Forest campaign intensifies as final management plans near

Sierra Club Regional Representative

Our local national forests, so often taken for granted, are in trouble. As people build more and more houses, businesses, and roads around and even on the forests, wildlife and their habitat continue to decline. Increasing numbers of motorcycles in the back country and commercial demands to slice the forests with highways, power lines, and even hydroelectric dams complete the picture of forests in crisis.

Hiker in Cleveland National Forest. photo by Andrew Harvey

Keeping these national forests great places to visit is the mission of the Sierra Club's Southern California Forests Campaign.

Sierra Club volunteers and staff are working to ensure a better future for the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland national forests, which together cover nearly four million acres stretching from Big Sur to Baja. One million of those acres are in the Angeles Chapter, spanning the Angeles National Forest and the Trabuco District of the Cleveland National Forest.

Over the last three years, the Forest Service, the federal agency that manages these forests for us, has been developing a new management plan for the forests. Conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, assembled a Conservation Alternative for the agency to consider as it developed its plan. Last year nearly 2,000 Sierra Club members attended campaign meetings and Forest Service open houses and submitted comments in support of the Conservation Alternative. Now the Forest Service is finalizing its plan, which will determine how our forests are managed for a generation to come.

The impending summer release of the final plans is a great opportunity to get involved in protecting these magnificent wild places so near our own backyards. You can start by attending a community meeting to learn more about our forests and what you can do. On April 21 we'll be meeting at the San Juan Community Center in San Juan Capistrano. The guest speaker will be Jerry Schad, noted author of the Afoot and Afield hiking series. In May we'll meet in Pasadena (details will appear in the next issue of the Southern Sierran and at the campaign website: www.sierraclub.org/ca/socalforests). You can also be kept up-to-date about these meetings and other events by filling out and returning the postcard you'll find in this issue.

The campaign is co-hosting the San Juan Capistrano meeting with the Angeles Chapter Santa Ana Mountains Task Force; the Chapter's Forest Committee is co-hosting the Pasadena event. These Angeles Chapter groups are the first line of defense for our local forests and the campaign coordinates closely with them.

Because so many Sierra Club members took a few hours of their time to help out last summer, the Forest Service heard loudly and clearly that it should adopt a final plan that prioritizes setting aside wilderness areas, strongly protecting wildlife, and making sure that the forests remain a great place to visit. This vision is opposed by those who would open the forests to more and more intrusive urban uses like toll roads, transmission towers, oil wells, and expanded off-road vehicle use. On just one part of the Cleveland National Forest straddling Orange, Riverside, and San Diego counties-the Santa Ana Mountains-there are proposals to build a freeway, 190-foot-tall transmission towers, antenna towers, and a dam and reservoir for a hydroelectric project.

If the Forest Service's final plans aren't done right, then we'll hear more loud, polluting off-road vehicles on our forests and see more and more ugly, harmful development that will put the long-term health of our forests and wildlife at more risk-that's increased pressure these forests can't sustain. Seventy-six species are already at great risk of disappearing from our local mountains-a key measure of the problems our forests confront.

Right now the campaign is developing a list of the 10 most threatened places on the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland national forests. If there is a place you think is suffering from abuse or neglect, let us know through our website or by calling campaign organizer John Monsen at 213-387-6528, ext. 203. We plan to debut the report at the Pasadena community meeting.

Campaign staff are committed to making it easy to take action. Regardless of how much time you have, there are positive things you can do to protect and restore our forests. To join the campaign all you have to do is fill out the postcard enclosed in this newspaper and send it in. That's it. After that we'll keep you informed of the upcoming community meetings and other opportunities to send in comments to the Forest Service. Of course, if you'd like to get more involved, we can help connect you with other local volunteers in the Chapter Forest Committee and the Santa Ana Mountains Task Force.

Working together, we can make great progress in protecting our local national forests for a generation to come.

Take Action
Join the Southern California Forests Campaign at
http://www.sierraclub.org/ca/socalforests/.