Over the past three years, the Bohemian Club has crafted a timber management plan in consultation with the appropriate state authorities and leading experts in the field of forest management. Our plan allows us to reduce the very real risk of a fire on our property in Sonoma County, protect the revered old growth trees at the Bohemian Grove and harvest timber at a sustainable level well below the re-growth rate of our forest. Our plan has been termed a model of sustainable forestry by impartial, objective experts and the California Department of Forestry.

Simply put, there is no merit to the lawsuit filed to block our plan which has been approved through an open, public and correct regulatory process. This lawsuit is filled with boilerplate language and based on flimsy evidence. Our plan will not contribute to global warming as the plaintiffs continue to erroneously assert. Our plan will increase the carbon storage potential of our forest. Any suggestion that the Department of Forestry did a less than thorough job reviewing our permit application is baseless.

The plaintiffs are dead wrong on the facts and dead wrong on our motivation for seeking a sustainable non-industrial timber management plan. We are not proposing to harvest any old-growth trees which our members are committed to preserving. Leading experts and regulators have validated the sustainability and environmental sensitivity of our plan. We would recommend to the plaintiffs that they find a legitimate and more pressing environmental issue to champion. They are quite literally barking up the wrong set of trees.