Groups Sound Alarm on Controversial Logging & Clearing Plan for Los Padres National Forest

More than 90 environmental, tribal, and community organizations ask Forest Service to reduce project size, prepare Environmental Impact Statement

Groups throughout California’s central coast and beyond are raising concerns about a U.S. Forest Service plan to log trees and clear native chaparral habitat across 90,796 acres of Los Padres National Forest —the largest vegetation removal project in this forest’s history.

[Last week], 91 environmental, tribal, and community organizations submitted a joint letter asking the agency to significantly reduce the size of the project and to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement. The groups are endorsing a “Community Alternative” that reduces the Forest Service’s plan by 83%, avoids ecologically critical areas, and focuses vegetation treatments in areas close to communities where they are most effective.

The Forest Service plan, dubbed the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project, would allow commercial timber sales, heavy machinery, and other methods to clear trees and shrubs across national forest land stretching from Big Sur to the Ventura-Los Angeles county line and covering  six counties: Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Kern, and Los Angeles.

As it stands, the Forest Service proposal would cause significant harm to important ecological and historical sites. The area is popular for local recreation, home to rare plants and wildlife, and contains numerous cultural and religious sites. Specifically, it would affect 26,048 acres of designated critical habitat for nine federally listed wildlife and plant species such as the California condor and the purple amole, 38,345 acres of inventoried roadless areas, 270 miles of trails, and 73 recreation sites.

“To be clear, reducing wildfire risk is a laudable and necessary goal—our neighborhoods depend on it,” said Los Padres ForestWatch executive director Jeff Kuyper. “Unfortunately, the Forest Service’s plan continues to rely on an outdated fire mitigation approach by clearing vegetation in remote areas, far away from where any of us live. The Community Alternative minimizes damage to our wild places and advances more effective solutions closer to home.”

Thanks to feedback from Los Padres ForestWatch and its attorney, the Environmental Defense Center, and other conservation organizations, tribes, and community members in 2022, the Forest Service eliminated around 144,000 acres from their initial proposal. While the organizations view the revision as a welcome step in the right direction, they point out that it still targets vast areas of wildlands, poses tremendous impacts to the forest, and leaves significant room for improvement.

“This area is a beautiful and critically important part of California’s natural landscape,” said Maggie Hall, Deputy Chief Counsel at the Environmental Defense Center. “We look forward to working with the Forest Service to protect this incredible resource while not unnecessarily harming cultural sites, wild and undeveloped lands, and endangered plants and animals.”

The proposal’s impacts are potentially sweeping and raise serious questions about ecological damage, cultural site protection, and the effectiveness of backcountry fuel treatments. The groups highlighted several concerns with the plan, including:

• The plan would clear areas up to 1,500 feet wide along hundreds of miles of trails and recreation sites including Romero Canyon Trail and Hot Springs Trail in the Santa Barbara front country, Aliso Canyon Trail near the Santa Ynez River, Davy Brown Trail and campsites and day use areas near Figueroa Mountain, the Mt. Pinos Summit Trail, Cerro Alto and West Cuesta Ridge near San Luis Obispo, and popular recreation sites along the Big Sur coast like the bluffs overlooking Sand Dollar Beach.
• The plan authorizes the removal of trees through commercial timber sales, raising concerns that it may facilitate broader efforts by the current administration to ramp up logging on public lands.
• The plan would affect more than 800 sites and landscapes considered sacred by local tribes.
• More than 42% of the project intrudes into roadless areas, some of the most wild and untouched places in Los Padres National Forest outside of designated Wilderness areas.
• The plan would remove vegetation across more than 26,000 acres of federally designated critical habitat where endangered and threatened species such as California red-legged frogs, arroyo toads, California condors, and purple amole cling to survival.

The groups are asking the Forest Service to significantly scale back the project to focus more strategically on areas immediately surrounding communities instead of remote areas in the interior of the forest. They are also asking the Forest Service to prepare a more detailed Environmental Impact Statement in lieu of the shorter, less thorough Environmental Assessment it released last month.

The groups include national organizations like The Wilderness Society, Western Watersheds Project, Hispanic Access Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife, WildEarth Guardians, Runners for Public Lands, GreenLatinos, Center for Biological Diversity, and Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Several statewide and local organizations also signed, including ForestWatch, Environmental Defense Center, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, California Nature Art Museum, Nature for All, California Native Plant Society, Community Environmental Council, local Sierra Club and Audubon Society chapters, Ventana Wilderness Alliance, CalWild, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), Ventura Land Trust, Keep Sespe Wild, Mountain Lion Foundation, and more. Indigenous groups joining the letter include Native Coast Action Network, the Chalon Indian Council of Bakersfield, and Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation. Ventura-based outdoor company Patagonia also joined the letter.

ForestWatch has published a web page with frequently asked questions, an interactive map, and more information to help the public better understand what’s at stake.

Background: More Effective Ways to Protect Our Communities from Wildfire

Despite claims that logging and remote vegetation clearing will reduce wildfire risk, decades of scientific research and recent wildfire incidents consistently show that they do not prevent the most destructive fires—those driven by extreme winds and climate conditions. The kinds of wildfires that threaten communities are not fueled by dense forests, but by winds that can hurl embers miles ahead of a fire front, igniting homes and structures regardless of nearby vegetation.

Firefighting experts agree that protecting communities starts at the home—not in the backcountry. Investments in retrofitting homes, creating defensible space and maintaining “Zone Zero” (the area within five feet of a structure), and improving emergency response systems are far more effective than remote logging and clearing projects that do little to alter fire behavior when it matters the most—during extreme wind events. These treatments often leave communities more vulnerable at a critical time when climate change is worsening fire risk across the country.