…California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan was released on Jan. 8 to give a comprehensive and direct action plan for the state to reduce wildfire risk, improve the health of forests and wildlands along with battling climate change. The plan gives a strategy to tackle statewide projects on half a million acres every year by 2025 to meet the state’s target. …While the larger plan is state-wide, portions would directly target areas in the Lake Tahoe Basin. …The comprehensive plan also focuses on building a large network of fuel breaks around vulnerable communities, expanding home hardening, defensible space and preparedness planning to create wildfire-adapted communities, and sustaining the economic vitality of rural forested areas. …$323 million would go directly to specific priorities which include protecting communities, reducing risk of large, catastrophic wildfires and economic recovery in rural communities.

The San Juan National Forest is considering a vegetation management plan that includes logging ponderosa pine forests northeast of Dolores. An environmental assessment will be released in February for the Salter Vegetation Management Project. The project proposes a combination of actions that include timber harvest, tree planting and prescribed burns covering 22,346 acres north of Dolores. …Dolores District Ranger Derek Padilla said the proposed projects’ goals are to increase the stand diversity of the ponderosa pine forest ecosystem, improve ponderosa forest resiliency and provide economic opportunities for the timber industry. The proposed project would lower pine stocking levels, reduce the presence of dwarf mistletoe disease and remove infested bark beetle trees and dead trees, according to project scoping documents.

….During “the timber wars,” also known as “the spotted-owl wars,” the period from roughly the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, loggers and environmentalists first fought over the listing of the diminutive northern spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act, and then over the management of the owl’s ancient forest habitat on public lands.   …In 1994, President Bill Clinton brokered an uneasy truce by directing federal land and wildlife managers to work together on what would become the Northwest Forest Plan.   …But since then, the spotted-owl wars have cooled.  Many stakeholders have laid down their weapons of war and have chosen instead to sit around a table and collaborate on public forest management. But now all that is likely to change.  In an overtly political decision, the Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Jan. 13 stripped protections for the northern spotted owl from 3.4 million acres of federal forestlands. 

Dylan Plummer

The ferns were sprouting already. Green fronds poked out in stark contrast with the charred trees of the McKenzie watershed. Yet despite the signs of new life, it was difficult not to feel as though this watershed had been forever transformed as I walked through the blackened landscape. The verdant forests of stooped maples and ancient Douglas firs stretching towards the sun seemed lost in the blazes that burned across our state last September. …Left to their own devices, these forests can come back healthier than they were before the inferno. …But as I walked through the stands of blackened trunks to the crest of a hill, I received a harsh reminder that the majority of the burned forests would not be allowed to naturally regenerate.