This is a comment letter submitted to the Forest Service regarding their proposed new Categorical Exclusion additions.

There have been many recent assumptions that transferring the 327,769 acre Giant Sequoia National Monument from the jurisdiction of the Forest Service into the National Park Service would be bad for local economies, believing that fewer people would visit the area if it were not a free access National Forest.  However, this is blatantly false and transfer of the Monument would, in fact, do just the opposite... 

On Tuesday, March 15,  Federal Court Judge Lawrence O’Neill struck down a U.S. Forest Service permit which has allowed a local rancher to divert the entire flow of Fay Creek, a tributary of the South Fork Kern River, for failing to ensure compliance with the Clean Water Act.  Fay Creek is located just east of Lake Isabella, in Weldon, CA.  Now, where a thriving creek once teemed with native fish, frogs, and insects, there is only a trickle of mostly stagnant water where nothing but mosquitoes can survive. 

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Youth Outreach Program

Our youth in the Kern Valley are desperate for enrichment activities, and since the school board has cut all extracurricular activities that enhance creativity and environmental education, it is up to volunteers and organizations to ensure that the students receive supplemental activities to their standard education.  With so many people in our community living in poverty, and the majority of the rest of the population struggling to make ends meet, our children are suffering from a lack of activities to enrich their imagination and foster their creativity. Sequoia ForestKeeper brings activities into the classroom that focus on art, music, dance, science, and writing, and works with our local teachers to provide opportunities for more outdoor learning to complement the classroom instruction.  We also get students involved in volunteer projects to help them become proactive citizens through hands-on involvement.

Summer Intern Monitoring & GIS Analysis Programs

Our Summer Intern Forest Monitoring Program trains college students (both undergraduate and graduate with a relevant major) to collect scientific data from within the forest and to create GIS maps of the forest conditions for a spatial analysis of forest health and sequoia regeneration in logged vs. unlogged areas of Sequoia National Forest and the Giant Sequoia National Monument.  This program is critical at a time when leading forest scientists agree that global climate change is already affecting watershed health and sequoia life cycles.  The Forest Service’s scientists are seeking data to determine how best to manage the sequoias and their surrounding ecosystems to help mitigate the changes that will occur due to climate change, and SFK is poised to assist them in determining best management practices in a warming Southern Sierra.

Our organization’s research assists the Forest Service in determining the best management strategies for Sequoia National Forest and the Giant Sequoia National Monument by scientifically demonstrating how their various management techniques have affected the forest.  SFK’s data will help determine which strategies have created healthy forests and which have damaged ecosystems, which can advise the agency in best future management practices.

Click Here to see a slideshow of our 2011 interns' adventures!