This year, the U.S. Forest Service is taking a fresh look–through a “bioregional assessment”–at how the forests of the Sierra should be managed in coming decades. Our national forests are not only beautiful landscapes–they also provide clean drinking water and vital wildlife habitats, while fueling our state’s economy. With so much at stake, we must make our voices heard and ensure that California’s national forests are protected and restored for future generations.

Submit your message to tell the U.S. Forest Service to protect and restore Sierra Nevada forests, watersheds, wildlife, and sustainable recreation and economy–by commenting on the draft bioregional assessment.

The Sierra Nevada contains one of the most biologically diverse temperate conifer forests on the planet. California also has the highest animal-species richness of any state in the U.S., and many of these species are found only in the Sierra Nevada. Forests are the lungs of the planet, keeping our air clean. California national forests provide almost 50% of the state’s water.

The bioregional assessment needs to better review and address the health of watersheds, aquatic habitat, and meadows and the impacts of activities such as grazing and off-road vehicle use to these important resources. Healthy watersheds provide a clean and consistent supply of water by filtering sediment and contaminants. Mountain meadows act as natural storage to release water throughout the drier seasons. Riparian areas and aquatic habitats are some of the most threatened ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada.

Urge the Forest Service to assess meadow management and restoration to ensure that water is properly retained in the meadow system. The Forest Service should address the impact of roads and off-highway vehicle use, including soil erosion and sedimentation of streams. The assessment should also address grazing practices and their impact on water quality and riparian and meadow vegetation.

Many wildlife species in the Sierra Nevada are declining and are threatened by habitat loss and degradation caused by California’s rapid pace of development. The bioregional assessment should better review and address the decline of species in the Sierra Nevada and what role the current management practices have on the populations of these species.

The Forest Service should direct actions that reverse declines and threats to species at risk including Pacific fisher, Pacific marten, California spotted owl, great grey owl, willow flycatcher, Yosemite toad, bi-state sage grouse, and yellow-legged frog. The Forest Service should identify key wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors.

Support forest restoration in the Sierra Nevada that has the clear objective to restore the healthy ecological functions and biological diversity of our forests. The bioregional assessment needs to better review and address the impact of fire suppression on the health of forests and the need to restore fire to its evolutionary role as the primary shaper of Sierran ecosystems.

The Forest Service needs to address the use of ecological processes, such as managed fire, to restore the forests in the Sierra Nevada from decades of aggressive logging and fire suppression so that they are more able to provide ecological services and adapt to the impacts of a changing climate.

Wilderness and roadless areas provide a variety of ecosystem services like air and water filtration, climate regulation, and maintenance of biodiversity. They act as biological strongholds for populations of threatened and endangered species and provide large, relatively undisturbed landscapes that are important to the long-term survival of many at-risk species.

During the assessment phase of planning, the Forest Service is required to identify and evaluate the opportunity and need for additional designated areas (e.g. wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, research natural areas) in the plan area.

Roughly 6,000,000 people visit Forest Service-managed wilderness and roadless areas each year to enjoy high-quality, non-motorized activities including hiking, camping, mountain biking, picnicking, wildlife viewing, hunting, fishing, crosscountry skiing, swimming, whitewater boating, and viewing wildlife. These protected areas have a positive effect on local economies by creating revenue through recreation dollars, increasing property values, and providing invaluable ecosystem services to nearby cities. Recent studies of western counties and states have shown that income and employment increase as the percentage of wilderness increases.

The Forest Service should better assess the need for sustainable, primitive, non-motorized recreation and to protect and increase opportunities and access for recreation in ways that maintain the quiet, peaceful, and undisturbed forest and wilderness experience.

To make your voice heard, go to https://secure.sierraclub.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=11305&s_src=113FZZNC02&s_subsrc=link.

Bristol Bay. Photo by Jim Klug.

Bristol Bay, on the Alaska coast, is not just a stunningly beautiful place of rivers and shoals, bears, and eagles. It’s also the best salmon habitat in the world, producing the world’s largest runs of salmon, including 45% of all sockeye salmon.

But all this could be destroyed if mining giants get their way. They want to turn Bristol Bay into the earth’s largest gold and copper mines, putting a toxic lake in the heart of this amazing wild place.

Tell the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stand up to these mining giants and protect Bristol Bay.

The proposed Pebble Mine would be gouged out of a wild American paradise that has sustained wildlife and Native communities for millennia. It would produce 10 billion tons of waste–in an active earthquake zone. Even without any accidents, the mine would destroy 87 miles of salmon streams.

But the EPA can stop this disaster-in-the-making. Its scientists have already found that Pebble Mine would endanger this pristine environment, legendary salmon runs, and Native communities. Now it needs to stand up and assert that Pebble Mine would break the Clean Water Act and should not move forward.

The EPA needs to hear from you–tell EPA acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe that you want him to protect Bristol Bay and stop Pebble Mine.

Bristol Bay is one of the most beautiful and ecologically rich wild places on Earth. We can’t stand by and watch it be destroyed–but with an outpouring of public support, we can protect it.

Thank you for everything you do for our wild America,

Dan Ritzman, director, Sierra Club Alaska Program

Hurray for the big-cat bills!

In late May, two bills that will protect California’s native big cats passed out of their respective houses, bringing the cats closer to better protection. Additionally, a bill that bans lead ammunition moved forward.

Sen. Jerry Hill’s mountain-lion bill, Senate Bill 132, and Assemblymember Richard Bloom’s bobcat bill, Assembly Bill 1213, made it off the Senate floor and Assembly floor respectively. They now await assignment to a committee. Gunning forward, the lead ammunition ban bill, AB 711, by Assemblymember Anthony Rendon and Assemblymember Das Williams’ trapping bill, AB 789, also made it to the Senate side.

If Hill’s SB 132 can make through the Assembly as is, it would require the Department of Fish and Wildlife to use non-lethal procedures for removing mountain lions that have been perceived to pose an imminent threat to public safety. This means good things for the mountain lion and should result in the end to incidents where cubs have been needlessly killed for wandering into residential areas.

Bloom’s AB 1213 would make it illegal to trap bobcats in the area surrounding Joshua Tree National Park. It also would make the Fish and Game Commission amend its regulations to prohibit trapping within and around state and national parks and in national wildlife refuges as well. Though it doesn’t ban bobcat trapping state-wide, it would ultimately protect bobcats over a significant area.

Rendon’s AB 711 would require use of non-lead ammunition when hunting wildlife on California public lands. Lead left behind from hunting activities can devastate an entire ecosystem. This bill needs to shoot through the Senate to protect wildlife and begin a recovery process for an already stressed natural environment. Be sure to contact your legislators to give this bill that little extra fire power.

The trapping bill would help prevent incidental death of domestic cats and dogs by reducing the size of body-gripping “conibear” traps in wetland areas. It also requires signage notifying people of the presence of traps. Most importantly, AB 789 would prohibit killing any trapped animal in inhumane ways including chest crushing or drowning. California needs this bill to protect our beloved pets, but also to end unnecessary suffering of California’s wildlife.

These bills are in good shape, but with continued support from our members, we can guarantee a safer future for all of California’s critters. Please continue your much appreciated efforts to protect the future of California’s majestic wildlife. Contact your representatives urging support for these bills!

Edward Moreno

from Sierra Club California Capitol Voice, June 2013

Four wildlife protection bills supported by Sierra Club California, including two that specifically address big cats, continue to thrive and move through the legislative process despite opposition.

AB 711 by Assemblymember Anthony Rendon, which bans lead bullets in hunting across California, passed in Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife after the bill was amended to increase the scope of protection to include lead bullets used in all wildlife hunting with any firearm. It will be heard in Assembly Appropriations, and we anticipate it will move to the floor for a vote before the end of this month. It faces opposition from the National Rifle Association and the Sportsman’s Lobby.

Sierra Club California also helped push Sen. Jerry Hill’s SB 132 through the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee. That bill would require the Department of Fish and Wildlife to use nonlethal procedures when removing a mountain lion perceived to be an imminent threat to public health or safety. It is now waiting action in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The Department of Fish and Wildlife publicly opposes the bill, citing work involved with preparing incident reports and an annual report to the legislature that the bill requires.

On April 30, Assemblymember Richard Bloom’s AB 1213 made it out of its first policy committee. Though the bill no longer calls for a statewide ban on bobcat trapping, it does push for a statewide management plan for bobcats, which currently doesn’t exist, and creates a two-mile-wide trapping-ban buffer zone around Joshua Tree National Park. If a management plan isn’t developed by July 1, 2015, then a statewide trapping ban would take effect at that time. The Farm Bureau and the trapping organizations were not happy with any of the amendments; we anticipate a forceful opposition moving forward.

One important bill, AB 789 by Assemblymember Das Williams, which would define which methods used to kill a trapped mammal are in violation of the law, passed the Assembly and has moved to the Senate. We are waiting to see which committees will hear the bill and then will start our efforts to help it get through the Senate by the end of this year’s session in September.

reprinted from Capitol Voice, newsletter of Sierra Club California

Big Meadow in the Dardanelles Roadless Area deserves a wilderness recommendation. Photo by Sarah Matsumoto.

By Arthur Boone

Now in my fourth year as chair of the chapter’s Conservation Committee, I have used this appointment as a goad to make myself familiar with the workings of all of the Chapter’s operating committees. The Club is full of people who know a lot about a few things but my position requires that I know a little about a lot of things. For several years I was also one of the Chapter’s delegates to the Regional Conservation Committee (RCC), where I got to meet some of the best people from around the state on various issues: Yosemite, energy, Delta water policy, the Sierra, etc.

San Francisco resident Vicky Hoover, long-time Chapter member and former assistant to former national Club president Edgar Wayburn, is chair of the RCC’s Wilderness Committee and has more than once encouraged me to attend the annual meeting of the RCC’s Wilderness and Desert Committees held on Presidents’ Day weekend in February in Shoshone CA (see also http://theyodeler.org/?p=7113). For several years now I’ve planned to go but this year did the deed; Natalie and I rented a recreational vehicle for a week and toured the Kings Canyon/Sequoia area and then headed east to Shoshone, a town of 70 people outside the southeast corner of Death Valley National Park and 60 miles due west of Las Vegas but a long way from those bright urban lights.

When Congress enacted the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it encouraged the approval of at least 10,000 megawatts of non-hydropower renewable-energy projects on public lands within the next 10 years. Land for which the Bureau of Land Management had found no takers for 150 years (the BLM now controls over 3,000,000 acres of public land in California) now has 79 wind projects, 60 photovoltaic projects, and 11 transmission projects working their way through the permitting process towards development. Some of the projects would be on sites that have already been severely damaged, but too many would take up land that has at worst been somewhat invaded by grazing cattle and sheep but mostly left to rusticate as home for bighorn sheep, the desert tortoise, etc. This is now threatened with wholesale development by private power producers hoping to capitalize on the 2005 act.

At Shoshone the people who care meet to take notes and share stories of their victories and defeats. I was touched by many, awed by a few, but came away feeling that the good guys were much over-matched by the biggest land rush in the desert since the Comstock Lode of 1870. In my lifetime there have been attacks on Mineral King and Mono Lake and national parks here and there, but the onslaught of power producers envisioned in all the planning reminded me more of the space saucers coming over the mountains in the movie “Independence Day”. A lot of people want to spend a lot of money to develop solar energy and wind in precious desert wildlands, and the resistance we offer is small and partial. It was good to realize that the national Club is now focusing more of its energy and attention on distributed generation as an alternative to wasteful (in many ways) energy from the desert.

I came back with renewed appreciation for Al Weinrub and his little book on distributed generation. The urban rooftops beckon for energy development, far from the massive investments in transmission lines. This, it seems to me, is where enlightened public policy needs to go, and I hope our own Chapter’s Energy and Climate Committee can help make that happen. [I've deleted the above sentence because it is factually wrong. Vicky has been a key desert activist since the campaign for the California Desert Act.]

Arthur Boone has been a Club member since 1975, active since his retirement in 2003, and is a member of the Chapter’s Zero Waste Committee.