Preview our latest Sierra Magazine story on the fight to protect public lands.
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In Sierra Magazine's latest feature story, “Public Lands on the Line,” journalist Jeremy Miller follows conservationist Bryant Baker into California's Los Padres National Forest to expose how renewed attacks are placing millions of acres at risk from oil drilling and industrial logging to mass staffing cuts and ecological neglect.
Here's an exclusive preview:
“A sweeping plan is underway to open up vast areas of U.S. public lands to extractive industries. In Ventura County, California, half the landscape is federally managed — including Channel Islands National Park and Los Padres National Forest, home to iconic species like the California condor. Now, those protections are being gutted. Logging proposals are moving forward under the guise of wildfire risk reduction. Offshore drilling platforms are being restarted near sensitive marine sanctuaries. National forest staff have been slashed, and a rollback of the Roadless Rule threatens more than 58 million acres of previously protected wilderness.
“These remote areas are so valuable for clean water and wildlife security,” warns a retired Forest Service official. “Losing the people, the science, the resources to manage them — that's an ecological disaster waiting to happen.”
And it's not just happening in California. Similar policies are surfacing across the country.”
