Editor's Note: Clean & Abundant Water
Clean and abundant water in our rivers depends on public policy and community action as well as healthy watersheds. With many regional rivers suffering from high levels of pollution and low flows during dry summer months, wildlife and urban and rural communities are being adversely impacted. (read more)

Protecting the Rogue: KS Wild Expands Public Oversight with Rogue Riverkeeper

For more than a decade, the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center (KS Wild) has been a regional leader in forest conservation, advocating for the forests, waters, and wildlife of the Rogue and Klamath River basins of southwest Oregon and northwest California. Using legal, political, and organizing tools, a small grassroots organization has achieved significant victories for Klamath-Siskiyou forests and the plants and critters that call them home. (read more)

The Mattole Flow Program After Five Years: Lessons Learned and Future Directions
Since 2004, Sanctuary Forest has been working on several fronts in an integrated approach toward the goal of restoring healthy summertime flows to the Mattole River headwaters. Here we offer an overview of where our work so far has brought us, and what we see as the essential next steps in implementing an effective long-range solution to the low-flow crisis. (read more)

Conditions Worsening for Imperiled Salmon
It has been a scary beautiful winter on the North Coast. Even in our wet-winter corner of California, shifts in weather are amplifying changes in climate. We're getting a preview of our future, on a world where water scarcity will make life more challenging for human communities, and may threaten the viability of species and ecosystems. EPIC is working to ensure that our rich, wild corner of the continent remains an ark for biological diversity, especially for keystone species like salmon. (read more)

Community-based Forestry: Community Forestry and the Humboldt County General Plan

Last month the Institute for Sustainable Forestry, the Buckeye Forest Project, UC Extension, the Forest Guild, and Redwood Coast Rural Action together hosted the event "Future Forests II: Maintaining healthy and productive working forests on the North Coast." The coalition designed a two-day conference agenda addressing the current economic challenges facing the forest products industry, and non-industrial landowners in particular. FFII brought together a diverse audience including landowners, mill operators, foresters, managers of land trusts, conservation professionals, timber industry representatives, and environmental advocates. (read more)

12th Annual Coho Confab Hands-on Fish Workshops on the Mendocino Coast

	Photo: Hawk Rosalas

The Coho Confab is a symposium to explore watershed restoration, learn restoration techniques to recover coho salmon populations, and to network with other fish-centric people. To confabulate literally means to informally chat or to fabricate to compensate for gaps in ones memory. Not to imply that restorationists are prone to hyperbole when recounting the size of a rescued fish, the magnitude of the waterfall coming out of the culvert, or the heroics of a particular restoration job. The Confab is an informal gathering of fishheads that allows for participants and instructors to learn from each other's experience. Participants learn skills and practices that can be applied to restore habitat in their home watershed. Each year the Confab is held in another location on the North Coast. (read more)

Wildfire Effects: Fire Resistance of Redwoods

From Sonoma to Santa Cruz, foresters are attempting to justify the need to log large tracts of redwoods, claiming that such harvests are necessary to protect the forest and nearby human neighborhoods from fire. However, saying that something is true doesn't necessarily make it so. And many have disagreed with the industry's assertions. (read more)

Diggin' In: The Gienger Report

My original topics for this issue were to include community-based forests (specifically the Usal Redwood Forest in northwest Mendocino County, continuing the theme I focused on in the Winter 2008 Forest & River News); some important aspects of the Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc., (RFFI) manifested efforts "to create new stewardship models that would both protect the natural and cultural values and provide a long-term conservation-based economy"; and also the usual short summaries of other issues vital to California's North Coast. However, the panic and resulting critical pressures brought to bear on watershed restoration and conservation-based efforts by the freezing of Bond Funds in California on December 17th, 2008, coupled with the pell-mell rush to submit "shovel-ready" projects for federal Stimulus Funding by early April 2009, have now grabbed center stage for this column. (read more)

North Coast Living: Animal Stories
People in my neighborhood on Elk Ridge above Briceland get very fond of their animals. Not just their dogs and cats and chickens and goats, but also their bears, foxes, mountain lions, owls, squirrels, ravens, and even sometimes raccoons. Some of them we aren't so fond of, but we keep track of them and wonder how they're doing, even so. (read more)

Richardson Grove "Improvement" Project: What are We Trading our Trees For?
Richardson Grove State Park, established in 1922, is approximately 2,000 acres encompassing a majestic stand of old-growth redwoods bisected by the South Fork of the Eel River. For centuries the Eel worked to create the thick layers of rich soil needed to grow the enormously tall redwoods found within the park borders. (read more)

Take Action!: Reuse Water for the Benefit of Watersheds, Wildlife, and Communities
You can support water recycling in an effort to protect water quality and quantity. Send the California Department of Housing and Community Development a letter letting them know that you want the option of reusing graywater in a safe and economical way. (read more)

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