some higher-ups in the Forest Service referred to them as “The Evil Empire”. However, they do appear concerned about their public image, and have made some attempts to alter that negative look. Even in the Rim Fire, they didn’t clearcut all of their 20,000 acres. No, they didn’t cut their Giant Sequoias, either.

    Here’s a view of some ‘experimental’ logging they did: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5322025,-120.4024361,518m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

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  3. At the risk of being even more heretical than usual, when I saw these clearcuts, I thought of the transition from small clearcuts to “big messy clearcuts” a la Jerry Franklin can’t remember what decade that was) . I was also thinking that California forest practices regulations, which probably required small square clearcuts, today might consider long parallel strips (perpendicular to wind direction at time of troubling fires) a la SPLATS instead.

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  4. Matthew, you bolded:
    “Extreme environmental groups have for years stated that we shouldn’t thin our forests because of the benefits of carbon that is stored,” said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach. “However, the carbon that is currently being released with these out-of-control wildfires is dramatically greater than we would have if our forests were responsibly managed.”

    Are you saying that the environmental groups were not, in fact, extreme? Or that they never said this?

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    • Hi Sharon, Sorry that I wasn’t clear. As I’ve pointed out more than a few times on this blog, some right-leaning politicians often refer to environmentalists as “environment terrorists” or “extremists” or, in this case, “extreme environmental groups.”

      I believe that such rhetoric is very dangerous and actually helps to promote violences towards people who speak up for the environment, both in America and around the globe.

      Without the elected official, Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen, specifically naming specific, supposed “extreme environmental groups” it’s tough to know exactly who he is speaking about. My bet is that it would be the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and well-established groups like that.

      Finally, I also bolded that statement because I’m not really sure that many “extreme environmental groups” have said that we “shouldn’t thin our forests because of the benefits of carbon that is stored,” so I think that’s sort of a straw-man argument from Assemblyman Travis Allen. Sure that can be an issue to some, but I doubt it’s a top-line issue in the context of this discussion about wildfires.

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      • I’m sure that number of “extreme eco-groups” would grow if we said ‘ we shouldn’t commercially thin our forests’. Since the Feds do very little in the way of non-commercial thinning, that idea is also some “sort of a straw-man argument”, to me.

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        • Huh? The U.S. Forest Service in the northern Rockies region, and I suspect a lot of other USFS Regions, does do quite a bit of “non-commercial thinning” and “hand-slashing.” I can think of tens of thousands of acres of “non-commercial thinning” that has been planned, and/or carried out, in just Montana over the past few years. Just one project on the Bitterroot National Forest proposed at last 5,000 acres of non-commercial thinning in nearly 200 units spread across the forest. I also believe the Lolo NF and the Flathead NF also have had similar, forest-wide “non-commercial thinning” plans and projects in recent years.

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  5. Colorado also has non-commercial thinning, because the trees we need to thin are in some cases non-commercial.

    Matthew do you know what happens to the “non commercial thinning” trees in Montana?

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    • “Do you know what happens to the ‘non commercial thinning’ trees in Montana?” It depends. Sometimes they are piled and burned. Sometimes they are chipped on site. Sometimes they are trucked to a facility and chipped there. Some of it ends up at big chipper at the former Stimson mill site, where it is hauled by a train to Washington state to a pulp mill that I’m told provides the pulp needed to make 3M post-it notes.

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