Timber powers attempt to hijack golden forestry-reform opportunity!

"Experts" committee will shut out public, eliminate transparency!

Right now we have a very rare opportunity to reform California's logging practices - so that future forests will be healthy as well as productive. This opportunity is the result of a new law in California aimed at achieving a more efficient and effective approach to regulating the impacts of logging, while ensuring strong environmental safeguards.

Unfortunately, however, an industry-controlled coalition is now attempting to hijack this reform process. They are backing a so-called "Effectiveness Monitoring Committee" (EMC) to develop the new approach. It sounds great but it's not!

Their committee is to be made up of the usual cast of timber industry-oriented agency officials and experts, and they plan on the EMC becoming the place where any proposed environmental regulations can be ground down to insignificance or jettisoned.

We need to act right away to stop this travesty and demand that a truly meaningful process instead be put into place— one already outlined in detail in legislation sponsored by Forests Forever in recent years. This better approach consists of conducting two or more forest/watershed pilot projects-- managed by qualified scientists and other stakeholders including the public-- in a transparent process that ensures both accountability and oversight.

The EMC is nothing more than a direct arm of forest regulators and industry. Instead there needs to be a high-level, truly independent effort. We have seen a cycle of failed attempts at regulation too many times already!

Write to the Governor and the Secretaries of the Natural Resources Agency and CalEPA, demanding that the pilot projects be put into place without delay-- and that the sham of the EMC is unacceptable!

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