Likely Future Prospects for Sierra

I would like to think the new likely prospects for the Sierra, after many studies and realizations of the environmentally negative human impacts on the ecosystem, would be efforts to stop these negative impacts completely. After seeing how detrimental these impacts are on the Sierra, it would seem an obvious result to completely stop these impacts from occurring (i.e., logging, air pollution, fire suppression tactics). Unfortunately, in reality stopping these impacts is not an instantaneous result. As seemingly easy and plausible it would be to completely stop logging and fire suppression, by simply placing laws in place that completely halt logging and the current fire suppression tactics, it is not that simple. When it comes to air pollution, it is obviously a different scenario, where years and years of air pollution can not be stopped over night. There are two possibly directions the new prospects can go: no real effective efforts made, and/or backwards efforts, to help this ecosystem, or, immediate efforts to stop these detrimental impacts.

'No efforts' made to help this coniferous forest are easy to display: simply keep neglecting to do anything serious about these impacts. But there are even branches of the government who want more logging rights in the most endangered parts of coniferous forests: old growth forests. The National Forest Service, which seems to be a misleading name to those who do not know it is managed by the Department of Agriculture, released a brochure and set up a website which  "exaggerated the impact of forest fires on spotted owl habitat in an attempt to expand old-growth logging in the Sierra Nevada." (Union of Concerned Scientists) They misrepresented images and data of the Sierra making it seem as though increased logging and wildfire containment would help the Spotted Owl population. The entire, very interesting article, can be found here: http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/forest-brochure.html. It is efforts like these that prove not only unhelpful to this ecosystem, but actually destroy more of the coniferous forest ecosystem of the Sierra Nevada.

On the helpful side, there are in fact beneficial things being done to help protect and restore this ecosystem. There are many groups who's sole purpose is to protect the natural ecosystem of the Sierra. Two of the most important are the Sierra Club and the Sierra Nevada Alliance. Both these groups main focus are to protect and restore Sierra Nevada natural resources for future generations while promoting sustainable communities. The Sierra Club is the forerunner in battling legally with the federal government and National Forest Service in protecting this coniferous forest and lobbying for sustainable logging, or stopping logging, ideally. The Sierra Club is full of environmental lawyers whos goal to protect the forest they love, and have done great jobs stopping former Presidential Administrations (Bush Administration) from gaining total control of the Sierra with aims of clear cutting the hell out of it. Because of groups like these, we still have at least one line of defense between destruction of the beautiful places we love.