This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.

A so-called “forest health and wildfire resilience project” to mitigate fires in Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County, California, is in reality a misguided and devastatingly destructive deforestation project that needs to be stopped to protect the park's lush habitat and countless wild animals who call it home.

It's a ten-year-long deforestation project. Chainsaws, masticating machines, chippers, and toxic herbicides will cut into and poison a lush, healthy forest at Tomales Bay State Park.

What's driving this multi-million dollar carnage? California has a $2 billion fund for wildfire protection and prevention. To get some of this funding, the California Department of Parks (Cal Parks) and the California Department of Fire Protection (Cal Fire) claim this giant, destructive, make-work deforestation project will somehow “restore” pine trees, and protect nearby houses from wildfire.

But the proper, effective, proven way to protect houses against wildfire isn't to destroy forests, but to “harden” houses and create defensible space no more than 100 feet out from the house.

Destroying plants over 100 feet from houses adds no additional protection, and can even lead to a hotter forest with drier vegetation that is easier to ignite. In short, deforestation increases wildfire danger and releases massive amounts of carbon stored in forests, thus accelerating global heating.

Felling trees both living and dead means destroying more dwindling wild animal habitats. It's exactly the opposite of what the world needs now, which is more forests, and more safe places for wild animals to survive the greed and destruction of humans.

Innocent, vulnerable, wild animals live here in peace, as they have for centuries. Only a few narrow trails allow humans into small parts of this remote woods, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay on the Point Reyes peninsula in the busy San Francisco Bay Area.

Countless wild animals have lived and flourished, undisturbed, for hundreds of years in this rare, wild animal sanctuary — until now.

Unlike many state parks, it is a haven, a precious 2,000-acre refuge for countless numbers of gray foxes, skunks, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, bats, Downy woodpeckers, Acorn woodpeckers, giant Pileated woodpeckers, sparrows, jays, robins, doves and dozens of other species of birds, safely away from busy human cities.

Now imagine how disruptive — and destructive — it will be when two large state agencies, Cal Parks and Cal Fire drive in heavy, gasoline-powered machinery. Chainsaws, chippers, and masticating machines will destroy trees and forest canopy, and shred hundreds of living understory plants.

The project plan calls these “treatments” for hundreds of acres of lush, fog-collecting vegetation. Plants that harbor wildlife will be “managed” to death, and then toxic herbicides will be sprayed to control — to kill — still more of everything.

Noxious gasoline fumes and machinery noise will shatter the silence of this sanctuary for years to come.

This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.