By Jonathan Park and Janna Van Vranken | CNN
The National Park Service wants to replant sequoia groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, where wildfires in 2020 and 2021 inflicted lasting damage on the iconic sequoia forests. Environmentalists in California say it’s a huge mistake.
Four groups filed suit against the National Park Service on Nov. 17, saying the agency’s effort violates the law as it includes planting in designated wilderness areas, where human involvement in the ecosystem is explicitly prohibited.
The National Park Service announced the seedling-planting project earlier this fall, saying it was “concerned that natural regeneration may not be sufficient to support self-sustaining groves into the future, particularly as the fires killed an unprecedented number of reproductive sequoia trees in the groves themselves.”
Chad Hanson, the director of the John Muir Project, one of the groups that filed suit, disputes that conclusion. Sequoias are among the species of trees that actually “depend on high-intensity fire in order to reproduce effectively,” Hanson told CNN.
“Nature doesn’t need our help,” Hanson told CNN. “We are not supposed to be getting involved with tending it like a garden.”
Advocates at Wilderness Watch, Sequoia Forest Keeper and the Tule River Conservancy first sued the National Park Service in September to stop a separate project by the agency to cut and burn trees in the same designated wilderness areas. Coined the “Fuels Reduction Project,” that plan would authorize cutting a thousand acres of timber and make 20,000 additional acres subject to “manager-ignited fires and associated activity,” according to the complaint.
The John Muir Project, a nonprofit focused on ensuring federal public forests are protected, joined the lawsuit on Nov. 17, amending it to include the sequoia replanting project as part of the complaint. The groups now jointly accuse the National Park Service of illegally…
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