East Bay Regional Parks conducting "controlled" burns for native plant restorations

The Board of East Bay Regional Parks will be asked on June 24, 2010, to approve prescribed burns in public parks in the East Bay

On Thursday, June 24, 2010, the Board of the East Bay Regional Park District will be asked to approve the “Fuels Management Work Plan” for 2011. (available here: http://www.ebparks.org/files/ebrpd_brd_exec_cmt_packet_06-24-2010.pdf)

In addition to several projects requiring the destruction of trees, there are five prescribed burns planned. One of the burns—on approximately 50 acres at Pt Pinole--is explicitly for the purpose of “prairie restoration.”

The meeting, which begins at 12:45 pm, will take place at park headquarters at 2950 Peralta Oaks Court in Oakland and is open to the public.

Please visit the Million Trees blog to read about the many prescribed burns (AKA “controlled” burns) that have caused major wildfires in the Bay Area and elsewhere: http://milliontrees.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/uncontrolled-burns/. We explain in this post that the public is being told that these burns are for the purpose of reducing fire hazard, but that most are in fact for the purpose of supporting native plant restorations. Every allegation in this post is supported by scientific evidence and official documents.

The Million Trees blog was created in May 2010 to inform the public of the many projects on public lands in the San Francisco Bay Area that have destroyed tens of thousands of trees and intend to destroy hundreds of thousands more in the future.