What’s worse than a 1,000-acre industrial deforestation project billed as a “forest health initiative?”
Even as environmental activists and wild animal advocates are working to educate the public about an existing project consisting of hacking into and poisoning (with herbicides) 1,000 acres of Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County, CA, the agencies entrusted with protecting public forests are now targeting for industrial assault an additional 39,300 acres of coastal forests and wildlands up and down the Marin County coastline (north of San Francisco).
A 39,300-acre Marin County coastal deforestation project.
Tomales Bay State Park’s approximately 2,000 acres of lush, fire-resistant, fog-enshrouded coastal “cloud” forest and coastal scrub (like coyote brush) is set to be chainsawed and masticated this year into a sunnier, hotter, drier and windier denuded forest. Using machines, toxic chemicals and fires to “clear out” the living “understory vegetation” — where thousands of birds and other wild animals live — these damp, wildfire-resistant Pacific oceanside forests will be “thinned” and be cut, burned and poisoned to become MORE flammable.
When the chainsaw-wielding forest “managers” are done “restoring” — as these Orwellian “foresters” also call their deforestation projects — these wild habitats, they will have thousands fewer green plants to condense, collect and drip irrigate Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay fog. Welcome to modern, money-driven, budget-filling “vegetation management” in 2025.
The latest. larger, 39,300-acre “vegetation management” project is 39x larger than the Tomales Bay deforestation project. That is over 35,000 football fields worth of wild, undeveloped Marin County coastline, just north of San Francisco, that will be converted from wildland to thinned, denuded, desiccated “managed” forests. They will be cut and mowed and burned and poisoned to become more “park-like”and sunnier and hotter and drier- and thus more likely to ignite a future wildfire, whether by cigarette, car (manmade) or lightning strike (natural).
These two projects, and dozens more across the western states, are the latest craze of industrial assault, often called “restoration” projects, as if gas-powered chainsaws, masticating machines, and chippers “help” forests. As if forests need human help, instead of the exact opposite, less human interference, and fewer machines cutting into them.
Deforestation. Re-branded as “thinning” and “fuel reduction.”
All of these so-called “management” and “restoration” and “thinning” projects — sold to the public by stoking wildfire fear — are just deforestation projects re-branded. Meaning these projects reduce the amount of precious remaining wild forests which mitigate the heating climate and increasing droughts — which are caused in large part by human deforestations.
So-called forest “thinning” increases wildfire danger.
Wildfire in the west is a very real danger, but the best protection for homeowners is creating Defensible Space and applying home “hardening” treatments to the house. And working from the house-out, NOT the forest-in.
As if burning slash piles made of freshly chainsawed trees and masticated plants were how native Americans once “tended” the forests, as these forest-killing bureaucracies claim they are mimicking. The current trend, which works all too often is to invoke “TEK,” traditional ecological knowledge of native American tribes who lived in harmony on the land for hundreds of generations. While we modern humans have decimated so many forests and our own ecosystem in less than one century of industrialization. And fossil fuels emission. And deforestation-for-profit, as here.
Not just slashing and burning forests. Also poisoning them.
(To “save” and “help” and “restore” them.)
The icing on this deadly, nature-killing cake of forest “treatments” is hundreds of gallons of toxic chemical herbicides. Topping off all the tree killing with thousands more plant and insect and soil and microorganisms killing. Toxic chemical poisons like Monsanto Roundup formulations and Dow Garlon (to name a few better know name brands) do nothing but damage (killing) in any wildland.
• READ MORE about the plant and animal-poisoning chemicals called herbicides.
• READ MORE about the Tomales Bay State Park deforestation project.
• READ MORE about the 101 Reasons these deforestation projects are ecologically and environmentally destructive — and also don’t reduce wildfire danger. And how they are falsely advertised to the public, leveraging the public’s justified fear of wildfire: https://www.treespiritproject.com/TomalesBayforest101reasons
• READ MORE about Wildfire.
