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Sierra Club Lawsuits

Protecting the Sierra Nevada's National Forests

Case Updates:

March 12, 2004

The Bush administration has launched an all out assault on the national forests of the Sierra Nevada, and the Club's legal team is massing a response. For over a decade the Sierra Club has challenged unsustainable logging and destructive forest management practices in the Sierra Nevada's eleven national forests. The Club was heavily involved in the adoption of the "Sierra Nevada Framework," a management plan for all eleven forests crafted by the Clinton Administration that is one of the first forest management plans that gives priority to ecological values over timber harvesting. Now the Bush administration has proposed a "revision" to the Framework that guts key environmental provisions and calls for a tripling of logging in the forests. The Club is challenging this move through formal administrative appeals and then court litigation. In another, related case, the Sierra Club has intervened to defend the Framework Plan from a legal challenge by a local California county and an organization called the Quincy Library Group; these groups also seek increased logging in the Sierra Nevada's forests.

The Bush Administration's plan is so poorly conceived that they hired a public relations firm in March, 2004, to try and spin it to the public. But when this came to light, the Bush Administration was slammed for spending money on PR rather than forest restoration.

See the San Francisco Chronicle's article from March 11, 2004 : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/11/BAGAA5I8581.DTL

Details and Documents: