Proponents call it fuel reduction. To its detractors, it’s nothing short of deforestation.
The battle over fire prevention in Tomales Bay State Park is more than a dispute over semantics—it’s a fierce clash over whether such measures protect or imperil the forest’s ecosystem. Now, two environmental groups have sued in hopes of halting a major forest rehabilitation project, arguing that the state failed to assess its potential impacts.
They warn the plan would devastate the forest while offering negligible safety benefits.
“There’s this dominant narrative that we can somehow kill nature back to health,” said Jack Gescheidt, an environmentalist and leader of the Tomales Bay Forest Keepers, which partnered with the California Chaparral Institute to sue California State Parks in August.
Mr. Gescheidt, a former New York City adman-turned-vegan activist known for his Edenic photographs of nude figures posed among ancient trees, is also part of a lawsuit against the National Park Service over its management of tule elk in the neighboring Point Reyes National Seashore. In his latest lawsuit, he criticizes what he calls destructive fire management practices and the “Orwellian newsspeak” of State Parks, which he says uses euphemisms like “thinning” and “fuel reduction” to describe logging.
Tomales Bay State Park is home to the largest natural bishop pine forest in the world, an ecosystem that has evolved to burn. Wildfires, though destructive to mature trees, are essential to stimulate bishop pine reproduction; the intense heat opens their cones, releasing seeds that take root in the ashes of an incinerated forest and serving as a kind of ecological reset.
The last time a wildfire swept through the area was in 1939, more than a decade before the park was established. With bishop pines’ 80- to 100-year lifespan and nearly a century of fire suppression, the forest floor has become a powder keg, littered with dead trees, fallen branches and dense mounds of dried needles.
California State Parks’ Tomales Bay State Park Forest Health and Wildfire Resilience Project outlines a decade-long, phased approach that includes a combination of mechanical thinning, herbicide application and prescribed burns—controlled, low-intensity fires intended to clear duff, deadwood and other vegetation—across the park’s 2,400 acres.
The plan, which was first floated in 2019 and began the compliance and permitting process in 2022, identifies many threats to the forest, including pathogens like western gall rust, pitch canker and sudden oak death, coupled with prolonged drought that has left the ecosystem susceptible to catastrophic wildfire.
Work is slated to begin later this fall and will be adapted to the park’s unique ecological features, including diverse plant communities, wildlife habitats and topography, to minimize environmental disruption.
The Tomales Bay Forest Keepers and the California Chaparral Institute hope their legal efforts will delay, if not indefinitely halt, the project by tying it up in environmental red tape. A case management conference is scheduled for October in Marin Superior Court.
Mr. Gescheidt argues that the forest plan is disturbingly vague, with little transparency about the extent of vegetation removal or its potential ecological impacts.
State Parks bypassed a dedicated environmental impact report for the project, arguing that the anticipated effects were covered under a 2019 analysis of the state’s vegetation treatment program. Instead, State Parks issued an addendum to that E.I.R., asserting that the project would not cause any new or unforeseen disturbances.
The lawsuit contends that employing sweeping forest management practices could harm federally endangered species like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, a seabird that nests in the pines.
“What they call fuel is actually habitat,” said Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute, a southern California-based nonprofit. “There’s a pejorative shift from seeing nature as something we love to something we fear.”
Meanwhile, critics of the lawsuit call it another example of how the environmental review process has been weaponized by activist groups to delay essential projects, even if courts eventually side with the government. State Parks declined to comment on the litigation.
Regardless of the outcome, the suit reflects a debate that reverberates far beyond the park’s boundaries about how to manage forests in an age of climate change. Increasingly, ecologists are propounding a view dissonant to a public accustomed to the idea of preserving wild lands: Sometimes to save trees, you have to cut trees; to save forests, you sometimes have to set them on fire.
Opponents of this new prevailing wisdom, including Mr. Gescheidt and Mr. Halsey, argue that thinning forests can elevate fire risk by opening the canopy to increased sunlight and wind, conditions linked to greater burn intensity.
Their views are influenced by the work of ecologist Chad Hanson, a controversial figure who has gained a near-cult status on the environmental left and draws vitriol from the scientific establishment for his opposition to conventional forest management practices.
“The notion that removing a bunch of trees from the forest is somehow going to curb fire is largely discredited,” Dr. Hanson said, pointing to the Camp Fire in 2018 that destroyed Paradise and the 2021 Caldor and Dixie fires, where managed forests still burned with devastating intensity.
Dr. Hanson calls this “a new and insidious type of climate change denialism,” arguing that the true drivers of wildfire are drought, heat and wind—not forest density. “You can’t fight climate change with a chainsaw,” he said, adding that resources are better spent fireproofing homes and creating defensible space near communities than on broad, landscape-scale interventions.
But Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington, said Dr. Hanson’s stance is a selective and misleading interpretation of wildfire science. “Chad Hanson is like Sauron in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” she laughed. “He is just blessed with this artful way of communicating and yet what he says is often not true.”
In 2021, Dr. Prichard and a group of over 20 fire ecologists published a trio of scientific reviews aimed at busting the most entrenched myths surrounding wildfire management, including the belief that fuel reduction is unnecessary or counterproductive. Their findings were decisive: The evidence overwhelmingly supports thinning and prescribed burns as crucial tools for mitigating wildfire risks.
“The landscape of the West is not a natural landscape,” Dr. Prichard said. “We’ve fundamentally altered it through a century and a half of fire suppression, and millennia before that of Indigenous intervention. It’s not in a condition that would be safe to just leave to its own devices.”
According to State Parks, strategically burning the environment was a practice of Indigenous tribes like the Coast Miwok, who used fire as a land management tool, intentionally burning hills around Tomales Bay to sustain grasslands and attract game. Once the United States government pushed Native Americans onto reservations and seized their land, controlled burning ceased across much of the country.
In its place, a new fire suppression ethos emerged in the 20th century, centered on putting out fires as quickly as possible. The approach was partially motivated by fear, but mostly by the view of forests as standing timber with economic value. By the 1930s, the advent of new firefighting technology—airplanes, smokejumpers and chemical fire suppressants—enabled agencies to snuff out flames across vast landscapes.
But these long-practiced policies have yielded unintended consequences, allowing landscapes to accumulate an enormous amount of dense, overgrown brush that can provide fuel for conflagrations to rage. Since 2017, the state has experienced eight of its 10 biggest blazes, charring over 10 million acres and destroying thousands of homes.
Nowadays, the goal of most forest management is to manage fire rather than rush to extinguish it. Prescribed and cultural burns are increasingly seen as essential to safeguarding both ecosystems and communities, with entities like Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, tribal organizations and private citizens leading these efforts. For the Inverness project, State Parks is consulting with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
Dr. Hanson cautions that this evolving approach may have become overly uniform, with the fear of fire overshadowing its ecological role in parks and wildlands. “There are two distinct conversations we need to have,” he said. “One about managing fire in our forests, and another about protecting our communities from fire. These are fundamentally different issues that require separate approaches.”
Yet in communities adjacent to aging forests, these issues are deeply entangled.
The threat of wildfire is particularly acute in Seahaven, the residential enclave bordering the most fire-prone section of Tomales Bay State Park. In recent years, residents have carved firebreaks at their own expense.
“It’s not if this fire is going to start,” said Felix Chamberlain, a resident who helped spearhead local efforts, “but when.”
For Mr. Chamberlain, the lawsuit against the State Parks plan underscores a broader rift: environmental activists want to preserve wild landscapes, often with little regard for the human settlements that border them. “They want to enjoy the park for the park’s sake, without considering the people who live here,” he said.
Many of the most devastating wildfires in recent years have jumped from forests or grasslands into nearby communities. With more homes in high-risk zones than any other state, California faces a daunting challenge: Cal Fire estimates that one in 10 houses in the state—roughly five million units—are in areas prone to wildfire.
In 2019, Inverness forester Tom Gaman conducted a detailed survey that raised serious concerns about the park’s health that laid the groundwork for the forest plan. Crawling through dense thickets of understory, brush and debris, he meticulously assessed 50 sample plots, documenting alarming levels of disease, tree mortality and duff layers nearly a foot deep.
“If nature had its way, these trees would burn,” Mr. Gaman said. “But since we don’t want that to happen, we need to find ways to mimic natural processes and regenerate the forest while preventing catastrophic fire.”
Mr. Gaman believes there is broad local support for the plan, while opposition is coming from those who are “more ideologically zealous and live farther away.”
“But this is a situation where ideology doesn’t quite dovetail with reality,” he added.
Still, not everyone shares his confidence in the plan. Woody Elliott, a former natural resource manager for State Parks and a Seahaven resident, acknowledges that the project may offer some reassurance to locals who live with the constant specter of wildfire, but he fears the inevitability of a flame-filled future.
“If people think it’s going to cut down the risk of catastrophic wildfire, they have another thing coming,” he said. “A strong wind is going to drive any fire through our forest. No matter what state it’s in.”
California lawmakers have channeled $2.6 billion into an array of wildfire prevention measures, with the goal of burning 400,000 acres—an area larger than Los Angeles—annually by 2025. The Tomales Bay forest resilience plan represents a sliver of this effort, but it has become emblematic of the state’s broader struggle to balance fire management with ecological preservation.
For some environmentalists, the plan evokes a legacy of distrust in government agencies from nearly a century of state-sanctioned clear-cutting. They accuse these agencies of prioritizing logging and monetary interests over conservation, and of misappropriating Indigenous practices to justify aggressive interventions that bear little resemblance to traditional stewardship.
“We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that saving nature demands more human intervention—this time wielding chainsaws and bulldozers masquerading as protectors of the very forests they once endangered,” Mr. Gescheidt said. “How are we still clinging to the illusion that we’re in control?”