First up, President Biden kept his campaign promise to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. With that move, the United States joined the 194 other countries that have signed the agreement. While EPIC applauds President Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s important to remember that this is merely a first step. The Paris Agreement is a pledge to try to reduce a country’s GHG emissions but a pledge without followthrough is worth

“I grew up in Hoopa. I’m a Yurok Tribal member from the Klamath River; I’m Chetco from the Chetco River, Tolowa from the Smith River, and Chilula from Redwood Creek. I’m thankful to have left Creator to come here to be who I am at this time. As human beings we choose how to walk back to Creator. In my young life, I choose to walk for five of my relatives who aren’t here. Two of them were small babies who failed to thrive due to exposure of aerial spraying of herbicides 2,4,5-

Climate March photo by Edward Kimmel How can we roll back the Trump-era rollbacks of environmental laws? The last six months of the Trump Administration kept EPIC busy. As his poll numbers dipped and his reelection appeared more distant, the administration moved into rush mode to get through a large suite of environmental rollbacks: severe reductions in the amount of “Critical Habitat” designated for northern spotted owls (more on EPIC’s efforts to overturn that here); change

On January 15, in a parting gift to the timber Industry, the Trump Administration cut over 3.4 million acres of Critical Habitat for the northern spotted owl—some 42% of the amount designated in 2012 to ensure the owl’s survival—including thousands of acres in California. The cut was all the more staggering given that just a month before, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged that the owl was under immediate threat of extinction, warranting a change in its designati

EPIC is happy to announce that it has filed a motion for a rehearing en banc concerning the December Ninth Circuit ruling, overturning our previous victory in federal court. In basketball, a full-court press is an aggressive defense, where the defensive side applies pressure along the entire length of the court. It is an apt analogy for EPIC’s defense of the sacred old-growth redwoods of Richardson Grove State Park. At every opportunity, at every court and at every decision,

Last month, EPIC asked our members to tell CAL FIRE not to proceed with the Mitchell Creek Timber Harvest Plan (THP) or any THPs in the heavily used western portion of Jackson Demonstration State Forest. Despite hundreds of you writing in to tell them not to, CAL FIRE has decided to move forward with a nearby THP that could be even more destructive. CAL FIRE needs to know that we are watching them and that these plans are opposed. Take action today! The Mendocino Woodlands Ou

We here at EPIC would like to wish all of our members a happy Black History Month. The past year has been an incredibly difficult time for all of us, but has been especially challenging for Black communities. The police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless other Black Americans sparked the largest protests against police brutality in American history. Despite this, calls for substantive police reform have gone largely unanswered. At the same tim

EPIC and allies have been fighting to protect the old-growth redwood trees of Richardson Grove from Caltrans’s proposed highway widening project for over a decade. But 10 years ago, when we first filed our lawsuit against Caltrans, we made a harmful mistake. Based on factual errors in a State Parks brochure, our original lawsuit described the Indigenous inhabitants of Richardson Grove as being “Wailaki Native Americans”. That information was incorrect. We made a second mistak