The devastation was appalling. It was all I could do to hold back tears.
In early June, I was flying with EcoFlight to survey the ecologically diverse Lassen National Forest in northeast California. With me were journalist Nate Halverson from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones magazine, and Susan Tchudi, host of KZFR Community Public Radio’s Ecotopia program in Chico.
The purpose of the flight: to document the damage created by the 2021 Dixie and 2024 Park wildfires and assess the potential impacts of the U.S. Forest Service’s response – the massive West Lassen Headwaters Landscape Restoration Project, which includes more than 101,000 acres of mechanical logging and thinning, herbicide spraying, hand treatments, and meadow and aspen restoration.
It was post-apocalyptic. Public lands and wild places I explored and worked to protect for more than 40 years bristled with dead trees. Where the timber industry and the forest service “salvaged” the dead trees, there was nothing but roads, deep gashes in the bare earth, and debris piles, with virtually no live vegetation. It looked like Tolkien’s dark vision of Mordor.
Through the heart of this burnt landscape flow Mill and Deer Creeks. These streams flow from the vicinity of Lassen Volcanic National Park and through the western Lassen Forest, to the Sacramento Valley. They are some of the few remaining tributaries of the Sacramento River to support threatened runs of wild native spring chinook salmon and steelhead. These salmonids swim all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the foot of Mt. Lassen to spawn and lay their eggs. When the eggs hatch, the young fish swim back to the ocean to grow into adults and repeat this cycle every 3-4 years.
Mill and Deer Creeks are so unique, the forest service recommended that more than 30 miles of each stream on the Lassen Forest be added to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. The agency also recommended Wilderness protection for two roadless areas through which the streams flow and administratively set aside other roadless areas to protect their potential wilderness qualities from new road building and logging.
But in its environmental analysis for the West Lassen Project, the forest service ignored the recommended Wild and Scenic Rivers. Their 200-page analysis completely failed to assess the potential impacts of project activities on Deer and Mill Creek’s Wild and Scenic River qualities, including their threatened fish and outstanding scenery, wildlife, and Native American cultural values.
The forest service deserves praise for proposing to stay out of the roadless areas (at least for now), but how could they have forgotten about their recommended Wild and Scenic Rivers? Although there are components of the West Lassen Project we can support, CalWild has serious concerns about the project’s proposed activities along Mill and Deer Creeks.
The project could transform the once scenic but now fire-devastated Mill Creek corridor into a uniform tree farm that will simply pose a new wildfire hazard 20 years from now. To top it off, the forest service proposes to facilitate new conifer growth by spraying more than 9,000 acres with herbicides toxic to fish. It also proposes mechanical thinning of live forests along the visually stunning Deer Creek Wild and Scenic River and scenic Highway 32.
Of particular concern is the project’s dependence on extensive herbicide spraying, including glyphosate. Herbicide spraying on California’s forests has increased 5 times in the last two decades, with 266,000 pounds of glyphosate sprayed in 2023. This amount will increase as the forest service and private timber companies respond to climate-change induced wildfires by bombing the landscape back to bare dirt in preparation for tree planting. The Environmental Protection Agency and the forest service claim that glyphosate is safe because it binds to the soil, but federal scientists have detected its residue in more than 74% of sampled streams.
Herbicides negatively impact salmonids, most notably by affecting early life stages, interfering with behavior, and creating synergistic toxic effects from pesticide mixtures. Glyphosate harms salmon by affecting the development and behavior of young fish, causing stress, reproductive issues, and physical abnormalities. This is of particular concern since the forest service proposes to spray glyphosate along segments of Mill Creek where threatened spring chinook salmon and steelhead spawn.
The forest service largely ignored CalWild’s extensive comments on its environmental analysis. The agency has also ignored our recommendations to develop a reforestation plan for Mill Creek to restore its Wild and Scenic values, prohibit herbicide spraying in the creek’s streamside riparian zones, and avoid mechanical logging and thinning in Deer Creek’s still green and thriving forests.
This amidst a broader effort to cut the public out of even more forest service management (reject this effort here!) paints a grim future for those of us who visit California’s national forests and want to enjoy them as the wild landscapes we have grown to love.
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