Crews have been ramping up wildfire resilience projects to thin out brush and dead wood in California's giant sequoia groves, clearing twice as many acres in 2023 compared with 2022.
The Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition is trying to avoid a repeat of the disastrous mega-fires of 2020 and 2021 - which killed about 20% of large mature trees in their native Sierra Nevada range.
Joanna Nelson, Ph.D. is the director of science and conservation planning with the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League.
"We remove fuel," said Nelson, "we get to a safe place to do prescribed burning and to do cultural burning - which is always led by Indigenous people, which is another practice of taking care of the forest and reducing wildfire risk."
Sequoia National Park is just one part of California's giant sequoia groves, which stretch over 26,000 acres.
A new report shows that in 2023, the program treated nearly 9,900 acres in 28 groves - and more than 14,000 since 2021.
Crews have also planted 542,000 native tree seedlings in severely burned areas over the past two years.
Nelson said the groves must be re-treated about every 8 to 10 years.
"The cost of inaction is loss of giant sequoias in their native range," said Nelson. "And big fires that spread because of the fuel continuity. We risk further loss of trees that are anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 years old if we do nothing."
The groves have built up quite a bit of dead wood fuel because, until the last few decades, it had been national policy to suppress almost all fire - which led to intense firestorms that incinerated entire groves of old-growth trees.
It is now understood that judicious use of fire can clear out the understory and be beneficial to the forest.
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California took a big step Tuesday toward the goal of conserving 30% of land and waters by 2030. The Ocean Protection Council adopted a roadmap to decide which protected waters will count toward the goal.
"We're now at 21.9% of coastal waters conserved," said Michael Esgro, the council's senior biodiversity program manager and tribal liaison, "so more than three-quarters of the way to our 30 by 30 goal, here at the halfway point of the initiative. We have another almost 300,000 acres to conserve by 2030."
The Council refined the roadmap over the past year in a series of public workshops and consultations with tribes. The next meeting in September will delve further into the specific criteria for evaluating improvements in biodiversity in protected waters.
Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, president of a conservation consulting firm, Coastal Policy Solutions, said advocates are pleased that the final draft of the roadmap zeroes in on threats specific to estuaries, where the rivers meet the sea.
"On the open coast, we're worried more about things like fishing and oil and gas extraction and impacts from shipping," she said. "In bays and estuaries, we're more concerned with impairments to water quality from urban runoff and lack of space for marsh migration under sea-level rise."
At Tuesday's hearing, tribal leaders praised the state and tribal cooperation that resulted in the new federal Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. However, Violet Sage Walker, chair of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, said the sanctuary needs more state support if it is to be counted in the 30 x 30 initiative, citing cuts at the federal level.
"I am concerned as national leadership has removed so much of the funding," she said, "so much of the staff and potentially co-management directives from marine sanctuaries and all protected areas."
The roadmap allows for some commercial fishing within the marine sanctuary. Council staff will report back on biodiversity in those waters over the next year.
Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has announced plans to reintroduce a public lands sell-off amendment to the big budget reconciliation package in Congress, after a similar proposal was rejected in the U.S. House.
The House version would have facilitated the sale of thousands of acres of public land in Utah to local governments or private buyers. Backers of the idea said it could help address the housing shortage, improve public infrastructure and allow industries to expand. Similar arguments are now being made by Senator Lee.
Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said the idea is "wildly out of step" with what Utahns want.
"We're all deeply concerned about the precedent that this could set," Bloch explained. "This would start to sell off the fabric of the American West to pay for tax cuts. And if it starts here in Utah and adjacent western states, it can really spread anywhere across the West and into Alaska."
Bloch pointed out the amendment would be only the beginning of public lands being sold. In recent polling, a majority of Utah voters said they oppose giving control over national public lands to state government.
Lee has been an advocate for selling them, especially in Utah, which is made up of about two-thirds public land. But the amendment could prove to be another hurdle for Republicans who want to pass the bill by July 4.
Bloch would like state leaders to have meaningful conversations with public lands advocates. He noted it is a group that includes people from all sides of the political spectrum.
"This is a far cry from your Schoolhouse Rock 'How a Bill Becomes a Law,'" Bloch asserted. "This is not some stand-alone piece of legislation. This is trying to insert public land sell-off into a budget bill, expressly for the purpose of selling them off to pay for tax cuts."
The budget bill now awaits revisions in the Senate and will then go back to the House. In the meantime, Bloch encouraged Utahns and other westerners to voice their opinions.
"We're encouraging our members and supporters to reach out to Senator Lee and tell him that he is simply out of touch with what Utahns, and other westerners, want," Bloch underscored.
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New Mexicans will gather in Las Cruces, Taos and other locations tomorrow for a day of action to defend national monuments and public lands.
The second Trump administration has renewed calls to sell off public lands to save the government money.
Miya King-Flaherty, program manager for the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club, said advocates will rally to prevent public lands from being turned over to states, industry groups and developers.
"We're really trying to inform the public about these senseless attacks on our public lands that the administration is moving forward with," King-Flaherty explained. "To call on our Congressional delegates in New Mexico to keep pushing back and letting them know that their constituents are behind them."
Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., is pressuring Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to release a list of 400 national parks he cited in Congressional testimony which could be transferred to states or localities as the agency seeks to cut 30% of its operating budget.
On June 8, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman, signed the Antiquities Act, the first U.S. law to provide legal protection of cultural and natural resources on federal lands. It authorizes presidents to establish national monuments to protect historic and scientific sites.
King-Flaherty pointed out in contrast, the Trump administration's approach aims to maximize economic output from federal lands.
"These policies are really meant to allow corporations, multimillionaires, billionaires to exploit our lands at the expense of what the public wants," King-Flaherty contended. "It really just undercuts our democracy."
Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported the Trump administration had included New Mexico's Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks in a list of six national monuments for potential mining activities and a reduction in protections. President Donald Trump has already signed a proclamation opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.
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