39 



Mr. J. Thomas. It takes a lot to discourage me. 



Mr. Brown. All right. 



We will call our next panel, which is Ms. Carla Cloer of 

 Porterville; Mr. Michael McCloskey of the Sierra Club; Mr. Kirk 

 Boyd of the law firm of Boyd, Huffman & Williams, San Francisco; 

 Mr. Robert Wolf, forester, accompanied by Mr. Martin Litton of the 

 Sequoia Alliance. Would all of you come forward at this time. 



Lacking any better guidelines, I will ask the panel members to 

 proceed in the order in which I called their names. 



Ms. Cloer, you may proceed. 



STATEMENT OF CARLA CLOER, RESmENT, PORTERVILLE, CA 



Ms. Cloer. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting us to testify on 

 behalf of my very favorite subject, which is the giant sequoia 

 groves. 



I think there are more native Califomians in this room than 

 there are in California, and I am one of them. I am a fourth-gen- 

 eration native of California. My great-grandfather homesteaded in 

 the Porterville area in 1880. I live in Porterville with my daughter. 

 I am a schoolteacher there. I teach fifth grade. 



Porterville is not only the home of Sequoia National Forest head- 

 quarters, but it is about an hour's drive from where your preserve 

 would be. I also own property that would be surrounded by this 

 preserve. My neighbors and my family and all of us support the 

 passage of this bill. 



I would like you to know that I am the official Sierra Club con- 

 tact person and representative for the mediated settlement agree- 

 ment, and I am not violating the settlement agreement by being 

 here and supporting this bill. 



Also, I would like you to know that Porterville is not a logging 

 town. It has a much wider economic base, and the mill is not its 

 sole means of survival. 



I have spent every summer of my life in Sequoia National Forest. 

 I thought it would be there forever when I was a kid. Now, as an 

 adult, I know that it will not, and I have spent the last 10 years 

 of my life doing everything possible that is legal to try to protect 

 this forest. 



I would like to show you my story. The purpose of what I am 

 going to show you is to, hopefully, convince you that there is a 

 much higher future for Sequoia National Forest and for the giant 

 sequoia ecosystem than was envisioned in the past. 



So now if we can turn the lights down, I would like to show you 

 my slides of Sequoia National Forest. 



These are the trees we are talking about, the giant sequoia of the 

 Sierra Nevada. Visitors worldwide come to see these trees. They 

 can live up to 3,000 years old. Some of the trees were in their own 

 place, of course, still growing when Christ was bom. The groves 

 themselves are hundreds of thousands of years old. 



This is a map of California. The Sierra Nevada runs from, be- 

 tween the two arrows, from Mount Lassen in the north and 

 Tehachapi in the south. You can see it is a narrow peninsula of a 

 mountain range, with its high 14,000-foot peaks. 



