Summer 2023
ForestLife is Pacific Forest Trust’s newsletter, with news and insight about our work to sustain America’s forests for all their benefits of wood, water, wildlife, and people’s well being, in cooperation with private landowners and communities.
View or download this issue as a PDF, or read the individual stories online below.
In This Issue:
Our New Award-Winning Film
Collaboratively produced by Imaginary Forces, VanEck, and Pacific Forest Trust, the new award-winning documentary “Beyond the Trees” follows our determined team of climate champions seeking to restore our native forests through conservation-based forest management.
President’s Letter: ForestLife Summer 2023
Seven months into 2023, the message is inescapable. Heat domes. Wildfires on 20 million acres. Unbreathable air. With each fresh disaster, scientists identify climate change as a major factor increasing their intensity and scale. Our home planet is sending out distress signals that get louder every day. Will this compel us to decisive action?
Managing for Climate Resilience on Mount Ashland Demonstration Forest
This summer, leading forest ecologists, silviculturalists, wildlife biologists and indigenous cultural practitioners are joining with PFT staff to help develop the first 10-year management plan for our new 1,130-acre Mount Ashland Demonstration Forest. In bringing together the best available climate science and traditional ecological knowledge to inform our management, we are learning so much!
Saving the Source: Conserving 11,000 acres of the Trinity River Headwaters
PFT’s goal of conserving the core source watersheds of California has moved another key step forward. Our project to acquire and conserve 11,000 acres at the very top of the Trinity River moved closer to completion this past month with the Sierra Nevada Conservancy making a significant grant of $1.4M to PFT to help protect this invaluable source watershed.
Harnessing the Power of Nature to Address Climate Change
With massive floods and fires, droughts and hurricanes, Nature is often highlighted as the victim of climate change. But it is, in fact, perhaps our greatest champion to help remediate climate change.
Donor Profile: Barbara and Mark Daugherty
The very first grant PFT ever received—in 1993—was from the Weeden Foundation, a family foundation with roots in California. They saw the merit of supporting private, voluntary forest conservation, complementing their traditional focus on public lands. Thirty years later, Barbara Weeden Daugherty is continuing that tradition.
Celebrating 30 Years and Forest Wildlife
In late April, forest landowners, community leaders, policy makers, conservationists, and wildlife advocates from across the country gathered to celebrate forests as treasure troves of biodiversity at PFT’s annual Forest Fete.