An emotional courtroom battle over a plan to log a forest of dead trees incinerated in the Sierra Nevada six years ago could have a lasting impact on how California manages the after-effects of catastrophic wildfire.
The dispute, over the massive burn scar left by the 2013 Rim Fire, is an example of the kinds of philosophical arguments going on in the state over landscape restoration and how best to manage forests after an unprecedented series of large, deadly and destructive wildfires.
That debate is playing out in the legal fight over a plan by the U.S. Forest Service to cut down charred trees on 3,000 acres at the site of the Rim Fire, which swept through the Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.
The forest service wants to log and burn the salvaged wood in a biomass plant, which would create electricity. They would then replant thousands of conifers in the burn scar, which can still be seen off Highway 120 on the way to Yosemite.
But conservation groups have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in an attempt to stop the plan.
“What they do is clear-cut the forest, incinerate it and pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and kill all of the natural forest generation,” said Chad Hanson, a research ecologist for the John Muir Project, which, along with Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace and Sequoia Forestkeeper, sued the state and federal governments.
“We don’t see this as just an isolated thing. The danger is that this administration or a future administration will increasingly treat the trees on our national forests like they are coal fields. We cannot afford that.”
The lawsuit is the second Hanson has filed to stop salvage logging within the area ravaged by the 257,314-acre Rim Fire, the fifth-largest wildfire in California history.
The biomass plan is part of an effort by the Forest Service and state and local agencies to get rid of dead wood, replant trees and restore forest habitat, not just in the Rim Fire-burned areas of Tuolumne and Mariposa counties, but across the state.
At stake in the lawsuit is the extent to which forests and woodlands are managed and whether fire-scarred habitat should be artificially restored or left to recover on its own.
The suit claims the salvage logging and planting will actually harm recovery of the post-fire habitat, which Hanson said is the most biodiverse type of conifer forest in the Sierra Nevada.
Fire science experts disagree. They say forest management, including prescribed burning, thinning, careful monitoring of regrowth and the removal of dead trees and underbrush is extremely important if forests are going to survive as climate change intensifies.
John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resources Center, a science-based group that works on ecosystem preservation issues, said the logging and reforestation plan proposed by the Forest Service has the full support of a coalition of local politicians, tribal groups, hunters and environmentalists.
He said the number of trees that would be salvaged is less than 2% of the number of charred trees still standing.
“The Rim Fire was 400 square miles, and this lawsuit is fighting over somewhere around 5 square miles,” said Buckley, who is also on the leadership team of Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, a local group that filed a legal brief in support of the Forest Service plan. “It’s misguided and at odds with the broad support of all the local diverse interests who are most knowledgeable about the local forest conditions.”
The lawsuit accuses the Forest Service of improperly using a $28 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the California Department of Housing and Community Development that was supposed to help communities rebuild after disasters. The project proposal includes construction of a multimillion-dollar biomass power plant.
Proponents argue that burning forest debris in a biomass plant releases less smoke and carbon dioxide than the standard method of burning piles of debris. These plants are essentially enclosed furnaces that burn trees and other organic material — the biomass — to generate gas, which is fed into a boiler to produce steam. A turbine converts the steam into electrical energy. A biomass plant can also be used to produce liquid biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.
The Rim Fire has been a treasure trove of information for scientists studying the effects of forest management.
The blaze started on Aug. 17, 2013, near Groveland (Tuolumne County), when a hunter built an illegal campfire. Driven by strong winds, it burned through a variety of landscapes, including chaparral-covered canyons, newly planted tree plots, previously burned areas and dense forest.
Because of the dense forest, it climbed the tree canopy, generating a 200-foot wall of flames that destroyed 11 homes and incinerated the city of Berkeley’s popular Tuolumne Camp.
Scott Stephens, UC Berkeley’s chief fire science expert, was studying the area when the fire started and had counted as many as 400 trees per acre in the Stanislaus forest. That’s compared to between 60 and 90 trees per acre when it was studied in 1911.
He also reported between 30 and 40 tons of woody debris per acre on the forest floor, compared with 6 to 8 tons a century ago. All that, he said, contributed to the unusual intensity of the fire.
It was so hot, Buckley said, that not a single living tree was left on almost 40,000 acres in the core area. In addition, he said, all the pine cones were incinerated, leaving no seeds for regeneration on large swaths of land.
The fire, which burned for 69 days, slowed dramatically when it crossed the Yosemite boundary on Aug. 23. Experts believe that’s because the National Park Service has a policy of allowing lightning-caused fires to burn out. That meant fuel densities in the Yosemite area were much lower than in the Stanislaus forest, officials said.
Timber companies, which own land within the Rim Fire area, logged as many as 15,000 acres of burned wood after the fire. The Forest Service submitted a plan in 2013 to harvest dead trees on 29,648 acres in Stanislaus and plant new trees to replace them, but Hanson’s group filed a lawsuit then, too.
The court eventually allowed a smaller salvage logging plan to go forward, covering less than half the acreage originally planned. Instead of fighting the logging this time, the plaintiffs are claiming improper use of federal money, dubbing the plan “clear-cuts for kilowatts.”
Hanson’s primary argument centers on how logging disrupts the development of a complex post-fire ecosystem. He claims wood-boring beetles, black-backed woodpeckers and other wildlife thrive in the charred snags — a standing dead or dying tree — left behind by fire.
The “fire ecology” developed over millennia in California, he said, and was cultivated by Native Americans who set fires around their seasonal camps to stimulate growth of favored plants.
He argues that 92% of the snag forest habitat created by the Rim Fire where the Forest Service wants to log is now showing natural conifer regeneration.
Bill Stewart, a sustainable forestry and restoration specialist at UC Berkeley, disputes that statistic. He said the Rim Fire burn scar looks, in most places, like a maze of “burned telephone poles,” with about a third of the snags lying on the ground.
Stewart said as the world warms and fires get fiercer, it is no longer feasible to just let things go. The best plan, he said, would be to make sure trees grow larger faster and are spaced farther apart than in most forests in California, where a century of fire suppression has allowed tree densities to grow. Large conifers sequester more carbon — a natural process that removes from the atmosphere the heat-trapping gases that cause global warming — and are less fire-prone, especially when smaller trees and other fuels in between them are removed.
As it is, California is losing more trees than it is gaining. Between 2000 and 2015, 823,730 acres of trees were killed by fire on U.S. Forest Service land in California. But, according to a Forest Service report, tree saplings were replanted on only 228,485 acres of the denuded federal land.
The attrition, made worse by drought, bark beetle infestations and diseases like sudden oak death, is threatening the future of the tree canopy in California, Stewart said. Adding to the problem, he said, is that a lot of fire-damaged forest on private property is being developed or converted into other uses.
“I put climate benefits higher than the aesthetics of a snag forest, which is one thing we are not short of” given all the recent wildfires, Stewart said. “The real question is, how do you really plan for twice as many fires as we used to have. Climate change is serious, and at some point these environmental groups have to realize maybe they should be on the climate-change team also. I think that’s what this is all about.”
The case, which was filed in September, was recently taken over by U.S. District Court Judge Dale Drozd in Fresno. A ruling is not expected until early next year.
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite
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Rebuilding forests after massive fires: Debate over best methods moves to court - San Francisco Chronicle
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