Interesting Facts

• By the USFSs own figures, the taxpayers lost $12 million in logging national forests in the Sierra Nevada. The Wilderness Society, whose professional economists include costs such as logging road construction, estimate the loss is closer to $24 million. Neither calculation includes any dollar amount reflecting losses of wildlife habitat, recreation and visual quality, water quality or other resource losses.(1)
  
• More than 25 percent of all National Forest recreation occurs in California.(2)
  
• More people visit Sequoia National Forest than the adjacent Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.(3)
  
• The latest survey of the Sierra Nevada found only about a million acres of old growth forest remaining, or about one-sixth of its pre-Gold Rush total.(4)
  
• Giant Sequoia preservation was one of the reasons for creating the Sequoia Forest Reserve in 1893.(5) This Forest Reserve became Sequoia National Forest.in 1908.
  
• SNEP found on Sequoia National Forest that "the mapping of groves which provides 300-500 feet of buffer beyond existing sequoias to be arbitrary rather than science-based. SNEP found that ecologically based influence zones incorporating hydrology, fuels, and other landscape-scale considerations should guide grove management to ensure the long-term health of the groves.(6) Yet Sequoia National Forest has proceeding with the planning projects within groves using their existing arbitrary definition of "groves."
  
• SNEP states that existing high-quality late successional forests must be retained and expanded to support the full range of organisms and functions into the future, yet every timber sale approved on Sequoia National Forest since this SNEP study will log in these areas.(7)
  
• The USFS admits that the southern Sierra Nevada National Forests have the lowest success rate in reforestation.(8)
  
• An agreement between the USFS and the Sierra Club in 1990 required that the public be involved in incorporating the agreement into an amendment to the Sequoia Land Management Plan. Eight years later, this has not been done.
  
• A 1991 Reforestation Report written by Sequoia National Forest as a requirement of the agreement with the Sierra Club was vehemently protested as unscientific by the Sierra Club. In 1996 the USFS found that the information upon which that report was based was about 50% accurate, about the same as a toss of a coin.(9)

1. "Feds lose money on California forest timber sales" (AP) Recorder, Friday, Jan. 16, 1998.
2. Jay Watson, regional director for California and Nevada, The Wilderness Society, (AP) San Francisco as reported in the Recorder, Friday, Jan. 16,1998.
3. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), Volume 1, Final Report to Congress, Wildland Resources Center Report No. 36, University of California, page 162.
4. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), Volume 1, Final Report to Congress, Wildland Resources Center Report No. 36, University of California, Davis, page 162.
5. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), Volume 1, Final Report to Congress, Wildland Resources Center Report No. 36, University of California, Davis.page 160.
6. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), Volume 1, Final Report to Congress, Wildland Resources Center Report No. 36, University of California, Davis. page 158.
7. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), Volume 1, Final Report to Congress, Wildland Resources Center Report No. 36, University of California, Davis. page 100
8. Steve Paulson, Assistant Regional forester, 12/24/97 Memo to Chief of the USFS.
9. Sequoia National Forest 1996 Report to MSA parties.