In response to recent lawsuits, Sierra Pacific Industries has formally withdrawn plans this week to log more than 1,600 acres of Sierra Nevada forests. The Center for Biological Diversity recently filed three lawsuits against the California Department of Forestry's failure to analyze the carbon emissions of clear cutting when it approved logging plans in the Sierra Nevada.
The most recent lawsuit filed by the conservation group said the Department of Forestry failed to perform any project-specific analysis of the emissions -- which is a well-established law for state agencies in California -- that would result from a plan by Sierra Pacific Industries to clear-cut over 400 acres in Tehama and Butte Counties.
The Center for Biological Diversity asserted that the Department of Forestry simply stated that over a 100-year time frame enough trees would grow back on the company's lands to make the logging carbon neutral, instead of calculating the carbon emissions that would result from Sierra Pacific's logging plan.
More than two dozen similar logging plans by Sierra Pacific Industries are still waiting for approval from the Department of Forestry, which would authorize clear cutting of more than 12,000 additional acres of California forests, said the Center of Biological Diversity.
