clearcuts

In this episode, I speak with Adam Rissien of Wild Earth Guardians and Connie Wilbert of the Sierra Club about a massive Forest Service proposal to cut hundreds of thousands of acres of trees (including 80,000 acres in roadless areas!) in the Medicine Bow National forest in Wyoming called the LaVA Project. We talk about Adam and Connie’s organizations and backgrounds, the scale and scope of the LaVA project, its impacts, the harmful effects of road building on the ecosystem, lack of environmental analysis and oversight, similarities to the Four Forests Initiative in Arizona, rewriting the rules of the National Environmental Policy Act to allow for ambiguity, history of fires and logging on the Medicine Bow National Forest, how we should be managing our forests, the false promises of “Forest Heath” initiatives, climate change, forest resiliency and the Forest Service burying scientific information in support of their motives.