Concerned Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino County citizens came together with EPIC staff and staff from the Garberville-based Trees Foundation to discuss the recent purchase of 9,400-acres of timberland in the Sproul Creek Watershed by Green Diamond Resource Company, and to discuss creating a watershed-based community group to interface with the company.
A meeting was held on Monday, May 12th at the Southern Humboldt Organic and Regenerative Education (SHORE) Center, located in Garberville where EPIC staff provided information about Green Diamond’s recent purchase of timberland in Sproul Creek, a major tributary to the South Fork Eel River, and information on Green Diamond’s timber operations, permits, and management practices.
Trees Foundation staff then presented a structured and facilitated discussion with community members in attendance from which was born a new locally-based watershed advocacy group, the Sproul Watershed Advocates. This community and watershed-based group will now work independently to determine how best to interact with Green Diamond with respect to its management of the Sproul Creek timberlands it acquired last year.
EPIC remains concerned that Green Diamond will simply do in the Sproul Creek Watershed what it only seems to know how to do based on its contemporary land management elsewhere on its property—that being lots of clearcuts and herbicides. There is much EPIC can do, but it takes our members, and local citizens to get involved and help change what might seem like an inevitable outcome in Sproul Creek.
Big thanks and appreciation to the SHORE Center for the meeting space, and to the Trees Foundation for providing staff and logistical assistance.
EPIC will continue to watchdog what Green Diamond does, in Sproul Creek, and elsewhere on its 400,000-acre ownership with a focus to change its arcane and outdated reliance on clearcuts, herbicides, and industrial sapwood fiber-farm plantations.
Comments