How do you sell a 39,300-acre deforestation project to the public?
Call it a forest “health initiative!”…
…and Bob’s your dead uncle! Even as we environmental and wildlife advocates are working to stop one massive deforestation project masquerading as “wildfire resilience” and a “health initiative” (!), another, much larger deforestation rears its tree-felling head, pushing to cut down literally tens of thousands more trees and wild plants.
A clear bureaucratic pattern is evident: there is a large, coordinated, systemic push to demonize wild, unmanaged forests, keep stoking wildfire fears, and thus justify continued fire suppression — even as these same “management” agencies say wildfire suppression is a “failed policy of the past.”
Yes, that’s right. These various county, state and federal agencies all parrot the same contradictory narrative: that fire suppression failed because, they acknowledge, wildfires are how forests naturally regenerate when we ignorant, arrogant humans stop interfering with the natural ecological functions of forest.
But at the same these agencies call for massive forest “thinning” and “treating” projects — which are just the latest form of wildfire suppression rebranded and sold to an understandably wildfire-terrified public.
Various trendy new labels are deployed, some of them downright Orwellian in their ironic absurdity, like…
“Vegetation management” is the leading term of destructive art — the most common euphemism for “felling trees and killing plants in the wild.” “Restoration” is another doozy, since this word almost always today means: “killing wild plants, shrubs, trees, insects, birds, mammals, and poisoning the soil and waterways.” But describing what it really is doesn’t sell. So our activist job remains: educate the public. Tell them (you) bluntly that these agencies are either colossally ignorant, or chillingly corrupted by industry with its killing machinery (chainsaws, masticators, tractors, chippers, feller-bunchers and so on). And its equally lethal but silent toxic chemical poisons, herbicides.
You’d think that the generally affluent, educated, politically liberal and also environmentally-minded citizens of Marin County, CA, just across the Golden Gate from enlightened San Francisco, would know better. That most would immediately smell the snake oil salesmanship of, to name local agency names, Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority (aka, Marin Wildfire, aka MWPA), Cal Parks, Cal Fire, MMWD, and the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
Don’t “treat” forests with chainsaws, masticators and poison; “treat” houses.
Numerous agencies are now clamoring for millions of available CA state wildfire reduction funding — but then using it to cut down literally tens of thousands of acres of trees and plants, instead of making people’s homes safer from wildfire with home hardening treatments and defensible space creation within 100 ft. of homes.
“Hey, give us some-a that “wildfire reduction” money, too! – – count us in!” Who woulda thunk that stoking the very real fear of wildfire would make it so easy to bamboozle residents of this forested, relatively under-developed county to approve killing thousands of trees (just by labeling them “unhealthy”) and tens of thousands of smaller forest plants? Residents pay lip service to ‘loving nature,’ but fall silent when gripped in the fear of wildfire, a fear stoked by the biomass and timber industry, county, state and federal agencies, and the media.
Enter this webpage, with a dual purpose:
1) Expose this latest Marin Wildfire massive deforestation plan for 39,300 acres of coastal Marin County, CA. Advanced by the MWPA (Marin Wildfire), which is an umbrella-like, bureaucratic consortium of (17) member agencies, the MWPA has leapt to the head of the Let’s Deforest Marin County class with a newly released (late July 2025), under-the-radar, mind-blowing, heart-sinking 39,300-acre deforestation project.
The MWPA is sneaking through the required approval process for their grand plans to unleash the usual assortment of forest-destroying chainsaws, chippers, masticating machines, torches and herbicides on wild lands and forests in Marin County. They’ve timed their public notice for late summer, when many Marin-ites are on vacation before schools reopen.
2) Educate the general public about the multitude of destructive de-forestation assaults being advanced. The coastal Marin deforestation project is just one of many which are now targeting literally hundreds of thousands of acres of similar deforestation project being sold to the public, which is understandably terrified about wildfire, as essential “wildfire resilience” work and even more absurdly as a “forest health initiative.” I suppose that’s true if by “initiate” they mean destroy.
Because this 39,300-acre deforestation project will not only NOT accomplish much of its stated goals of forest health improvement or wildfire danger reduction; it will instead do monstrous ecological damage to some of the wild, wettest coastal communities in this county.
But it’s not too late. Get educated about this war on Mother Nature. And get involved.
The MWPA is targeting for industrial assault — the usual arsenal of chainsaws, masticators, chippers, fire accelerant and herbicides — an additional 39,300 acres of coastal forests and wildlands up and down the Marin coast.
TreeSpirit’s ongoing campaign to have more residents wake up to the destruction of an earlier deforestation proposal which is nearly underway — in Tomales Bay State Park’s approximately 2,000 acres of lush, fire-resistant, fog-enshrouded coastal “cloud” forest and coastal scrub — has been given its own webpage, HERE: https://treespiritproject.com/CalFire
Tomales Bay is targeted 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.
Call it what it is: a “Marin County Coastal Deforestation Project”
The Marin County Coastal Deforestation Project, as it will (only) be called on this website, will bring chainsaw-wielding forest “managers” into 39,300 acres of wildland, which is too large an amount of acreage to picture in your mind. The deforestation project’s authors and numerous proponents claim, out of one side of their mouths, that trees and plants in the wild, beyond 100 ft. from houses, must be killed — which they often label “removal,” so residents don’t get upset by the nature-destructive truth of their actions.
This “vegetation management” — another euphemism for killing literally thousands of trees and wild plants — is necessary, proponents claim, in order to “save” or “protect” both the forest, and our human communities, from wildfire. While out of the other side of their institutional mouths, they concede that wildfire is ecologically restorative and necessary — but only if they do it, their way. Meaning with industrial machines, herbicides and torches and accelerants.
Because, y’know, Mother Nature is out of control and must be tamed, managed, cleaned up, fixed, trimmed — She cannot be trusted to do what She has done for literally millions of years, maintaining her own abundance of healthy life without technologically advanced, industrially-powered civilized, managerial humans. Getting the picture? These humans know sooo much better than wild Mother Nature; she has become “overgrown” and only we can “restore” Her. And just look at how well we humans have managed the place/planet; especially in since the industrial revolution and the spread of civilization.
War on Nature is Peace; Destruction is “Restoration”
When these wildland Man-Agers are done with their destructive “restoring” — as these Orwellian deforesting ‘foresters” love to call their deforestation projects — these wild places will have thousands fewer green plants to make oxygen, sequester carbon, cool the earth, harbor countless thousands of animals and organisms. They will be denuded and thus condense, collect and drip less irrigating Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay fog. Welcome to modern, money-driven, budget-filling “vegetation management” in 2025.
This latest, larger, 39,300-acre “vegetation management” project is 39x larger than the adjacent Tomales Bay deforestation project, also in Marin County. 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).
“Treat” houses, not forests.
Not all of the MWPA’s project (edited graphic above) is destructive, only its large, so-called “Vegetation Management” component will denude and desiccate wild forests and render them hotter, drier and more wildfire ignition-prone.
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.”
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.
