FOREST FLASH

December 2023

In Pacific Forest Trust’s e-newsletter, Forest Flash, we send you the most recent PFT news and updates on forests, clean water, climate, and wildlife. Subscribe here.

This past year has been a highly productive and eventful one, accentuated all the more by celebrating our 30th anniversary. Your support has made all the difference to our success! Thank you so much for your generosity  — it’s had an outsize impact!

Below is a highlight reel of 2023 achievements, and harbingers of successes to come.

Conservation Wins

More acres, more progress! 

The Mt. Ashland Demonstration Forest

We made big strides this year on the conservation front. In Oregon, we developed  the Forest Management Plan for our Mount Ashland Demonstration Forest. Over 1100 acres of wet meadows, streams, in the most biodiverse conifer forests in the world, we were privileged to work with world-class scientists and foresters on the Plan and cannot wait to begin work in 2024! The Forest is part of our concerted effort to establish a conservation corridor for wildlife along the Crest, connecting public and private lands. We’ve hired a Stewardship and Outreach Associate, who will collaborate with myriad stakeholders in the region and beyond.

In California we completed funding for the conservation of the  Shasta Timberlands Working Forest. This project, many years in the making and surviving the Antelope Fire, conserves some 7,500 acres on Mt. Shasta’s northeastern slopes and forms a strategic connection between public and private working lands in order to provide connected and conserved habitat for hundreds of species.

PFT also made huge strides towards completing the conservation of the Trinity Headwaters. Thanks to Congressman Jared Huffman, we were awarded a HUD grant for Community Development to advance this unique conservation project in which we are partnering with the Watershed Research and training Center out of Hayfork, California.  We were also delighted to receive a grant for this project from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, also in recognition of the projects enormous benefit for both biodiversity and community.

Additionally, we must mention that PFT received a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop and implement an ambitious, forward-looking pilot project to promote a transition from the sometimes-catastrophic fires we have been experiencing to beneficial fire regimes. The pilot area, which lies within Siskiyou County, encompasses millions of acres managed forests, rangeland, and recreation areas, is characteristic of the fire-prone western states, and we are eager to build wildfire resiliency within the region—as well as provide a learning model for the rest of the nation to positively impact fire regimes—through innovative management and rehabilitative stewardship.

And, across all our properties, we were pleased to steward the conservation and management of 120,000 acres of forests on the West Coast! We’re honored to care for these lands in perpetuity.

Policy Advancements

PFT leaders helped propose and shape historic legislation that will help combat the climate crisis & its daily effects

We greatly furthered the proposal to leverage the climate-healing power of forests this year, with our president, Laurie Wayburn, chairing the 1757 Expert Advisory Committee, as laid out by AB1757, which delivered its recommendations to implement targets for the conservation, management, and restoration of California’s natural and working lands sector. A first-in-the-nation effort, these recommendations would contribute to 250–400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide reductions in the next 5–10 years. This is greater than all the potential gains from the greening of the transportation sector combined, and an essential suite of actions to take to meet our climate goals. Their full recommendations can be found here. These recommendations are a practical guide to achieving the climate gains advocated by over 200 scientists in their groundbreaking study published in Nature this fall.

Additionally, we continued our work with the Wildfire Resiliency Working Group — comprised of cultural fire practitioners, health advocates, scientists, farmers, environmental justice leaders, forest landowners  and more. This year, they developed a proposal for Governor Newsom and legislators in the Golden State that $1 billion be allotted to get more beneficial fire on the ground, in addition to other management methods to increase forest resilience and community safety from catastrophic wildfires.Read more about the thrust of PFT’s work in this arena via this Sacramento Bee op-ed.

PFT has long advocated for infrastructure that would allow for the safe passage of wildlife over major highways, primarily Interstate 5, as this road bisects the states of California and Oregon across vital wildlife corridors. These past several years, the Southern Oregon Wildlife Crossing Coalition (SOWCC) has led the effort and  the group put forth a proposal for a planning grant to create a wildlife crossing over I5 to help protect Oregon’s uniquely biodiverse Siskiyou Crest, a vital east-west corridor for many species. While this particular funding was not granted, we will continue to collaborate with our SOWCC colleagues to establish an overpass in this key area.

Please consider a donation to the Pacific Forest Trust. Your help—in all capacities—makes our work possible. Thanks for supporting us as we support forests!

Importantly, we celebrated the release of Beyond the Trees, the short documentary made about our innovative work on the van Eck forests of California and Oregon. The award-winning film—it has won seven nominations and awards, including “Best Environmental Film” at the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival—has been screened in cities and communities across the country. From New York to Arcata, Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco, many new people have come to learn about our pioneering means of enacting landscape-scale rehabilitation of natural forests for climate, wildlife, water, and more. Much gratitude to the van Eck family for making the film possible.

Once again, we thank you all so much for supporting our work. We could not do it without your help, and we’re so pleased to have your hand in helping us accomplish our ambitious and daring goals to conserve forests for all their benefits — for all. We wish you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season, and we’ll see you in the new year!

• Our President, Laurie Wayburn, wrote a New York Times Letter to the Editor in which she illustrates what’s so useful about conserving working forests. In another Letter for the same outlet, Wayburn re-ups the remarkable ability of older, more natural forests to capture extraordinary amounts of carbon, and highlights California’s pioneering efforts to harness the power of its natural and working lands.

• On the Camp Fire’s 5th anniversary, PFT’s VP of Policy & Incentives, Paul Mason, took to the pages of the Sacramento Beeto lay out means of preventing such catastrophic blazes in the future.

• PFT co-founder, Connie Best, recently wrote about conserving the Alsea River Bend property for Northwest Woodlands Magazine.

• PFT President, Laurie Wayburn, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg article on timber as a low-carbon building material. “Selective thinning,” she says, “is a needed tool but would be better paired with small fires that more closely mimic the forest’s natural cycles.”

• The Week highlighted our use of Working Forest Conservation Easements in their round-up of good news, under the headline “Private forest owners can play a role in curbing climate change.”

• In a USA Today piece entitled “The next Maui could be anywhere: Hawaii tragedy points to US wildfire vulnerability,” PFT co-founder and president, Laurie Wayburn, offered comment on the effects of climate change-induced conflagrations nationwide.