http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-sequoia28jan28,1,7202399.story?coll=la-news-environment

Suit Filed Over Sequoia Logging

Environmentalists seek to block Forest Service plans to allow cutting in
a

national monument.

By Bettina Boxall

Times Staff Writer

January 28, 2005

Conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit Thursday
asking the courts to

overturn a plan that would allow extensive logging
in the 5-year-old Giant

Sequoia National Monument in the southern Sierra.

The lawsuit is the latest skirmish in a long-running
battle over management of

nearly three dozen groves of the world's largest
trees found on national

forest land, beyond the confines of nearby Sequoia
and Kings Canyon National

Parks.

Logging in the national forest groves in the 1980s
provoked a preservation

drive that led to creation of the 328,000-acre
monument by President Clinton

in 2000.

The monument banned logging, mining and off-road
vehicle use in and around the

towering groves, prompting a lawsuit by timber
interests. Their challenge

failed, but controversy continued when the U.S.
Forest Service issued land-use

plans that called for extensive timber cutting in
the name of fire prevention

and ecosystem restoration.

In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, six
conservation

groups claim the Forest Service plan violates
national environmental laws,

permits logging that would harm rare wildlife, and
runs counter to both the

spirit and the letter of the monument designation.

"The plan will allow significant logging,
reduction in forest cover and

removal of large trees which are critical to
survival of already threatened

species such as the Pacific fisher," said
Sierra Club legal director Patrick

Gallagher, who helped prepare the suit. "The
giant sequoia is the largest

living thing on earth, and this is the only place
they are found, and we ought

to give them the utmost protection."

Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes
defended the management plan, which was

recently upheld on appeal by the agency's regional
office.

"After a very, very close examination, we
concluded that the Sequoia National

Monument Plan is a good plan that meets the spirit
and intent of what

President Clinton wanted," Mathes
said. "We remind people that the vast

majority of trees that are cut will be less than 20
inches in diameter."

Under the plan, enough trees could be cut in the
monument to fill more than

2,000 logging trucks a year. The biggest, oldest
sequoias could not be

touched, but trees as old as 130 years and as large
as 30 inches in diameter —

including sequoias — could be felled. The
clearing of forest openings as large

as a couple of football fields would be permitted.
The plan additionally calls

for the use of controlled burns to clean out dense
brush and small trees that

fuel wildfire.

"It's just business as usual," said Rachel
Fazio of the Earth Island

Institute, one of the plaintiffs. "They're
proposing this kind of stuff all

over the Sierra, so it's not different from any
place without monument status."

The fight over the monument plan mirrors disputes
throughout the West, where

conservationists contend that the Bush
administration is using the threat of

wildfire to pursue logging projects on public land
that are more about helping

the timber industry than reducing the fire risk. In
the Sequoia monument, they

say, the Forest Service should rely much more
heavily on controlled burning to

thin overgrown land — as does Sequoia National
Park, which has a

long-established program of such burns.

But the Forest Service says more thinning is needed
than can be accomplished

through burning, which also creates smoke that adds
to air pollution problems

in the San
Joaquin Valley
to the west.

"We would have to do a great deal of burning
under dangerous conditions," said

Mathes, though he conceded the Forest Service lagged behind the
Park Service

in using burns as a forest restoration tool.

"In retrospect, we wish we had a better program
of prescribed burning years

ago like the Park Service did," Mathes said. "We've only come around in recent

years to the notion that we have to reintroduce fire
into the ecosystem."