The U.S. Forest Service is moving forward with its second forest-thinning project within the Los Padres National Forest in the last six months.
On April 26, the Forest Service announced its plans to remove trees near Tecuya Ridge, which follows its November 2018 plans to remove trees in Cuddy Valley. Both of these projects are located in the Mount Pinos Ranger District, which is east of the Santa Lucia Ranger District that borders Santa Maria.
According to the Forest Service’s proposal for the Tecuya Ridge Shaded Fuelbreak Project from March 2018, the purpose of this effort is to remove from a 1,626-acre area trees that are dead or dying to reduce the risk of fires. According to a decision memo describing the Cuddy Valley forest health/fuels reduction project, the Forest Service will remove trees that are at risk of loss to insect and disease from a 1,200-acre area for prescribed fire management.
Los Padres ForestWatch, a Santa Barbara County group that focuses on protecting and restoring forests along the Central Coast, has pushed back on numerous aspects of both projects.
One of the groups’s primary concerns is that the logging for the Tecuya Ridge project takes place near habitat space for California condors, which are an endangered species protected by federal law. In a statement, the organization said that according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, almost 50 sites that condors regularly settle are located within a half-mile of where trees will be cut and removed.
“There is simply no place for commercial logging in condor country,” Bryant Baker, Los Padres ForestWatch Conservation Director, said in a statement.
Although environmental reviews were completed, Los Padres ForestWatch called out the Forest Service for moving forward with both of these projects without preparing environmental impact statements.
“With approval of this project, the Forest Service is setting a dangerous precedent for shirking environmental review and public input for logging projects that can have significant impacts on endangered species in the Los Padres National Forest,” Baker said in the statement.
The Forest Service’s memo on the Cuddy Valley project stated that the project is categorically excluded from an environmental impact review. According to the National Environmental Policy Act, projects can be categorically excluded if a federal agency has determined the project doesn’t significantly affect the environment for humans. This exclusion designation is designed to reduce paperwork and save time and resources.
Los Padres ForestWatch is not the only organization pushing back on these projects. The John Muir Project, another California-based group that works to protect national forests, disagrees with aspects of the project as well. The organization doesn’t believe widespread forest-thinning reduces wildfire risks.
“The science is telling us that commercial logging projects like these not only damage critical wildlife habitat, they also usually make wildland fires spread faster and burn hotter,” Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist with the John Muir Project, said in a statement.
This article appears in May 2-9, 2019.