Petition is addressed to: Denver Mountain Parks and City and County of Denver Leadership

We, the Friends of the Stanley Park 80 and other concerned citizens, respectfully request that you pause the tree cutting and associated disturbances in all 14,000 acres of Denver Mountain Parks, including Stanley Park, until our concerns with ecological impacts and public safety are fully considered and addressed.

These “treated” sites take decades (or longer) to recover, with many ecological and recreational tradeoffs. What’s more, a large body of peer-reviewed science shows that fire risk may not be reduced but actually exacerbated by tree removal, suggesting to us that DMP has not met its “burden of proof” for such an aggressive manipulation of the landscape.

The acquisition of the Denver Mountain Parks (DMP) in 1912 was “for the purpose of assuring perpetually to the residents of Denver the sublime scenery of the Rockies, the preservation of native forests and having for all time a pleasure ground in the mountains for the thousands of annual visitors to the city easily accessible,” according to the Denver Mountain Parks Foundation website.

Seventy-eight percent of Denver residents consider Denver Mountain Parks “important to their quality of life” and “echoed the founders’ words in expressing why Denver Mountain Parks are important to them and to the city: quality of life (primarily recreation and health), visionary protection of natural resources, and civic pride.” Sixty-eight percent of Denver residents visit these parks once a year. 

“Denver should be a vigilant steward of this economic benefit and public asset, caring for these irreplaceable mountain lands and natural resources for today and for the future,” insists the DMP Master Plan. Instead, over recent years, we’ve watched – without any notice or option for meaningful public involvement – many of our parks transformed from living, thriving ecosystems into intensively managed, ecologically impoverished former-forests. 

Areas that have been “treated” in the name of “forest health” and/or “wildfire fuel reduction” (with significant removal of trees and other vegetation, as well as destruction of ground cover and living soil) have:

• Hotter and drier conditions, making the areas more prone to drought and creating microclimates that receive less moisture.
• Increased fire risk and the potential for higher intensity fires (including crown fires) and quicker spread (from wind) to nearby residential areas. 
• Loss of native vegetation and ground cover with an increase in flammable invasive weeds due to disturbed desiccated soil. Spraying weeds exacerbates the issue, further killing the soil and adding to the undesirable conditions for native species.
• Loss of critical wildlife habitat, disrupting the availability of food sources for predators and potentially putting more predator pressure on pets and livestock. 
• Changes in the small water cycle that impact water resources, including groundwater (which affects wells and local water supply). 

In conclusion, we request that Denver Mountain Parks, which has the responsibility of stewardship of our public forests, pause all management activities to address the evidence that disputes the industry/agency “fuel reduction” and “forest health” narrative, as well as concerns from residents about the unprecedented scale and scope of land alteration in our parks. 

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully,

Friends of the Stanley Park 80 and concerned citizens