Meta Ads: LWVSC’s legacy forest education campaign was interrupted by Meta (Facebook/Instagram) on July 4th when our ad account was deactivated. For weeks, we were trapped in an endless, automated loop. Meta’s own internal tools confirmed that the League has fully complied with every requirement for Social Issue, Electoral, and Political (SIEP) advertising. Our identity, disclaimers, and organization page authorizations are 100% verified and approved. Meta’s AI support agents explicitly admitted that our account was stuck in an internal "system-synchronization error" that can only be fixed by a human member of their Integrity Team. Yet every attempt to reach a human support specialist was rejected with the same boilerplate response: the specialist queue is at maximum capacity. Meta and its platform monopolies and opaque, automated bureaucracies harm local communities and undermine civic participation. Fortunately, thanks to the Center for Responsible Forestry (CRF), we created an entirely new ad campaign and republished the educational videos in late August. We will use the remaining grant money to run the videos throughout Snohomish County until the end of October.
Next Legislative Session: This fall we will begin a new fundraising effort to find money for advocacy ahead of the next legislative session. Many in Snohomish County understand that we do not have to make a false choice between clearcut logging on state lands versus ecological forestry, “nor perpetuate the false choice of aggressive industrial logging versus funding schools and essential county services," according to CRF. "The scientific community has shown that there are ways to manage forests ecologically both for timber harvest and for ecological integrity . . . . Washington’s Legislature has allocated roughly $120 million through the Climate Commitment Act over the past three years to acquire replacement forestlands so carbon-rich legacy forests can be conserved for their climate, ecological, and public-health benefits.”
We will help rally the public to contact our county and state governments to continue funding to preserve these forests through Natural Climate Solutions funding, Trust Land Transfers, and
revenue diversification. Stay tuned for action alerts and
sign up to be on the mailing list so you don’t miss them.
New Ideas: The Center for Sustainable Economy has been working on a new legislative roadmap for Washington forests for the 2027 session and beyond. The League will be following the
proposed measures that include a primary forest protection act, a no-net-loss compensatory mitigation program to protect carbon sequestration capacity, forest carbon tax and reward, repeal of deforestation drivers, and repeal or redirection of logging subsidies.
Right now, you can make an immediate impact of legacy forest protection in the Elwha River Watershed. People are joining together to buy a treasured forest out of logging.
Consider this fundraising effort bringing timber, forest protectors, and agencies together to save more legacy forest acres in Washington.
We welcome folks interested in working on strategy to protect legacy forests in Snohomish County. Join us for an hour at the link on the calendar on the second Tuesdays at 10:00 A.M. Check the
calendar.