FEDERATION OF WESTERN OUTDOOR CLUBS

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ADMINISTRATION OF THE GIANT SEQUOIA NATIONAL MONUMENT

On April 15, 2000, then President Clinton signed a proclamation creating the Giant Sequoia National Monument in the Sequoia National Forest in the southern Sierra Nevada range of California.

The proclamation prohibits commercial logging in that monument and directs the Forest Service to take action to enable the area to recover from one hundred years of logging and the exclusion of fire. The agency was given three years to develop a management plan, using the provisions of the proclamation.

The Forest Service released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, with a preferred alternative which would permit logging of 10 million board feet per year within the monument and cutting of trees up to thirty inches in diameter (which might even include giant sequoias). Logging in the monument would even be more intensive than logging in the national forest outside the monument.

A Final Environmental Statement is expected to be released later this year, and there is no indication the Forest Service plans to change its recommendations (which clearly conflict with the proclamation). The Forest Service justifies its preferred alternative by advocating logging to reduce accumulated fuels.

The Sequoia Task Force of the Sierra Club believes that prescribed fire should be the primary tool used to reduce fuels and that fire should be reintroduced into the forest ecosystem. The nearby Sequoia National Park, which manages an identical ecosystem with numerous giant sequoia groves, has used prescribed fire to reduce fuels and has successfully reintroduced fire into the forest ecosystem. As a result, the forest in the park has been restored to a healthy and resilient condition.

The Sequoia Task Force of the Sierra Club feels the Forest Service has destroyed its credibility to manage the monument by proposing that logging continue, with a "business as usual approach," despite the directive given by President Clinton in his proclamation.

Accordingly, the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs believes that management of the Giant Sequoia National Monument should be transferred from the Department of Agriculture to the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior. The monument, though, should continue to be managed under the presidential proclamation of April 15, 2000.


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