In 2022, the U.S. Forest Service announced the “Ecological Restoration Project,” a misnamed and poorly-planned proposal to clear vegetation and wildlife habitat across more than 235,000 acres (368 square miles) of Los Padres National Forest in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, and southwestern Kern counties.
In May 2025, the project was rebranded as the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project and reduced to 90,700 acres. Despite the welcome downsizing, the project’s impacts to environmental, recreational, and cultural sites remain widespread and significant. ForestWatch is now working with our environmental and tribal allies to convince the U.S. Forest Service to further refine and reduce the project.
This project represents the largest mechanical alteration of land in the history of Los Padres National Forest.
- Massive Footprint: The plan allows the removal of trees, chaparral, and other native plants and habitat across 90,796 acres of national forest land in across six counties: Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Kern, and Los Angeles. This includes sensitive wildlife habitat, recreation sites, and inventoried roadless areas.
- Outdated and Ineffective Approach: Reducing wildfire risk is a laudable and necessary goal—our communities depend on it. But the Forest Service’s plan relies on outdated strategies that emphasize vegetation clearance in remote areas, often far from communities, rather than proven community-centered solutions.
- Real Protection Means Focusing on Structures and Evacuation Plans: Science and experience shows that the most effective ways to protect homes from wildfire involve making structures more fire-resistant (home hardening), creating defensible space immediately around structures, and improving neighborhood emergency response and preparedness—not large-scale vegetation removal miles away from homes.
- Insufficient Environmental Review: The project will cause significant environmental harm that should be thoroughly considered in an Environmental Impact Statement. Instead, the Forest Service has hired an out-of-state consultant to prepare a shorter and less-detailed Environmental Assessment that lacks sufficient detail, dismisses less-damaging alternatives, and fails to grapple with the scale and severity of the project’s potential impacts.
- Commercial Logging is Explicitly Allowed: The plan authorizes the removal of merchantable trees through commercial timber sales, raising concerns that it may facilitate broader efforts by the current administration to ramp up logging on public lands
- Destruction of Wild, Undeveloped Areas: More than 42% of the project intrudes into roadless areas, some of the most wild and untouched places in Los Padres National Forest outside of designated Wilderness areas. These areas are critical for wildlife movement, carbon storage, and solitude, and are typically off-limits to industrial activity.
- Threat to Endangered Species Habitat: The plan would remove vegetation across more than 26,000 acres of federally designated critical habitat where endangered and threatened species cling to survival. This includes areas essential to the survival of the California condor and California red-legged frog, among others.
- Recreation Affected: The plan would clear areas up to 1,500 feet wide along hundreds of miles of trails and recreation sites (campgrounds, trailheads, and day use areas).
- Cultural and Tribal Resources at Risk: The Forest Service admits the project would affect an undisclosed number of cultural sites and sacred landscapes important to local tribes.
- Key Landscapes Targeted: The project would fundamentally change the look, feel, and ecology of key places in Los Padres National Forest that provide abundant recreation opportunities and healthy wildlife habitat, such as Mt. Pinos, the Upper Santa Ynez River Recreation Area, West Cuesta Ridge, and more.
What’s At Stake
The plan could fundamentally alter different landscapes across the national forest.
Interactive Map: Wildfire Risk Reduction Project and Community Alternative
Explore a map showing the current project proposal as well as a reduced footprint Community Alternative.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to many of your questions about the project.
A Better Way
Structural retrofits and maintenance. Retrofitting or constructing homes with fire-safe materials is vitally important to reducing the risk of home ignition. Embers can travel for miles and cause home ignition by entering small gaps or by accumulating against flammable building features such as wood siding or roof shingles. Fiberglass-asphalt shingles, clay tiles, or metal sheets
Here are the facts:
1
Most areas will be cleared using heavy industrial equipment, chainsaws, masticators (giant tractors with a large arm and rotating blade), and mowers, with only a small amount of prescribed fire and livestock grazing.
2
The project targets all vegetation types, including conifer forests, hardwood forests (such as oak woodlands and riparian forests), chaparral, and grassland.
3
Out-of-state consultants in Montana are preparing the barest minimum study of the plan’s environmental impacts. Officials do not plan to prepare a robust and thorough Environmental Impact Statement, and the consultants seem unfamiliar with local conditions on the ground.
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The environmental assessment is funded by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), an investor-owned utility responsible for some of our state’s largest and deadliest wildfires. The utility has recently pled guilty to several felonies including manslaughter.
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This general forest-wide plan is the only opportunity for the public to weigh in. Officials will not prepare any site-specific environmental assessments for the life of the project, which could span decades.
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The plan will cost taxpayers dearly. By the Forest Service’s own estimate, clearing this much vegetation will cost $90,000,000 — approximately $1,000 per acre.
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An undisclosed number of cultural and spiritual importance to Native Americans occur in the proposed clearance areas. The exact number of sites is being hidden from the public. The earlier and larger version of this project would have affected over one thousand cultural sites.
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The project targets lands set aside for protection: botanical areas, critical biological zones, roadless areas, and critical habitat for endangered and threatened plants and wildlife. It also targets lands and rivers in a long-term conservation initiative crafted by local stakeholders over the last decade.
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The proposed clearance areas include trails, campgrounds, backcountry campsites, day use areas, and scenic routes. Several segments of the proposed Condor National Scenic Trail are targeted.
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The plan would increase fire risk through the spread of highly flammable invasive weeds. Cleared areas open up fertile ground that promotes infestations of non-native grasses.
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The plan would drastically expand the size of several controversial logging projects including ones on Pine Mountain and Mt. Pinos.
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The best way to protect our communities is to focus on the home outward. Home hardening, removing flammable materials near structures, creating defensible space, planting firewise landscaping, and reducing ignitions all provide the most effective risk reduction. Clearing huge swaths of land far from homes puts us at greater risk by creating a false sense of security and taking attention away from proven science-based solutions.
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Protecting forests protects our climate. Trees—when left standing—are essential to removing pollution from the atmosphere, storing carbon, and regulating our climate.
