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California's 10 Most Threatened Wild Places -- 2004

Ask a Californian what's the number one threat to wilderness and open space in our state, and you're increasingly likely to hear a single answer: the federal government.

Seemingly liberated after the 2002 elections, the Bush Administration in 2003 uncorked a staggering series of environmental rollbacks that clearly had been some time in the making. From the Department of the Interior, the EPA, and the USDA Forest Service emitted literally hundreds of policy rollbacks, decision reversals, and new pro-industry policies, easing pollution controls and encouraging development and resource extraction on the nation's public lands. Many targeted California lands specifically. As the year wore on, disbelief turned to outrage as the public saw the administration was methodically attacking 30 years of environmental progress with new federal measures weakening the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and the Wilderness Act.

As we look out over the California landscape today, we see the federal government opening our national monuments to logging, our national forests to logging and oil drilling, and our last wilderness to road-building and uncontrolled off-road vehicle abuse. Many of California's wild areas that Congress is now considering for permanent protection are simultaneously being targeted by the Bush Administration for logging or energy development.

Adding to this strain are two of the state's largest corporate landowners, whose plans for their vast private landholdings - industrial logging and urban sprawl - threaten to eliminate some of California's most biologically important habitat for endangered wildlife. Once again, choosing 10 places in the greatest danger was difficult, starting from a list more than twice that long.

California's 10 Most Threatened Wild Places in 2004 are:

• Sierra Nevada Forests - Bush Administration has revoked Forest Service's Sierra Framework; substitute plan will allow widespread logging throughout the Sierra, even old-growth areas. Private company's plan to clearcut its own 1 million acres is further degrading water and habitat for rare wildlife.
• Algodones Sand Dunes - Bush Administration's extreme off-road plan would overturn protection of endangered wildlife and wilderness.
• White Mountains (Furnace Creek) - California's largest unprotected wilderness is being invaded by illegal off-road vehicle trails damaging a rare desert stream.
• Cleveland National Forest - Proposed freeways, dams, and power lines threaten region's last unprotected wild forests.
• Tejon Ranch - Sprawl and industrial development threaten irreplaceable wildlife 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.
• Giant Sequoia National Monument - Forest Service's plan would continue intensive logging in a protected monument, even cutting century-old sequoias.
• Golden Trout Wilderness Addition - Salvage logging in roadless area would damage proposed wilderness that's home to California's imperiled state fish.
• 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 salmon and hurting farmers, fishermen, tribes, and endangered wildlife.

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