Southern California Sky Islands in Peril – Protect Pine Mountain

https://www.protectpinemountain.org/

Southern California’s Transverse Ranges include a number of high mountains in Ventura County, including Pine Mountain – a place where I've experienced many eye-dazzling days and heart-swelling sunsets. From this peak, you can look out over the spectacular Channel Islands, as well as east over the dry and harsh-looking badlands of the interior. This is spectacular, rugged country, and some of its most important denizens (southern coastal populations of Jeffrey Pine and White Fir (and most every population of Big-cone Douglas-fir!) are already under *severe* threat from drought, and especially fire.

Unfortunately, the USFS is pursuing a plan to log this area; the thought of which is too much to abide.

I want future generations of people to be able to visit these remnants of epochs past – these forests are a window onto a wetter, cooler, time in California's history.

Help send a message to the USFS (who have recently badly mismanaged their use of backfires, permanently destroying much of these pine and Big-cone Douglas-fir forests).

Here’s a barely-organized dump of notes and meta-notes I took while attending a Los Padres Forest Watch webinar about the US Forest Service's Pine Mountain thinning + logging project:

• Pine Mountain Project was proposed in late May 2020

This is directly tied to an Executive Order from the Trump administration re: reducing fire risk nationally, requiring 3.8 billion board feet of timber to be sold.

... which is part of/helpful to the aims of a larger, coordinated effort to expand commercial, extractive industry presence into western National Forests and public lands nationwide.

• From Internal USFS memo re: Pine Mountain Project:
"Categorical Exclusions to complete this work ... should be first choice wherever possible"

(these C.E.s expedite the process, minimize opportunity for public comment, and do not require the agency to respond to public comments).

The same USFS memo urged "getting creative" about how to do this = dwarf mistletoe reasoning (see below).

USFS internal memo also classified the timber in this area as "low value timber", purportedly due to distance from mills, allowing it to be sold very cheaply (0.25 cents/CCF, as opposed to normal $1, effectively quadrupling its value) = big incentive for logging.

• Project includes removal/logging of BOTH Live and dead trees and shrubs.

(Which is not to imply dead logs/snags don’t have their own significant ecological value!)

• Almost certainly more live trees and shrubs to be removed than dead stems.

• 34% of the project overlaps areas proposed to be added to Sespe Wilderness

• <24" diameter trees no questions asked for removal

• "impact by dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium spp.)" allows the USFS to remove trees > 24" diameter, up to 64" diameter. Functionally, this 64" upper limit encapsulates all trees in the project area.

** My note: This is a special kind of inane bureacratic reasoning that can only be explained by the urging of the USFS to "get creative" (read: disingenuous). The mere presence of conifer mistletoes is a bizarre reason to consider a tree particularly risky or fatally compromised and thus slated for removal. Many healthy trees with long lives ahead of them host Arceuthobium infestations.

• LPFW goal is to avoid having to litigate/file a case against the USFS by either getting them to drop the project or force more extensive environmental review.

• BEST OPTION TO DO THIS: Sustained public pressure, especially by submitting *personalized* comments:

• But even assuming no deranging economic motivations for logging (as if), will thinning/clearing help fire risk? … No.

USFS asserts 65 trees/acre in pre-fire suppression era

This estimate at minimum lacks context/nuance, and may just be an underestimate, glossing over patchy density of the mature conifer forests in these SoCal sky islands.

• This area is quite far from significant concentrations of any buildings/inhabited areas, and even in the USFS’ own prioritized ranking of projects that are part of this order, the Pine Mountain project is down near the bottom.

• Project will allow "temporary roads" to be constructed for heavy hauling machinery.

Editorial note: Heavy equipment doesn't make "TEMPORARY" roads!* This kind of disturbance is extremely persistent.

• Invasion of cheatgrass and other grasses into these disturbed areas/roads/firebreaks brings in a massive amount of fine fuels that INCREASE fire risk.