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California's 10 Most Threatened Wild Places -- 2003

Since the 2002 elections, California has been rocked not by earthquakes or El Niņo but by a deluge of new federal threats to our state's wild environment. It is as though a floodgate opened in Washington, D.C.: Literally dozens of regulatory rollbacks, decision reversals, and other anti-environmental policies have gushed forth in just a few months, many targeting California specifically.

Today the Bush Administration is hitting the Golden State's wild public lands harder than any administration in memory, opening our national monuments to logging, our national forests to oil drilling, even our national parks and wilderness areas to road-building. Adding to the strain, industrial logging and urban sprawl on privately owned lands threaten to snuff out some of California's most important wildlife habitat.

Fully half these areas are threatened because the Bush Administration has refused to enforce one key policy: the Forest Service's Roadless Area Conservation Rule. This landmark conservation measure, adopted by the Forest Service in 2000 but suspended by the current administration, protects the last wild national forest lands -- 58.5 million acres in the U.S. and 4.4 million acres in California -- from development, logging, and road-building. In December 2002, a federal court reinstated the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, sweeping away a judicial challenge. Now the Bush Administration is expected to dismantle the rule administratively. If enforced, the rule will save the threatened roadless areas of the Los Padres National Forest, the Cleveland National Forest, and Duncan Canyon (Tahoe National Forest), plus threatened portions of the Plumas National Forest (Humboldt Summit Roadless Area), and the Medicine Lake Highlands (Mount Hoffman Roadless Area on the Modoc and Klamath National Forests). Without the rule, all these areas are in imminent danger of development or logging.

The Bush Administration also has reversed many policies specific to California, stripping away hard-won protections and approving harmful projects. It approved industrial power plants in the Medicine Lake Highlands near Mt. Shasta which were denied by the previous administration. Similarly, it reversed the denial of an open-pit mine in the California Desert Conservation Area. It is re-opening large areas of the fragile Algodones Dunes, previously closed to vehicles to protect endangered species. Last summer it overruled its own federal scientists and cut back Klamath River flows, killing more than 34,000 salmon in Northern California. It is stripping key protections from the Northwest Forest Plan that protect California's ancient forests and salmon. And today, the Bush Administration is dismantling the Sierra Nevada Framework -- the historic plan that protects wildlife and old-growth trees in 11 of California's national forests -- so timber companies can more easily log ancient forests in our state's greatest mountain range.

Each year CWC quizzes activists and conservation groups to find the ten wild places in the deepest danger -- this year we have a bumper crop. California's 10 Most Threatened Wild Places in 2003 are:

• Algodones Sand Dunes -- Bush Administration's extreme off-road plan would overturn protection of endangered wildlife and wilderness.
• Panamint Range (Briggs Mine and Surprise Canyon) -- Open-pit mining and extreme ORV use would devastate natural landscapes, sacred lands, and wilderness.
• Cleveland National Forest -- Proposed freeways, dams, and, power lines threaten region's last unprotected wild forests.
• Tejon Ranch -- Sprawl and industrial development threaten key habitat on California's largest private landholding.
• Los Padres National Forest -- Proposed oil and gas development puts wild forest lands and endangered species habitat at risk.
• Duncan Canyon -- Salvage logging would ruin old-growth forest, roadless areas and proposed wilderness.
• Westside Sierra Corporate Forestlands -- Company's plan to clearcut 1,000,000 acres would degrade water and drive Sierra Nevada wildlife toward extinction.
• Plumas and Lassen National Forests -- Bush Administration's massive logging "experiment" would cut old-growth forests and spotted owl habitat.
• Medicine Lake Highlands -- Development of geothermal power plants would lay waste to wild forests and sacred lands.
• Klamath River Basin -- Excessive water diversion is killing thousands of salmon and hurting farmers, fishermen, tribes, and endangered wildlife.

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