Santa Barbara, Calif. – The U.S. Forest Service has released long-awaited details about its plan to log trees and clear native chaparral habitat across 90,700 acres of Los Padres National Forest —the largest vegetation removal project in this forest’s history.
The Forest Service plan, dubbed the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project, allows commercial timber sales, heavy machinery, and other methods to clear trees and shrubs. The work would take place across national forest land in six counties: Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Kern, and Los Angeles.
Thanks to feedback from Los Padres ForestWatch, other conservation organizations, tribes, and community members in 2022, the Forest Service eliminated around 144,000 acres from their initial proposal. While welcomed as a step in the right direction, the Forest Service plan still targets vast areas of wildlands, poses tremendous impacts to the forest, and leaves significant room for improvement.
ForestWatch is reviewing the agency’s plan in detail and is preparing a “Community Alternative” that reduces the Forest Service’s plan by more than 80%, avoids ecologically critical areas, and focuses vegetation treatments in areas close to communities, where they are most effective. ForestWatch is represented by the Environmental Defense Center in preparing technical comments.
Widespread Impacts
The proposal’s impacts are potentially sweeping and raise serious questions about ecological damage, cultural site protection, and the effectiveness of backcountry fuel treatments. Major concerns with the plan include:
- The plan authorizes the removal of trees through commercial timber sales, raising concerns that it may facilitate broader efforts by the current administration to ramp up logging on public lands.
- 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.
- The plan would remove vegetation across more than 26,000 acres of federally designated critical habitat where endangered and threatened species cling to survival.
- 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).
- The plan would affect an undisclosed number of places and landscapes considered sacred by local tribes.
ForestWatch is asking the Forest Service to significantly scale back the project to focus more strategically on areas immediately surrounding communities, instead of remote areas in the interior of the forest. We’re also asking the Forest Service to prepare a more detailed Environmental Impact Statement in lieu of the shorter, less thorough Environmental Assessment it recently released.
ForestWatch has published some frequently asked questions, an interactive map, a summary of what’s at stake, and an online Action Center to help the public submit comments before the deadline. This could be the only remaining opportunity for the public to provide input before the Forest Service approves the plan this fall. The comment period closes on June 2, 2025.
More Effective Ways to Protect Our Communities from Wildfire
Despite claims that logging and remote vegetation clearing will reduce wildfire risk, decades of scientific research and recent wildfire incidents consistently show that they do not prevent the most destructive fires—those driven by extreme winds and climate conditions. The kinds of wildfires that threaten communities are not fueled by dense forests, but by extreme winds that can hurl embers miles ahead of a fire front, igniting homes and structures regardless of nearby vegetation.
Firefighting experts agree that protecting communities starts at the home—not in the backcountry. Investments in retrofitting homes, creating defensible space and maintaining “Zone Zero” (the area within five feet of a structure), and improving emergency response systems are far more effective than remote logging and clearing projects that do little to alter fire behavior when it matters the most—during extreme wind events. These treatments often leave communities more vulnerable at a critical time when climate change is worsening fire risk across the country.