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California in 2024 saw the emergence of what may be the greatest threat to its forests since the infamous ad valorem tax on standing timber was finally repealed back in 1976.
The old tax policy dating to the days of Disco had incentivized pell-mell stripping of private forestlands. The more standing timber you owned, the more property tax you paid.
Fast forward to today and enter the woody biomass electricity industry: Forests would be leveled and ground into wood pellets to burn, producing a type of electricity more polluting per kilowatt than coal.
Proponents of this would-be California industry in October unveiled their formal proposal to set up shop here for the first time. Forests Forever was there to help ramp up a campaign to stop them.
A 2024 U.S. Forest Service rule proposal addressing protection of older, larger trees would guide management on all 154 national forests including 18 in California. Forests Forever garnered numerous letters to strengthen this Forest Service reg. (Thanks, if you were one of the commenters!)
And we focused public attention on the federal Bureau of Land Management's mixed effort—which laudably strengthened safeguards for public lands but, unacceptably, failed to address forests per se.
There's much more (There's much more— click on "READ MORE" button below). At every step of the way Forests Forever supporters like you helped with actions ranging from emails to calls and letters to clicks on our social media posts to funding.
Please donate today to keep our work going into 2025 and beyond.
Mining Forests to Generate Dirty Electricity
At this writing plans to build two enormous wood pellet manufacturing plants in California are under development by the Golden State Natural Resources organization, backed by its primary would-be pellet purchaser, U.K.-based Drax Group.
The controversial Forest Resiliency Demonstration Project was outlined in a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) released in October.
One factory would be built in Lassen County, another in Tuolumne County. Combined they would produce about one million tons of wood pellets a year, stripping already degraded California forests. The pellets would be transported to the Port of Stockton and shipped overseas to burn in plants in Asia and Europe to generate electricity.
The DEIR came with a public comment period jammed into the center of the election and holiday season. With your help we were able to extend the initial comment deadline by an additional month, to Jan. 20.
Public Comments Needed! If you haven't yet had a chance to comment in opposition to this disastrous scheme please take a minute to do so now!
This dirty industry has not yet gotten a foothold at industrial scale in California so the good news is we can still stop it. Forests Forever is now an active member of a growing coalition of groups embarked on a campaign to prevent this specter.
The wood pellet biomass industry already has made itself an unwelcome neighbor throughout the U.S. South, where for years it has harmed the health and quality of life of local residents.
Biomass electricity boosters employ environmentally friendly sounding justifications that in reality would bring exactly the opposite result. Drax touts biomass electricity as "green energy" due largely to the misleadingly applied fact that cut trees grow back. But wood-burning power actually emits more CO2 than coal per unit of electricity produced.
A second false claim concerning biomass is that it will alleviate wildfire dangers by cleansing forests of excess fuel, at the same time putting "waste wood"—branches, bark, and dead trees left over after logging operations, thinning, or wildfires—to good use to make pellets.
The truth is, collecting fuelstock from forests in all likelihood will make wildfire risk and hazards much greater. Recent investigations have revealed that pellet makers in fact prefer whole trees pellet makers in fact prefer whole trees to fabricate suitable pellets.
What's more, larger trees—dead or alive and the bigger the better—are the best insurance against rapid spread of wildfire: They are more fire resistant than smaller stems, brush or grass. Biomass electricity corporations, to justify their harmful practices, thus exploit the public's support for reducing greenhouse gases and its fear of wildfire.
Financial incentives should instead go toward hardening homes against ignition—an area where much more cries out to be done.
This issue will probably be our main focus, and that of many other like-minded allies, in 2025. Stay tuned and be ready to take action with your voices, phone calls, emails, and more.
Haven't submitted your comments against the Drax project yet? Click here to do so! Deadline is Jan. 20, 2025.
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Old-growth and Mature Forest Protection
Forests Forever has been increasingly involved in two groundbreaking policy initiatives at the federal level.
The Biden Administration 
in 2022 kicked off its mature and old-growth forest policy effort with a presidential executive order aimed at safeguarding older, larger trees, which are vital for climate stability and for stemming the biodiversity crisis.
Since then the U.S. Forest Service has written a rule in response to the executive order. This rule has undergone several rounds of revision and public comment, culminating in a latest draft with comments closed in September.
While the final version is pending, and remains far too weak, Forests Forever since 2022 has garnered hundreds of public comments at various stages of the rulemaking process.
The rule would affect all 154 U.S. national forests including 18 in California.
As if the public isn't challenged enough with a blizzard of proposed changes to conservation policies, good and bad, the Forest Service has been unhelpful by using a technically challenging and complicated online portal for garnering its public comments. We blasted the Forest Service for its obstinacy and called for the so-called CARA portal to be streamlined or replaced.
In our second policy initiative for old-growth—the country's largest land management agency, the federal Bureau of Land Management oversees vast forest acreage (including 15 million acres in California, much of it in forest or woodlands). This treed land could benefit from the added protections of the agency's game-changing new Public Lands Rule.
The rule takes a critically important step, placing conservation on an unambiguous equal footing with extractive uses of the agency's historically abused lands. But the new reg is under attack. Forests Forever in 2024 beat the drum for the public to speak out in defense of the rule, calling on their elected officials to take action.
The Public Lands Rule provides handholds for advocates such as Forests Forever to use in everything from garnering public comments to bolstering administrative appeals to filing litigation aimed at improving or even stopping deleterious projects on forests we all own.
And the highly effective Northwest Forest Plan, established in 1994, safeguards some 24 million acres of federal forestland in California, Oregon and Washington.
The plan is a sweeping and successful framework that has protected some of Earth's most carbon-rich, biologically diverse forests. But it is now under heavy attack.
The U.S. Forest Service, whose historical default has been to "get out the cut" to placate the timber industry and its anti-environmental backers in Congress, recently announced a slate of amendments to the plan. In short, they are a disaster.
The current Northwest Forest Plan tamped down controversy, providing for continued timber production while giving degraded forests a chance to bounce back.
The Forest Service's proposed amendments would effectively void these gains, allowing timber extraction volumes at double and even triple the current rates, including hammering precious mature and old-growth forests.
And sadly, while inclusion of Native American tribes in forest management is much needed, and was omitted from the original plan, the Forest Service now appears to be using tribal inclusion as a wedge issue to divide conservationists from their tribal allies.
The agency has woven tribal collaboration provisions into its recommended plan alternatives in a way that would appear aimed at forcing conservation advocates to support or oppose these alternatives in all-or-nothing fashion.
Tribal inclusion should be addressed in any plan revisions, but separately from the destructive resource extraction schemes the Forest Service wants.
Speak out today to protect and strengthen the Northwest Forest Plan!
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Conserving Redwoods, Water, Wildlife Habitat, and Cultural Heritage at Jackson Forest
In 2024 Forests Forever marked the 23rd year since it first began work to help save this 49,000-acre publicly owned redwood forest on the Mendocino County coast.
Since its establishment by the legislature in 1949 Jackson Forest has evolved to become a logging cash cow and woodlot for CalFIRE, even as the forest holds the potential to store ever greater volumes of atmospheric carbon (if it's left alone), as it stores and purifies water, as it boasts precious wildlife habitat, and constitutes a cultural place of importance to an array of California tribal nations.
Today we are confronted with a host of emerging concerns at Jackson:
Since 2022 CalFIRE has: 1) asserted that a new forest plan needs no environmental review nor its associated public input; 2) re-appointed a local timber company executive to one of Jackson's key advisory panels—a clear conflict of interest given his employer having a lawsuit underway against CalFIRE; 3) failed to consult with area tribes prior to moving ahead with logging plans that could harm their culturally significant sites; 4) apparently has violated state sunshine and open-meetings laws... and more.
Forests Forever has been pushing for reform of Jackson Forest through our fielding extensive grassroots organizing efforts, sponsoring state forest system reform legislation that passed both houses of the legislature, and as co-plaintiff in a 2003 lawsuit victory that deep-sixed CalFIRE's flawed then-current management plan for Jackson.
Our ultimate goal is to get Jackson Forest out of the commercial logging business.
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Late Breaking Items....
Oak woodlands protection victory update: In 2017 Forests Forever played a key role in a victory for oak woodlands in the El Sobrante Hills above Richmond, Calif.
Some 430 acres were saved from inappropriate (and risky due to potential landsliding) development in a pristine oak woodland and savanna area adjacent to Wildcat Canyon Regional Park. Subsequent legal challenges by speculators and developers have been defeated.
But recently a third legal challenge arose. Front-line activists are confident we will win on this one too. Meantime we continue to support Friends of the Richmond Hills in its long-term effort to protect this prized woodland area.
Our social media presence evolves: As many of you are aware, much controversy has swirled of late around the social media giant X (formerly Twitter) as it has resisted efforts to rein in hate speech and disinformation on its platform.
Forests Forever recently concluded it's had enough. Here is our exit statement:
Why Forests Forever is no longer posting on X.
Dear X (formerly Twitter) followers of Forests Forever,
We have decided to stop posting on the platform, effective immediately, but X users can still feel free to share our articles, posted on our website at www.forestsforever.org.
Since our organization began in 1989 we have relied on broad-based means of outreach to educate, inform and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people who are concerned about the use, misuse, conservation, and enjoyment of California's forests and forest wildlife.
These means of outreach began with one of the most basic forms of "small-d" democratic organizing—canvassing—and have increasingly broadened to include online outreach platforms.
Unfortunately, not all of these platforms are equally directed toward dissemination of information free of hate and lies. Along with an increasing number of public-minded NGOs, Forests Forever no longer regards X as a platform whose values align with ours, nor the values of the followers we seek to reach with our mission and message. The benefits of posting our content on X are now outweighed by the downsides.
A dark and toxic cloud is now gathering over the road to a better future, not only for the forest biome but also for a human civilization in balance with the planet's natural ecosystems—a civilization that respect's Earth's limits and all its inhabitants and its beautiful and vanishing natural places. We want no part of the vision for America and planet Earth now taking shape under the management of X.
We invite our X followers to disengage from the platform as well and to visit our website at www.forestsforever.org to explore your engagement with us through other means.
Thank you.
You can follow us on Bluesky and Threads. We remain quite active on Facebook, where Forests Forever boasts 10,000 followers.
Forests Forever was founded more than three decades ago amid the most tumultuous of forest controversies then or perhaps ever—the fight to save Headwaters Forest's ancient redwoods.
We still work every day all year long organizing to safeguard and restore California's forests and forest wildlife through direct-contact outreach to the concerned public who love forests and support our efforts.
Forests Forever's long experience and substantial grassroots organizing capacity render it invaluable among the advocacy groups fighting for forest conservation today.
As the threats to California's forest ecosystems take on virulent new forms we intend to be there to focus and channel public outcry in curbing them. We'd love to have you alongside.
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Paul Hughes
Executive Director
Forests Forever
 Forests Forever's new Swag Store offers a sizable array of fun items with which you can amplify our message, start a conversation— or just stay warm or hydrated. All carry our distinctive old-growth-forest-and-crescent-moon logo and many have our "Restore, Reinhabit, Re-enchant" motto. Except for our stock of books and bumper stickers all items are strictly printed to order, which means we don't produce and store unsold stock, with its attendant cost and potential waste. So browse our store and wear our logo with pride! All net proceeds benefit Forests Forever and its work to protect and restore California's forests. |
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