A NOTE TO YOU – Timothy J. Coleman, Executive Director
Welcome to Winter 2026 Edition of the Highlands News.
This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Kettle Range Conservation Group. Our mission to “defend wilderness, protect biodiversity and restore ecosystems” was never more urgent than it is today. We are now and have always been a Wilderness and rewilding advocacy group, and defenders of a wilder world of plants, animals, forests, rivers and wild spirit that exists in all things. We stand on guard for wildness, and when we have to, we fight with passion and unbridled dedication for the good of all.
My childhood years growing into adulthood were significantly shaped by summers spent on my uncle’s Midwest farms; bailing hay, detasseling corn, weeding soybeans, moving cattle and shoveling manure. All of these jobs were exhausting in typical heat and humidity that can be so stifling and yet rewarding. These were my first paying jobs, becoming an important part of my teenage identity. So it was, on my first journey away from home to attend Navy boot camp in San Diego these experiences gave me grounded strength, determination and feeling I could do anything, that landed me an assignment as a Navy communication specialist.
From childhood to becoming adults we try to make sense of our role and what is a meaningful life. We each develop our own stories, influenced by our beliefs, to define who we are. In my youth, I was a person of deep faith, always attending church and being “good.’ Experiences on the farm, attending school and joining the military provided a lifelong foundation for me.
The Navy shipped me overseas where my first big revelation was learning the Vietnam War was a scam. I stationed in Japan, near that war but not in it, but close enough to talk to the guys transferring into my base who were haunted by their experiences. My brother was a Navy corpsman detailed to an Airforce hospital in South Vietnam where he worked in surgery, where he was exposed to injured soldier infected with Agent Orange and that led to his premature death.
In Japan, my escape from loneliness and war was to go to the mountains. The Shinto religion teaches that everything is sacred, whether animate or inanimate, especially mountains. I fell in love with mountain wilderness, bought every piece of backpacking gear I could afford and spent most of my free time scaling peaks and making lifelong friends. Mountains and defying gravity made me whole in a way my earlier beliefs had not. Mountain wilderness taught me to believe in myself.
After my honorable departure from the Navy in Seattle and to moving to Oregon, I had a long list of climbing pursuits in the Cascades, Rocky Mountains (Canada/U.S.), Sierras, Andes and Appalachia Mountains.
Rocks and ice are beautiful if not sometimes quite challenging, however, after such challenges what delighted me most were desert, forest, rivers, plants, fish & wildlife that were a great comfort after I risked my life to further discover a true meaning to life. The challenge of vertical ascent/descent reset my gyroscope in such a way as to SEE a magnificent and beautiful living world.
A love of all things wild was a calling to a lifelong devotion to protect, defend and educate about wildness and its universal truths. The idea of a higher being was never more apparent than standing on a mountain top.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hold the Date
24th Annual Kettle Range Rendezvous
July 10-12, 2026
Celebrate KRCG’s 50th Anniversary!
The Mismanagement of Beavers
by Liz Carr, Wildlife Program Director
Overview
Beavers engineering of aquatic systems through dam building over thousands of years has created unimaginable biodiversity and productivity in riparian areas. Riparian areas once estimated to have covered 40-50% of the landscape prior to European settlement. Today they represent less than 2% of the western US. Washington’s beaver management policies do not respect or reflect what science shows about the immense ecological services that beavers provide, and the complex lives they live.
Beavers live in stable, monogamous family units called colonies, consisting of a breeding pair, their current kits, and yearlings, creating a strong social structure. The parents share duties, with both teaching survival skills like building and foraging, and the whole family works together to maintain lodges, build dams, and create underwater food caches for winter, with young beavers staying to help for up to two years before dispersing to find mates.
The dams they create, for free, offer many of the same benefits as costly rehabilitation projects. Their work has been shown to expand floodplains and wetlands, recharge groundwater, provide higher summer flows, improve water quality, create healthy habitat for many species and encourage a greater diversity of plants and animals. The natural water storage they create slows the runoff process, keeps freshwater habitat cooler later into the summer and helps counter the impacts of drought.
As herbivores, they eat terrestrial plants (bark, leaves) and aquatic plants, moving biomass and nutrients between land and water through their construction and consumption. This process creates rich, productive wetlands and meadows from old ponds, supporting diverse microbial communities, insects, fish, birds, and mammals, boosting overall ecosystem productivity.
Beaver engineering creates natural firebreaks by building dams that form wetlands, slowing water, increasing soil moisture, and creating green corridors that resist fire spread, providing crucial refuges for wildlife and firefighters during dry seasons. A 2025 study published in Nature, found that beavers can make arid Western landscapes more resilient by blunting drought, slowing floods and shielding areas from wildfire with the dams they build. They are vital for watershed health.
Nearly wiped out across the west a century ago beavers have spent the last decades regarded as a nuisance species. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is responsible for managing beaver populations. WDFW refers to them as “furbearers” and their policies treat them as resources or nuisance species open to unlimited trapping.
WDFW allows:
- Unlimited “recreational” trapping from November 1 to March 31, with no limit on the number of beavers a trapper can “harvest” for their “hides and pelts”, although a 2000 voter initiative banned “body-gripping traps,” including leghold traps and neck snares. Instead, trappers use cage traps set to catch
beavers and hold them underwater until they drown. Because beavers are adapted to survive for long periods underwater, this can take as long as 35 minutes. - Year-round killing due to “conflicts.” Landowners, their employees, and wildlife control operators can trap and kill “nuisance” beavers year-round without permits, reporting requirements, or limits.
It isn’t known how many beavers live in Washington, but the population began to grow after voters banned body-gripping traps in 2000. It is impossible to estimate the number of beavers killed in the state each year, since landowners do not have to report beavers they kill, and trapper reporting rates for the past decade have averaged only ~51%. Even with these gaps the state data suggests that humans kill roughly two thousand beavers each year. The real number is likely much higher.
Proposals to provide beavers with greater protections are gaining ground. WDFW made the state’s relocation program permanent in 2024. The program establishes a formal permitting process for qualified individuals and organizations to relocate beavers that are in conflict with landowners, serving as a non-lethal alternative to removal. But this program relocates only a small number of beavers each year, leaving in place the underlying framework based on lethal control.
WDFW had an opportunity to add beavers as a “species of greater conservation need” in the agency’s statewide wildlife action plan (SWAP) but that opportunity was missed in their 2025 update. In the state’s “comprehensive plan for conserving the state’s fish and wildlife and the natural habitats on which they depend” beavers appear only as a “Species of Greatest Information Need.” That label may justify research into their population status and distribution, but it does not provide protections or prioritize conservation actions.
At the same time, the draft SWAP omits beavers from sections where they clearly belong as natural habitat builders for a multitude of Species and Habitats of Greatest Conservation Need. Also, WDFW’s draft Game Management Plan (GMP) continues to sanction unlimited “recreational” beaver trapping despite weak demographic data, considerable reporting gaps, no spatial safeguards to prevent local extirpation, and no serious analysis of how killing beavers affects water, wetlands, salmon, or other wildlife (SantiagoAvila 2025).
In the coming year, we will continue to advocate for beavers and ensure that WDFW prioritizes coexistence. We will keep pressing WDFW to integrate beavers meaningfully into its SWAP and GMP, so their contributions to water, habitat, and climate resilience are finally reflected in how decisions are made.
We will be asking for your help soon to contact your representatives or WDFW Commission members to ensure beavers get the proper respect they are due.
Livestock Grazing on Public Lands – A history of taxpayer subsidies, corruption and ecological
disaster.
By Timothy Coleman
Centuries of U.S. cattle and sheep meat production has had a disastrous impact on the ecological health of ecosystems and human health, coast to coast. The vast majority of U.S. beef production is not raised on lands west of the Rocky Mountains, nor by small family farms and are thus not a subject of this essay. Livestock grazing is the largest extractive use of publicly owned lands in the West, two-thirds of which is held by just 10 percent of ranchers.
According to the Bureau of Lands Management (BLM) data, 38 million acres of lands it manages are in a degraded condition. Fifty percent of National Forest grazing allotments are controlled by the top wealthiest 10 percent, like billionaire Rupert Murdoch, mining industries and public utilities.
Ranching industry generates an insignificant contributor to the economy. In Washington, most red meat production is from cattle. According to data beef cattle ranching has about 250 businesses producing 628 jobs – or 1 out of 4,900 jobs – accounting for 0.14% of Gross Business Revenue. By contrast, wildlife recreation accounts for .64% of GBR, nearly 5 times that of beef production. And yet, it is wildlife and aquatic species that pay the greatest ecological costs associated with beef production.
Central to cost/benefit of cattle ranching are its many state and federal tax breaks, disaster payments, crop insurance, direct payments to support operations, predator control, free surface/ground water, safety certification, weed control, transportation and below-cost federal grazing fees on federal lands set at $1.35/month per cow/calf. And, ranchers get low property tax rate and costs subtracted from federal taxes.
Pasture, Rangeland and Forage (PRF) Insurance.
Other than federal grazing permit rate of $1.35/month per cow/calf, there is no other federal tax subsidy more nakedly defrauding the American taxpayer than Pasture, Rangeland and Forage insurance. PRF program was designed primarily for cattle producers who raise feed crops (pasture, alfalfa and other forage crops). The goal is to help producers cover their increased costs for feed, destocking, depopulating or other actions that can be incurred during dry periods. Policyholders don’t have to pay insurance premiums when they sign up for PRF insurance. They’re billed the following year in September. Plus, the federal government subsidizes more than half of the premium cost and can be combined with other federal aid source. This might seem legit, however, as with many such subsidies it’s the underlying double-dealing of what’s allowable that deserve a deeper dive.
Ranchers pay half or less of the cost for PRF coverage from a private insurance agent. When at least 10% less rainfall than normally occurs, based on the past 70-year average for the area, ranchers receive an indemnity payment per acre enrolled including private land and public lands allotments. Indemnity payments are not based on actual production or losses, nor do they require reductions in number of livestock during drought.
One PRF broker, Redd Summit Advisors based in American Fork, UT, estimates an average of $2-$3 annual net gain per enrolled acre for many counties in the arid West when using their software to optimize choices about which acres to enroll for which months, and at what level of coverage.
In a true market, marginal grazing allotments with unreliable precipitation would be abandoned by ranchers due to their low earnings and volatility. Instead, income from PRF insurance has contributed to some permittees’ decisions to decline buyout offers to retire their grazing permits. And some entities may even acquire grazing permits to cash in on PRF payments. Redd Summit Ranches, LLC, which has the same address as Redd Summit Advisors, holds grazing permits on multiple allotments in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. One wonders if they are also banking on RFP payments to make these areas profitable. Sadly, schemes like the USDA’s PRF insurance are prime examples of government waste, abuse, and fraud that DOGE claimed to be ferreting out but instead ignored.
The reality is livestock grazing in the interior West, from the Cascades and Sierras to the Rocky Mountain Front, would not be economically feasible without federal and state subsidies. But because of the subsidies, livestock production is Big Business. Fees from Public Land livestock grazing do not cover direct costs: fences and other infrastructure, administration or damage mitigation. Federal and state subsidies blow the economics benefits door off its hinges. Livestock generate a lot of pollution including manure & urine that pollutes surface water leading to algae growth, eutrophication of ponds lakes, methane release leading to climate change, streambank erosion, loss of wetlands, soil compaction, noxious weed spread and harms to terrestrial and aquatic plant and animal species.
The system allows widespread degradation of public lands. Ranchers contend livestock grazing has public benefits, such as maintaining open space. However true, degrading vast areas of public lands is not balanced by open space provided by private ranchlands. And, there is no guarantee that ranches won’t be subdivided, as so often has occurred. Many ranchers oppose establishing land trusts on their private lands that once established, guarantee ranchlands are maintained in open space, regardless of ownership.
Persecution of Carnivores
The simple fact is tax dollars support federal and state agency persecution of apex wildlife gray wolf, bear, coyote and cougar to protect domestic livestock that range across millions of acres of Public Land forests, grasslands and deserts. Wildlife are a public asset widely appreciated for their existence values. Though opinion surveys time and again show the vast majority of the public do not support killing carnivores on public lands, the practice continues.
No, so-called non-lethal deterrence, is more effective than human presence. Studies have shown the human voice alone triggers a flight response in wild carnivores. Effective deterrence methods have been shown to work to protect sheep in the Woods Hole Project, Idaho, and cattle in the Tom Miner Basin adjacent to Yellowstone N.P.
Grazing on Lands not Suitable for Grazing
Deserts, wetlands and mountain forests often do not meet standards for sustainable forage production, and as a result grazing degrades or eliminates native plant communities, impacting elk, bear, amphibians and other aquatic and terrestrial species.
Emblematic of lands unsuitable for grazing are the Kettle River Mountains, Colville National Forest. The Kettles are mostly rugged wilderness with few meadows surrounded by forests, steep topography, rock cliffs & terrain traps including jack-straw downed trees. The Colville National Forest management plan lists 26% of the Forest as suitable for cattle grazing, yet cattle allotments occupy 66% of the 1.1 million acre forest.
Public Lands grazing is an anachronism of history, perpetuated by the federal government. The hope for the future is an end to the persecution of wild animals for the benefit of a few and the untold costs of livestock grazing on western public lands.
1 ProPublica investigation of livestock grazing across the West on publicly held federal lands.
https://www.propublica.org/article/grazing-public-lands-investigationtakeaways
2 http://dor.wa.gov/content/aboutus/statisticsandreports/TID/resultsgbiset.aspx?results=gbi&Year=2015AN,&Code1=000000&Code2=999999&Sumby=nAll&SicNaics=2&Format=HTML
3 Western Watersheds Project – Winter 2026 Edition https://www.westernwatersheds.org/
.4 Ibid
Wilderness + Roadless Areas = Lower Severity Fires
By Liz Carr
In Washington state, the 2001 Roadless Rule protects roughly 2 million acres of national forest land from new road construction and commercial logging. While the rule is intended to be strictly protective, several “loopholes”—legally defined as exceptions or administrative shifts—permit activities such as road construction or timber removal under specific circumstances. Exceptions, particularly those for “forest health” logging, wildfire risk reduction, and access to mineral leases, can harm wildlife by fragmenting critical habitats, reducing connectivity for species like wolves, grizzly bears, and lynx, increasing invasive species, and disrupting water quality.
In Northeast Washington, the remote, high-elevation Kettle Range and the forests surrounding the SalmoPriest Wilderness would lose protections under these “exceptions”, putting at risk critical habitat for Washington’s only resident grizzly bears and a reestablishing wolf and lynx populations.
This threat of utilizing exceptions is real and is occurring now in the west. Roadless areas and wilderness are being referred to as fire hazards and that thinning is the solution to protect our beloved wild areas.
We need to continue to educate our representatives and neighbors about why roadless areas and wilderness areas are safer without roads and combat the disinformation that thinning them will reduce wildlife fire severity and protect public health.
For example: In December, Montana U.S. Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy and Representative Troy Downing introduced the “Montana Sportsmen Conservation Act.” The bill wants to return three Wilderness Study Areas (WSA) to general management. Each WSA is recommended for release by their respective agency’s land and resource management plan revisions and retains certain protections for these WSA’s while providing more flexibility for land managers to mitigate wildfire risk, restore wildlife habitat, and increase sportsmen access. This type of legislation gives the green light to roads and logging.
A large body of scientific evidence and opinion, including a growing group of U.S. Forest Service scientists, contradicts the current approach of ‘thinning’ forest wildlands to curb wildfires and to stop them from reaching and impacting communities. Research concludes that thinning – including thinning-plus burning – and post-fire logging/clearcutting increase overall tree mortality and carbon emissions, make wildfires spread faster toward homes and/or burn more severely.
This study found forests with higher levels of protection had lower severity values, even though they are generally identified as having the highest overall levels of biomass and fuel loading. These researchers suggest a need to reconsider current simplistic assumptions about the relationship between forest protection and fire severity in fire management and policy.
We forget that humans often start forest fires.
Fighting wildfires in the United States costs billions of dollars annually. Public dialog and ongoing research have focused on increasing wildfire risk because of climate warming, overlooking the direct role that people play in igniting wildfires and increasing fire activity.
An analysis of two decades of government agency wildfire records highlights the fundamental role of human ignitions. Human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned. National and regional policy efforts to mitigate wildfire-related hazards would benefit from focusing on reducing the human expansion of the fire niche.
Finally, suggesting that roadless areas need “management” to improve wildlife habitat, fails to recognize that WSA and other roadless lands contain some of the best wildlife habitat available for many species. Wildlife need an area of undisturbed, often remote terrain for refuge from human disturbance and hunting that provides essential cover, escape routes, food, and water for survival and reproduction – a safe haven.
Our roadless lands are critical to our efforts to protect sensitive wildlife, old-growth forests (carbon storage), and non-motorized recreation, which are more limited on public lands, where there are fewer restrictions and more resource exploitation.
Science that debunks the argument that logging, grazing, and more roads help reduce wildfire risk:
- Nearly 95% of human-caused wildfires start within half a mile of a road. More roads mean more fires.
- Peer-reviewed studies consistently find that thinning forests or logging in wild backcountry does not protect communities from wildfire.
- The only proven way to save homes and lives is home hardening and creating defensible space up to 100 feet around structures.
- Livestock grazing depletes native grasses and disturbs soils allowing highly-flammable invasive weeds like cheatgrass to take hold.
How You Can Help
25 years ago, the Roadless Rule was created to protect millions of acres of public lands against clear-cutting and roadbuilding. A tremendous outpouring of support helped put the rule in place, and it remains highly popular today – but the Trump administration is trying to undo it. This year, it’s time to step up and defend the Roadless Rule.
Instead of opening up roadless areas to risky logging, road construction, and more livestock grazing, we need to prioritize protecting these wild ecosystems that store carbon, shelter wildlife, and support natural fire resilience.
We need to educate our neighbors and our representatives and let our voices be heard now. Congress needs to hear our voices demanding that roadless wildlands remain wild and protected. The time has come for permanent, robust protections that honor the science, respect natural processes, and safeguard these landscapes for the future. What is needed is a single, strong federal standard that closes all loopholes in the Roadless Rule now.
Our public wildlands deserve nothing less. Senator Maria Cantwell is lead supporter of legislating protection of national forest roadless area. This legislation has broad support from hunting, fishing, wildlife and recreation interests.
Contact your Member of Congress and ask them to support The Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025. You can simply call the Capital Switchboard 202-224- 3121 and ask the operator to connect you to your U.S. Senator or U.S. House Member.
Here are a few quick facts to share about why roadless areas are important:
- Ecological connectivity: Roadless areas buffer and connect our national parks, wilderness areas, and other protected lands, creating vital wildlife corridors and fire resilient landscapes. Over 61% of these areas lie within 100 meters of existing protected lands, making them critical pieces of the larger conservation puzzle.
- Water quality: They protect high-quality soil and serve as important sources of public drinking water.
- Biodiversity: Roadless lands harbor diverse plant and animal communities, including threatened and endangered species that depend on large, undisturbed habitats.
- Cultural and recreational value: These landscapes hold traditional cultural and spiritual significance and provide places for dispersed, non-motorized recreation.
Forest Restoration Scam
by Tim Coleman
This short essay is to dispel the myth that logging in our publicly-owned land is to reduce wildfire severity, protect homes and communities and restore healthy forests.
Trout Lake logging project, Ferry County, WA, Colville National Forest
This 60 acre Trout Lake project clearcut before logging was a fully stocked stand of healthy mixed conifer forest (larch, D. fir, Englemann spruce, red cedar, pine and hardwoods) in the Trout Lake timber sale, is emblamatic of what is a ruse about forest “restoration.” A pretext to this mockery of restoration are the 5 meetings organized by the U.S. Forest Service (FS) and Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) with members of the NE Washington Forest Coalition (NEWFC), three of which I was in attendance.
Both in-person and in project documents, there was to be a minimal level of live tree retention, including the largest trees, no clearings larger than 3 acres.
A picture tells the backstory: forest restoration is a ruse designed to fool the public and legislators, based on sketchy science that was not tested nor developed in northern interior Columbia Basin forests based on a forecast that “historic” forest conditions will magically reappear 30-50 years from now. In other words this house of cards is based on timber production now and promises of mature forests beyond the lifespan of most adults over 30 years old.
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, west Pintler Range (2022).
Post fire snag forests provide an essential transition of forest ecological processes. Snag forests stand for decades, providing wildlife habitat, regeneration of native plant species, holding winter snow, protecting soils and providing carbon storage. Coleman photo. State and federal forest managers blame wildfire for their own poor management practices. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents show the FS strategized with timber industry and state forest managers to focus on forest fire as the boogey man cause of devastating wildfires from Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Yes, wildfire can be a risk to human structures, but that is due mostly to flammable building materials, oily/evergreen shrubs and trees next to homes and other structures. There is a mountain of evidence that not only does logging not prevent wildfire, it in fact exacerbates it.
Logging does not result in long term wildfire risk reduction due in part to regrowth of trees, shrubbery and highly flammable grasses. Roads are associated with the majority of wildfire ignitions including some of the largest and most catastrophic wildfires.
A century of logging has not cured the existential threat of wildfire, disease nor insect related tree mortality. Does the question not come to mind, how come after all these decades of logging that these problems, still persist? British Columbia is emblematic of why logging will not cure any of these.
Logging serves the timber industry, who incidentally, holds the majority of the most productive forest lands across North America.
Sherman Pass Project – Where are the wildlife to go?
Hopefully the forest will return by year 2070. Forest Service and Department of Natural Resources
media campaigns hyping their ability to prevent severe wildfire is a sick joke. It is based on unproven theoretical “historic range of variability” that does not hold up to scrutiny of 1930-era photography of the Okanogan Highlands, nor has it weathered the test of time. Young forests burn, old growth is more likely to survive wildfire. Snag forests provide wildlife habitat. Clearcuts are maybe good for livestock grazing that in turn harms forest regeneration,
Such a dichotomy – Time to Rise Up!
Tonata Trout Timber Sale is currently underway in the Trout and Tonata Creek Watersheds. For the most part, it further demonstrates the lie about forest restoration and gives a backhand to collaborative resolution to KRCG’s challenge of this logging project. Does this picture look like 20-50 trees/acre were retained as the Forest Service proposed to resolve KRCG’s administrative challenge?
Mindfulness of what matters–
Protecting Gray Wolf
by Tim Coleman
In October, Kettle Rangers and coalition partners sued Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) in King County Superior Court to prevent WDFW from killing another member of the Sherman Wolf Pack after it had previously sanctioned killing two wolves from this wolf family. Plaintiffs were represented by
ANIMAL & EARTH ADVOCATES PLLC. A county magistrate issued a Temporary Restraining Order halting WDFW’s kill authorization, and though a King County Superior Court judge denied our request for a preliminary injunction, the TRO ran out the clock on the existing kill order and WDFW decided not issue a new one after that.
Having our objective to stop the annihilation of the Sherman Pack, on January 9 plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed our King County lawsuit against the WDFW.
The Sherman pack had at least five adult wolves at the beginning of 2025, and produced up to six pups that spring, but it had already suffered devastating losses prior to WDFW’s new kill order. In May 2025, an unnamed livestock producer shot and killed an adult male wolf from the pack. On August 26, WDFW killed an adult female Sherman wolf following an order by WDFW Director Kelly Susewind. That same month, WDFW found another dead wolf from the pack, whose killing is still under investigation. Had WDFW’s October kill order been carried out it would have almost certainly doomed the pups to starvation and destroyed the fourth wolf pack in the Sherman Pass area.
Lawsuit challenging Colville National Forest Livestock Grazing
In October, Kettle Rangers and coalition partners sued the U.S. Forest Service in Federal District Court over permitting livestock grazing on huge swaths of the Colville National Forest that the agency itself had determined to be incapable of, or unsuitable for, sustaining livestock. The complaint alleges that ongoing livestock operations threaten the habitats of wolves, Canada lynx, grizzly bears, bull trout, and other wildlife, as well as impairing streams and meadows and harming recreational use. As it was evaluating proposed revisions to the Colville Forest Plan, the Forest Service determined that nearly 70 percent of the land then in the Colville National Forest’s livestock grazing allotments was not suitable to support this use. However, it wholly ignored those findings when it issued the revised Forest Plan in 2019, instead choosing to continue permitting livestock grazing at damaging and unacceptable levels across the Forest.
