The Gray Wolf de-listing proposed by the Trump Administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was opposed in a very strong letter from the California Fish and Game Commission, which voted to list the Gray Wolf under the California Endangered Species Act on June 14, 2014.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just can’t seem to help approving Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs) with Incidental Take Permits (ITPs) that will doom the Northern Spotted Owl to eventual range-wide extinction. Earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its Record of Decision to approve a new HCP and ITP for Green Diamond Resource Company. Until now, Green Diamond had been operating under a 1992 HCP that was approved when the company’s California timber operations were still the same as the parent-company’s name, Simpson Timber Company.

Have you gone online in 2019 looking to find a Timber Harvest Plan (THP) and found that the website has been disabled? Don’t worry, it’s not just you, and, no, no one is purposefully hiding THPs from you—instead, the State of California Natural Resources Agency, California Department of Forestry and others have created and launched a new website and interface for finding, viewing, reviewing, and tracking THPs and all other permits for private (non-federal) timber harvest in California.

In 2008, in the wake of the disastrous era of the Pacific Lumber Company under the liquidation-logging minded MAXXAM Corporation and Charles Hurwitz, the court hearings for the company’s bankruptcy and dissolution of company assets provided still more melodrama. What would become of the approximately 250,000-acres of timberland?

A Draft Habitat Conservation Plan (DHCP) for California timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) has been released with a companion Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for public comment with a comment deadline of July 1. The Draft SPI HCP would authorize the company to “take” federally-listed Northern Spotted Owl, and federal candidate for listing, the California Spotted Owl, a genetic and geographic near relative of the Northern Spotted Owl, in conjunction with its timber harvest and related activities on its California timberlands.

The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board will hold hearing in Eureka on June 19th to consider adopting a newly-revised sediment pollution control permit for Humboldt Redwood Company in the Upper Elk River Watershed.

Concerned Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino County citizens came together with EPIC staff and staff from the Garberville-based Trees Foundation to discuss the recent purchase of 9,400-acres of timberland in the Sproul Creek Watershed by Green Diamond Resource Company, and to discuss creating a watershed-based community group to interface with the company.

EPIC is excited to announce a follow-up community meeting to discuss the Green Diamond Resource Company purchase of 9,400-acres of timberland in the Sproul Creek Watershed in Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino Counties from Boyle Forests LP.

There’s little doubt that California’s forests are under siege; the problem is, we are told that California’s forests are under siege from things like wildfire, “pests,” pathogens and mortality. However, the reality is that the biggest threat to California’s forests has been and continues to be logging, the logging industry, agency enablers of logging, and the lies and misconceptions these folks spin.

Happy 20th Birthday to the Headwaters Forest Reserve! The 7,472-acre Headwaters Forest Reserve is located just south east of the City of Eureka, CA., and was established on March 1, 1999 as part of the landmark Headwaters Forest Agreement between the U.S. Government, the State of California, the MAXXAM Corporation, and its subsidiary, the Pacific Lumber Company. The Headwaters Forest Reserve was created to protect the last large, intact, old growth coast redwood forest on the planet that remained in private ownership.

Thirty Southern Humboldt community members came out on a wet and stormy Wednesday night to attend an EPIC sponsored Community Meeting to discuss the recent purchase of 9,200-acres of timberlands in the Sproul Creek Watershed by Green Diamond Resource Company. The event took place at Ganas in Garberville, and featured presentations by the North Coast Regional Land Trust addressing the Conservation Easement on the property that prohibits sub-division, and by EPIC staff, introducing Green Diamond and its practices to the local community.

The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board has made an even bigger mess of the situation in Elk River by failing to revisit and revise sediment pollution waste discharge permits for Green Diamond and Humboldt Redwood Company in the watershed as directed by the State Water Resources Control Board. To add insult to this injury, the Regional Board continues to allow Green Diamond and Humboldt Redwood Company to enroll Timber Harvest Plans under the old permits while it continues to kick-the-can down the road on the required revisions.

Elk River and its residents, human and otherwise, continue to play second-fiddle to the industrial timber ensemble of Humboldt Redwood Company and Green Diamond Resource Company when it comes to state agency enforcement and regulation of logging. EPIC expects this from CAL FIRE, an agency that seemingly never met a THP it didn’t like and want to approve. What’s more disappointing is the 20-years and-counting of heel-dragging by the North Coast Regional Water Board to develop and implement a Total Maximum Daily Load.

Green Diamond Resource Company recently purchased 9,400-acres of commercial timberland in the Sproul Creek Watershed in Southern Humboldt County. Sproul Creek is a tributary to the South Fork Eel River. The purchase was orchestrated between Green Diamond and the Boyle Forest LP, (formerly Barnum Timber Company).

600,000 cubic yards of sediment. That’s how much dirt is estimated to still be clogging up the Elk River, and that’s just in the so-called, “Impacted Reach” between the confluence of the North and South Fork and downstream to Berta Road. Oh, and the Regional Water Quality Control Board has designated that the Elk River is suffering from a “Nusiance,” condition, aka, wildly excessive rates and frequencies of overbank flooding that continues to endanger the ingress, egress, health, safety and livelihoods of Upper Elk River residents.

Governor Brown released his long-awaited “Forest Carbon Plan.” I’ll be blunt: the Plan is timber industry advocacy disguised as “science.” The Plan focuses almost exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions from fire—fire does emit greenhouse gases, but this is a smokescreen for the larger agenda: to cut down more trees. The Plan states that California needs to increase logging to both reduce the fire risk and to move carbon from trees to “long-lived forest products,” also known as wood. To be specific, Governor Brown is calling for doubling the land actively managed from 250,000 acres to 500,000 acres per year.