By David Hogan / East County Magazine / May 13, 2026
Conservation groups have sent a letter to officials at the Cleveland National Forest opposing the proposed Laguna Mountains Forest Restoration Project.
The groups condemn the Forest Service’s so-called “restoration” plan to log trees, bulldoze and burn natural chaparral shrublands, and spray herbicide across more than 13,000 acres of scenic mountains near San Diego.
This project is pure Orwellian doublespeak.
It’s not forest “restoration” if you use bulldozers, masticators, chainsaws, herbicides, and fire to beat the environment into conditions that never existed in the first place. National Forest land belongs to everyone and shouldn’t be sacrificed to private companies that stand to massively profit from destroying delicate mountain environments.
The project is a part of broader plans by the Trump administration to roll-back environmental protections for National Forests across the Country, especially with its proposed repeal of the “Roadless Rule” that protects nearly 60 million acres of natural public land from industrialization.
The Forest Service’s core premises and justifications for the Laguna Mountains project are fundamentally false, that thousands of acres of forest vegetation are at risk in a future wildfire event and that recent wildfires burned at uncharacteristically high severity across the project area. In fact, the vast majority of the Project area is naturally chaparral and meadows, not tree forests.
And decades of science prove that high severity fire is normal in chaparral and that chaparral will recover so long as it is left alone and doesn’t burn too frequently.
The Laguna Mountain Recreation Area is located in the mountains of San Diego County fifty miles from downtown San Diego and eighty miles from Brawley and El Centro. The mountains are a top destination for outdoor recreation like hiking, camping, snow play, mountain biking, horseback riding, and hunting.
The Laguna Mountains range from 5,000 to 6,000 feet in elevation so experience mountain weather like winter snow and summer thunderstorms and are one of only a handful of locations in San Diego County with limited areas of natural pine and oak tree forests.
The Laguna Mountains are cherished by our organizations and thousands of residents of San Diego and Imperial counties as a remote and scenic landscape of natural wonders and opportunities for outdoor recreation and reflection. We’re not going to let the Trump Administration literally crush and poison our backyard wilderness into just another southern California industrial hellscape.
David Hogan is the executive director of The Chaparral Lands Conservancy, and has worked as a professional environmental advocate for over thirty years. Prior to founding The Chaparral Lands Conservancy in January 2009, Hogan worked for the Center for Biological Diversity for sixteen years to preserve forests, deserts, and chaparral wildlife, plants and wild lands in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The mission of The Chaparral Lands Conservancy is to protect shrubland ecosystems as an integral and beautiful feature of California’s natural landscape through land preservation and stewardship. www.chaparralconservancy.org
Contact info for the responsible people so as to protest these plans would be useful…
There is a link at the end to the group in opposition.
I had to look carefully for the link because it isn’t ‘live’ but requires that you copy and paste. Easy to overlook. It’s literally at the end of the text in Italic.
Thinning our Forest and reducing the number of trees, is a responsibility we have, to keep /restore our forests in good health. Prescribed burning and is also a tool to help reduce fuel loads so when lighting fires or manmade fires ignite they do not grow in devasting conflagrations.
When natural occurring lighting fires are not allowed to burn and skunk around do what mother nature intended, we end up with overgrown decadent shrub fields, doghair thickets of trees that grow tall and skinny and are less likely to be able to defend against drought, bug infestation and other diseases. It has nothing to do with Trump, except he wants us to care for Forest (rake our forest) by providing much needed dollars to fix a problem we human beans created with our fire policies and the anti-logging zealots who have different views on what a healthy Forest Landscape looks like. Most of our large fires today are from lack of Forest Management. Help the Forest Service manage our lands to our great grandkids can experience a healthy robust forest.
OMG – this has nothing to do with Trump?? except encourage us to rake our forest. Where did we hear this before? Hmmm?
The kind of “care” being proposed in response to the president’s directives to “clean up” national forests (i.e. “log trees, bulldoze and burn natural chaparral shrublands, and spray herbicide across more than 13,000 acres”) makes forests far more vulnerable to wildfire.
The kind of “care” proposed opens up those areas to non-native vegetation to replace the destroyed-by-herbicides native vegetation. Impacts go far beyond the vegetation itself but includes destruction of the natural habitat of all of the insects and animals that depend on the forest. The intent, also, is to open up our national forests to commercial logging and other non-recreational commercial purposes.
Non-native vegetation is far more vulnerable to fire than native vegetation. “Cleaned up” or not, Santa Ana winds like those that drove the Laguna Fire west toward the coast in 1970 (much like the Cedar Creek Fire in 2003 which jumped I-15 en route toward the coast) are far more dangerous in our local national forest than existing native vegetation.
Tiki Gray:
Trump ‘cares’ for forests? That’s absolutely hilarious, and you even got a ‘choked-back snort/chuckle’ out of me on that one.
I’m not sure if this is a troll attempt or if the problem is that you just have never actually studied anything that wasn’t logging company/Forest Service propaganda. Which, to be perfectly frank about it, is like asking oil companies about Global Warming and atmospheric destabilization consequences….
Where did you read or who told you that? Don’t you know any of Trump’s background history?? He’s a New York city-bred apartment dweller kid, concrete and asphalt surrounded by a ‘forest’ of monster high-rise building blocking out the sun at 2 in the afternoon. Unless of course you are rich and have one of those multi-million dollar apartments on the upper floors. Then you get to at least see the sun.
He’s never had a driver’s license since he’s been chauffeured everywhere his entire life, so I’m doubtful he’s ever been to a forest. Besides, people like him only value what they can make from the destruction of such places.
I’m sure he’s seen forests, maybe, at least from 35,000 feet if he happened to look out the window of one of his family’s private jets.
I extremely doubt that he has ever been ‘IN’ a forest. Or that he has actually hiked through a forest. As for that caring part, anybody with even a modicum amount of ‘caring for green growing things’ wouldn’t have torn out the Rose Garden of the White House and had a concrete slab poured in as a replacement.
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As for your ‘overgrown decadent’ 2nd paragraph, obviously you have never studied what this continent actually looked like before the Europeans crossed the pond and trashed this place, and then invented industrialized logging operations. I recently read a piece about what Lewis & Clark dealt with on their trek across the continent which included the fact that the forests had HUGE trees and were so thick and dense that they started getting hungry because they couldn’t hunt for supper. Sorry, I didn’t keep the link but maybe you could put that in a search engine and find it.
And the fact that corporate clearcut logging (that’s what the FS means by ‘thinning’) is where a majority of the big fires START because a real forest keeps the ground and plants and tree so damp and wet that fires never could grow like they do now.
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My oldest became a wildlands firefighter, first with CDF before she switched to the Forest Service. Her husband is also an FS firefighter. Her younger sister wanted to do something more positive and started at Humboldt State as a Biology major. Until one of her profs stood in front of the class and told them that most would only find jobs with logging companies or the Forest Service; which is in the business of selling huge tracks of public forests to logging companies.
She switched and became a veterinary surgeon.
And I’ve lived in mountain forests for 40+ years (3 different western states) since I left my hometown of OB, the last 23 years here on the Canadian Border.
My advice? Educate yourself. Public libraries are good for that.
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“We Are Bombarding America’s Forests with Roundup”: Trump Admin Pushes Herbicide Despite Risks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhaVPNb-cDA
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sealintheSelkirks