You Make the Difference!
This November, PFT was honored by two anonymous donors offering to match up to $70,000 dollar-for-dollar to help support our pioneering work in managing forests for climate change and other public benefits. We are just over halfway to that goal, having raised $38,500 to date! Your gift today to PFT is essential to helping conserve diverse, productive forests across California and Oregon, such as the Shasta Timberlands, Lightning Canyon, and Mount Ashland, as well as advance groundbreaking new policies and incentives for healthy, fire-safe forests (see article below) and develop new funding for forests to ensure cold, clean, clear water for people, fish and wildlife (read the FUTURE Act section of the HR2 bill here).
Please donate as generously as you can to meet this challenge match!
Accelerating Fire Resilience in California
This year’s fire season had devastating impacts on communities, and reinforced the critical necessity of getting more work done to restore fire resilience in our forests and other landscapes. But, this takes people, time, and money. When the Legislature approved California’s budget in June, economic uncertainties limited overall spending drastically. This included stripping out significant funding for fire preparedness that had been included in earlier versions of the budget. Now, the economic picture is far better. But the impacts of this fire season make the lack of funding for fire preparedness grant programs that lower the risk of uncontrolled, landscape-level fires or increasing workforce capacity to manage fire stand out as a major missed opportunity. PFT is working to remedy this in January 2021.
The forests surrounding Shaver Lake have been managed with prescribed fire for decades; it withstood this year’s fires well.
Working with 20 allied groups ranging from the California Cattlemen’s Association to the Native Plant Society to the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, we are calling on the Governor and Legislature to make an emergency mid-year appropriation of $500 million for a broad range of landscape resilience and fire preparedness activities. This includes increasing the use of “good” fire, funding forest health improvements, and conserving intact, well-managed forests. These actions will help keep fire in uninhabited lands where more natural fire regimes can be restored and allowed to burn. There is also a significant focus on actions closer to where people live, including retrofits to make structures more burn-proof, improving warning systems and evacuation planning, and safeguarding vulnerable populations from the impacts of extreme smoke.
Read the letter.
Safeguarding the Elliott State Forest for Future Generations
The 80,000-acre Elliott State Forest contains some of Oregon’s rare remaining old forests, is home to Marbled Murrelets, Spotted Owls as well as several species of threatened salmon, and poses the opportunity both protect these resources while being a world-class research site managing forests for climate change. Its future has been hotly debated since it was put up for auction to pay off the Common School Fund (Fund), and then rescued from sale when the Governor and Legislature authorized a $100,000,000 bond to decouple the ESF management from the Fund. Oregon State University has been proposed as the future manager for the ESF. On December 8th, they will present their proposal for how they will do that, and under what conditions.
Photo courtesy of earthlawcenter.org
PFT supports the use of the Elliott for research, but with clear, enforceable protections for the many public benefit resources that the $100,000,000 bond was issued to protect. The best means of doing that is to place the Elliott under a permanent, working forest conservation easement that guides its management, allows for crucial climate change research and protects those public benefits with a third-party, transparent, verified tool. PFT has worked to protect the ESF, while keeping it in under management for all tis forest values, for over a decade.
Read PFT’s comments on this here.