President Obama has the chance to do the right thing here, but he needs more information to get him on the right track. President Obama needs to be informed of the damage Title IV of Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (Senate bill S.22) would cause and to reject Title IV, if it is approved by the House. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (S.22) would allow ten biomass removal and fuel break creation experiments on half a million acres of public lands each year for ten years for a total of a MINIMUM of five million acres, supposedly to protect public lands and homes from wildfires.

“Treatments for a 10-year period within a landscape that is–at least 50,000 acres; 10 proposals to be funded during any fiscal year” S.22 Title IV would allow removal of all small diameter trees from more than 5,000,000 acres of public forests when the science on the issue is inconclusive.  If you kill all the kindergartners, you’ll soon find out there are no sixth graders.  S.22 Title IV would degrade huge amounts of forest habitat for many species and will not protect homes or the federal treasury.

S.22 Title IV has passed the Senate and will be heard in the house in a couple of days. The Herger Feinstein Quincy Library Group Act allowed experimental biomass extractive logging and quarter-mile wide fuel break logging projects along all the mountain ridgelines in two and one half national Forests in California to slow wildfires. But the project would increase the potential for fire right next to the community.  The language of the S.22 bill Title IV requires compliance with “ESA, NEPA, and other applicable law, and can only occur in areas that need active management to restore natural processes.”

However, our experience with the U.S. Forest Service (FS) in Sequoia National Forest is that they claim compliance and when damage occurs, we must file suit based on non-compliance, and the court rules in our favor or the FS withdraws the project. The FS generally resubmits the same project the following year using different terminology and we begin the game of persistence all over, but damage to public lands repeatedly occurs. The Senate committee indicated that while some young trees will likely be removed, it would only be so that a more natural forest with a mix of young, medium-aged, and old trees is created. My reading of S.22 Title IV indicates that small diameter trees would be the focus of projects (“forest restoration treatments that reduce hazardous fuels by–(i) focusing on small diameter trees, thinning, strategic fuel breaks”) at Sec 4003 C.1.E.1. From: Sequoia ForestKeeper – ara@sequoiaforestkeeper.org S.22 : http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c111g0Bbdr:e528873:

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