Jackson Protestors Push Back on Calfire’s Hired Goons Nonviolently
A protestor stands next to a recently felled tree in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest [Picture provided by KZYX Program Direction Alicia Bales]
Wall Street Firm Makes Wager on Carbon-Offset Forests
Oak Hill Advisors LP, which manages $52 billion and is best known as a big debt investor, is teaming up on the venture with Bluesource, a firm that creates and sells carbon credits. The companies said they expect to buy roughly one million acres of North American woodlands and manage the properties to generate so-called forest offsets.
GREEN DIAMOND CLEARCUTS FOREST AMIDST THE COLLAPSE OF OUR CLIMATE
Forest activists in Northern California recently sent an open letter to a timber corporation in Northern California while simultaneously putting up a new tree-sit in a threatened redwood forest. The company, Green Diamond Resource Co., is notorious for its bad logging practices. Despite their clearcutting and encroaching into habitat of threatened and endangered species, GDRC managed to get “sustainable” certification from the Forest Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. This forest lies just north of an area that has been protected from additional logging by tree-sitters since 2012.
False Biomass Energy Industry Claims Demand a Response
Arial shot of a forest with trees dying from pests, pathogens, and/or climate change. Photo Credit Duke.edu
As scientists with expertise in forest and fire ecology and climate change in California, we feel compelled to expose the many false claims from the biomass industry in your May 19 article (“In California, A Push Grows to Turn Dead Trees into Biomass Energy”). These claims fly in the face of the best available science. Creating effective forest, fire, and climate policy depends on getting the facts right.
US Forest Service MUST Continue to Consult With Public on ALL Projects!
The United States Forest Service (USFS) is proposing to eliminate public participation and virtually abandon their legal and moral responsibility by significantly changing how it complies with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Adhering to these rules requires among other steps, to conduct environmental impact studies (EISs), allow for public review and must take into account not only scientific study of the possible impacts and threats but our approval or denial for proposed activities within public lands. These projects include logging, pipelines, and road building through 193 million acres of the last remaining wild places that belong to WE the PEOPLE!
Executive Summary: Genetically Engineered American Chestnut White Paper
The GE AC is promoted as a test case to sway public opinion toward supporting the use of biotechnology for forest conservation, and to pave the way for the introduction of other GE trees. However, most other GE trees in development would be grown in industrial monoculture plantations, for the commercial production of timber, pulp and biofuels.