Reining in Boys with Matches and Chainsaws – Back to Court

Cal Fire and the California Board of Forestry refuse to enforce
court ordered environmental protections

Now that they are flush with cash, boys with their matches and chainsaws are on a roll, burning and grinding up habitat under the guise of land “management.” One wonders how nature survived without us. And they are breaking the law.

Cal Fire and the California Board of Forestry are violating the Appellate Court order we won last year, an order with the intent of preventing Cal Fire from making the landscape more flammable while destroying nature along the way.

Cal Fire and the Board are allowing habitat clearance projects to occur in chaparral that do not follow the environmental protections designed to prevent the conversion of native shrublands to non-native weedlands, as well as ignoring protections in their own Vegetation Treatment Program document (VTP). They are also violating the law, again. (PRC 4483 and the California Environmental Protection Act).

And both Cal Fire and the Board are refusing to accept any responsibility to enforce the agreements they made or even the VTP itself. Experiencing the denials was worthy of a Marx Brothers movie.

One of the fundamental obligations of American citizenship is to stand up for what is right and call out the government when it is in the wrong. And so, we are celebrating this month’s 4th of July by doing exactly what the framers of the US Constitution expected us to do to maintain our vigorous democracy. We are going back to court.

Here’s our new Writ of Mandate we just filed Monday. It is really quite a joy to read.