For 70 years, a Mendocino County forest has been used to promote logging. Is it time to change its mission?

Room for improvement

It would require a change in state law to change the status as a “demonstration forest,” California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said.

But Crowfoot said there remains “a lot of room for improvement” short of that, including greater partnership with local tribes and more engagement with residents and recreational communities.

In a sign that the growing anxiety on the coast has reached Sacramento, he also noted that Cal Fire, which oversees the forest, was beginning a midterm review of the 2016 forest management plan, which normally wouldn’t be due for an update until 2026.

In November, Mendocino County supervisors voted unanimously to ask Gov. Gavin Newsom and Crowfoot’s agency to evaluate logging on the forest in the context of state climate goals, carbon capture potential and wildfire resiliency.

“I’m certainly open and willing to discuss how we continue to update the mission, the work of the Jackson forest, given the emergency of accelerating climate change,” Crowfoot said.

North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, whose district encompasses the forest, went further, saying “I’m not confident the demonstration forest is demonstrating anything of substance.”

“The Jackson State Demonstration Forest has an antiquated model,” he said. “It may have been useful in the late 1940s, but I think this entire model must be updated to combat the realities that we live in. The forest must be focused on climate and wildfires and forest resilience.”

During a town hall Wednesday, McGuire said he expected new developments on the subject soon. He did not elaborate.

Bringing the forest back

At 48,652 acres, Jackson is far and away the largest of the state’s nine demonstration forests, each of which represents one of the most common forest types in California. Combined, they total 72,000 acres.

The Jackson forest contains many tree species, but coastal redwoods — mostly second-growth — prevail. Pockets of old-growth redwoods totaling 461 acres are off-limits to logging.

Signs of early logging remain visible throughout the forest, but Cal Fire, short for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, has largely succeeded in bringing the forest back.

The Caspar-area logging plan, known as the Caspar 500, under which the Mama and Papa trees were marked, would remove about one in 10 of the very largest trees, 48 inches in diameter or more. (Cal Fire unmarked the two iconic trees and other redwoods along the heavily used Blue Gum Trail in response to citizen complaints last year.)

Allowing one in 10 of the biggest trees to be harvested "doesn’t mean we are taking all the large trees off the landscape,” said State Forests Program Manager Kevin Conway.

However, the very removal of a tree releases carbon dioxide and invites disturbance of the forest floor, beneath which substantial portions of carbon are sequestered in roots, tiny plants and micro-organisms.

Forest operations staff counter that current management still has a net positive effect on the climate, promoting forest renewal and growth, and increasing carbon sequestration over time by ensuring a mix of large, older trees and vigorously growing younger ones.

Cal Fire says the forest already stores an estimated 19 million metric tons of carbon and is sequestering another 200,000 metric tons a year as the forest grows — enough to offset the annual emissions from 19,000 average California residents.

Most of the logging is either “single selection,” where individual trees are chosen to be cut, or “group selection,” in which up to a quarter acre will be cleared to allow light to reach the forest floor for a new generation of trees, Conway said.

Stands of trees are typically left alone for 30 years or more.

Strategic tree removal is critical to maintaining forest health because it lessens crowding and competition for sun, water and nutrients, allowing them to become more resilient to disease, powerful winds and wildfire, Conway said.

Models show removing trees from a stand of midsize trees allows those that are left to grow larger than they would have otherwise, he said.

“Just doing nothing with them … is not always the best solution,” he said.

Conway and others also highlighted the value of “a living laboratory” for testing and improving logging practices. In the Caspar Creek watershed, long-term research on water quality and stream flow, riparian plant and animal communities, sediment loading and other issues provides valuable information that is used worldwide.

“The state looks to natural and working lands, which includes managed forest, as really the workhorse of the carbon sequestration strategy,” Conway said. “Everything else is about limiting emissions or preventing emissions.”

Unexpected opposition

Conway and others said they were surprised when opposition arose to what Cal Fire viewed as routine logging plans about two years ago. But Conway said he also understands how it happened.

When cornflower-blue spray paint stripes began appearing on trees along popular hiking and cycling routes off Caspar Orchard Road, all who saw them knew those trees were to be cut down.

Over the previous 10 or 12 years, Cal Fire had mostly logged in more remote areas of the forest, Conway said.

But just as the COVID-19 pandemic was sending more and more people onto public lands, the agency was preparing to log in areas close to coastal communities and tourist destinations.

“All of a sudden people were seeing massive trees — they’re second growth, but they’re essentially massive trees in their backyard — marked for cutting,” said Chad Swimmer, co-founder and former president of the Mendocino Trail Stewards. “And that’s when people started to get mad.”

In addition, Conway said, efforts to decommission logging roads near streams and waterways and build them at higher elevations brought additional attention to logging operations, he said.

And continuing growth in the number of mountain bikers flocking to the area meant more people became aware of a slope just off a road southeast of Caspar that had been all but clear-cut a few years back, generating more fury.

“When I heard the redwoods of Caspar 500 were being cut, I thought, ‘Oh, well, this is my moment,’ “ said Sara Rose, the 15-year-old co-founder of Mendocino County Youth for Climate.

But the fight “has never been about the two or three trees that have a sit (platform) in them, or the Caspar 500, or just the coast side of the forest,” she said. “The plan has to reflect the reality of the climate crisis and the sovereignty of the indigenous people.”

The landscape is still recovering from abuses long past, when ancient coastal redwoods, once abundant across more than 2 million acres of Northern California, were nearly decimated.

In a 26-page position paper on the issue, climate scientist John P. O’Brien, who holds dual posts with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, made a point-by-point case for the end of logging in Jackson forest.

The forest, he wrote, “is primarily second growth Redwood forest and has the potential to store far and away more carbon than any forest type in the world and is actually now rarer than old growth due to the absence of environmental protections.”

Protecting Jackson forest “should be seen as a form of self-preservation by all Californians that transcends party lines,” he wrote.

He and other advocates say converting Jackson forest from timberland to environmental preserve fits neatly into Newsom’s embrace of the global “30 by 30” initiative.

In October 2020, Newsom, by executive order, set California on a path toward protecting 30% of the land and coastal waters by 2030 to preserve biodiversity and fight climate change.

Separate policies established in 2019 and ’20 promote government-to-government consultations between the state and tribal representatives over co-management and access to natural, state-owned lands within their ancestral territory.

Coyote Valley Letter to Governor_JDSF_1-31-2022 (2) (004).pdf

Coyote Valley Band of Pomos Chairman Michael Hunter already has begun consultations but said he fears negotiations are dragging so Caspar 500 can be cut first.

Though the harvest was suspended last summer, forest officials plan to send crews back into the 533-acre tract come April, once mandated surveys for federally protected northern spotted owls are completed.

Local sawmill owner Chris Baldo is still waiting to make good on the largely uncut timber he bought for more than $2.8 million last year, and he and Anderson Logging owner Myles Anderson went to pains to keep their crews employed when the Caspar site was closed.

Controversial harvest operations elsewhere in the forest through winter kept tensions high among protesters, who remained active, however.

There have been road blockades, rallies and disrupted public meetings. Six protesters were cited after being subjected to citizens arrests by loggers Jan. 10 in the 345-acre “Red Tail” timber harvest area east of Fort Bragg, in the Noyo River watershed.

Hunter, the Pomo tribal chairman, said he’s deeply concerned about what comes next if state officials don’t impose a moratorium.

“Someone’s going to get hurt out there, and I don’t think it’s going to be any of the workers, the loggers,” Hunter said. “I think you’re going to have elderly white women out there who are willing to die for those trees, and I don’t think they (officials) understand the magnitude.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

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