Los Padres Forest approves large scale Wildfire Risk Reduction Project

The Los Padres Forest Service has approved the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project, moving forward a wide scale effort to conduct fire suppression across six counties, including Santa Barbara County. The project includes fuel treatment and fire suppression actions across 33,000 acres of the national forest. There will be no environmental impact statement prepared for the project. In the assessment of the project, the Forest Service found that the project had no significant impact on the environment. The Service defines impact as: “The degree of effects of the specific action on the potentially affected environment.” Chaparral in danger The methods of fuel treatment have sparked the concern of conservationists due to the harm it could cause to native plant communities such as chaparral. Chaparral is a plant community of dense, shrub-like plants, ranging from three to 10 feet tall. While it is only found in a few regions of the world, chaparral grows abundantly in Santa Barba