FAIRFAX, Calif. (June 10, 2025) — Thousands of Marin County residents were stunned to see a costumed California State Parks “forester” with a chainsaw for a head march through the Fairfax Festival parade on June 7. Even more shocking is the reason behind the performance: a massive, taxpayer-funded deforestation project planned for more than 1,000 acres of Tomales Bay State Park. 

Demonstrators from In Defense of Animals and TreeSpirit Project joined the popular annual festival to warn the public about a 10-year, multimillion-dollar “treatment” plan by Cal Parks and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). The project will see thousands of trees and understory plants cut, shredded, and poisoned across 1,000 acres of damp, fog-shrouded coastal forest under the false pretense of wildfire prevention.

“We crashed the parade to reawaken the hippies — destroying the forest poses a danger to Marin residents and animals alike,” said Fleur Dawes, Communications Director for In Defense of Animals. “Tomales Bay State Park is a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention and part of a U.N. biosphere reserve. It’s a vital habitat for endangered species like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. These animals simply cannot survive when their homes are cut down around them.”   

The logging and herbicide operation will drastically alter the humid, fire-resistant ecosystem surrounding the beloved Heart’s Desire Beach. The forest hasn’t burned in more than 100 years due to its natural moisture-retaining canopy and shaded understory plants. The project will make the park more flammable by removing this cooling shading vegetation, drying out soil, and allowing wind and sunlight to penetrate formerly damp, dense forest. 

“Instead of investing in proven, effective wildfire protection like home hardening and defensible space, millions in public funds are being misused to destroy a coastal forest that is actually fire-resistant,” said Jack Gescheidt, TreeSpirit Project founder and campaigner for In Defense of Animals. “This is a make-work project, sold to a misled public as ‘wildfire resilience work.’ A beautiful, naturally fire-resistant cloud forest will be denuded into a dried-out, ignition-prone fire hazard.”

The event marked the first public appearance of the Cal Parks Chainsaw Ranger, a satirical character created to expose the hidden logging agenda in Cal Parks policy, which does the opposite of what it claims: increasing wildfire danger and global heating. Chainsaw Ranger was accompanied by another costumed Cal Parks character, a contractor in a yellow hazmat suit armed with a pesticide sprayer — illustrating how the deadly project will poison a healthy forest with gallons of toxic herbicides.

The ecocidal project is scheduled to begin in November, yet few Marin residents have heard of it. “Cal Parks and Cal Fire have quietly pushed this plan with almost no public knowledge,” said Gescheidt. “The people of Marin are passionate about wild places, forests, mitigating the climate emergency, and defending wild animals. They deserve to know their money is being ill spent, used to increase wildfire risk and climate-heating deforestation.”

This project continues the failed practice of fire suppression — today rebranded as “management,” “restoration,” and “resilience work.” Agencies are exploiting wildfire fear — amplified by climate anxiety — to win millions of dollars in public wildfire reduction funds that ironically make forests drier and more flammable. The result is a destructive cycle of increased “management” of wild forests — logging.

“Wildfire funds are being misappropriated for industrial forestry,” Gescheidt added. “Forests are now demonized as dangerous places that must be tamed, controlled, and ‘cleaned up’ with machines.”

Instead of protecting homes through proven solutions like home hardening and defensible space, agencies seek funding for “management” projects to justify their existence — denuding and desiccating forests, destroying what little wild habitat remains, and increasing the danger of fast-burning, wind-driven fires in dense, damp forest ecosystems that have been “opened up” with chainsaws and masticators. 

These forest defenders will appear next at the annual Corte Madera-Larkspur Fourth of July Parade to continue raising awareness about the Tomales Bay State Park deforestation project — and the many others like it across California.

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CONTACT: Jack Gescheidt, jackg@idausa.org or office landline: 415-488-4200.

LEARN MORE: 

https://www.idausa.org/TomalesBay 

https://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/wildfire

In Defense of Animals is an international animal protection organization with over 250,000 supporters and a history of fighting for animals, people, and the environment through education and campaigns, as well as hands-on rescue facilities in California, India, South Korea, and rural Mississippi since 1983. www.idausa.org/wildanimals

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