STAYING ALIVE ON THE MALHEUR

The argument over dead or dying trees on the Malheur National Forest this year was weirdly reminiscent of a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. In a plague-ravaged medieval town, a cart collecting victims comes through, its driver calling, “Bring out your dead.” A customer approaches and throws a body on, only to have the body protest, “I’m not dead!” After a three-way argument (“I can’t take him like that, it’s against regulations!” “I’m getting better!” “No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.”), the customer bludgeons the almost-dead on the head and sends the cart on its way.

The High Roberts timber sale, put on the auction block by the U. S. Forest Service in September, was not nearly as funny. The sale included a large number of trees that the Forest Service claimed were dying and therefore allowed to be included in the sale. Dan Becker, who was a fire management officer on the Prairie City Ranger District until his retirement last fall, protested the sale in a letter. He noted that some of the trees marked for sale were large—larger than the twenty-one inches in diameter required by the forest management plan to be left standing if alive. They appeared to be quite healthy two years after the fire.

Had the sale gone through, the question of whether the trees would have survived the fire would be moot; instead of being burned by flames they would be felled by chainsaws, ending the argument as effectively as a blow to the head.

The salvage project—a result of the 2002 High Roberts fire, which spread across 13,535 acres on the Malheur—would have allowed the Forest Service to sell approximately 2.7 million board feet of timber cut from 209 acres. The Forest Service prepared the sale without an environmental impact statement, claiming it was “categorically excluded” from National Environmental Policy Act analysis. The categorical exclusion rule, created in July, 2003, waives the need for environmental analysis on salvage sales smaller than 250 acres.

U.S. District Judge Garr M. King agreed with Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who, with the League of Wilderness Defenders, filed a lawsuit challenging the Forest Service’s decision to authorize the sale. In King’s ruling, he stated, “Although the Forest Service categorizes many of the marked trees as Ôdying,’ the plain meaning of Ôlive’ is still living, in other words, not dead.”

The implication of this ruling is larger than one auction. It’s not unheard of for salvage sales to push the envelope on the number, size and condition of the trees to be included in the sale to sweeten the economic benefits in order to attract bidders.

Judge King’s ruling that living trees cannot be counted as dead seemed clear, but Malheur National Forest Supervisor Roger Williams may not have read it. In January he proposed another sale, the Easy timber sale, which also includes a large number of “dying” trees. For now, the sale appears to be on hold, possibly because of a phone call from FSEEE to the regional office. The trees that are not dead yet may still have a chance. -—Patricia Marshall

STRANGELY LIKE FIRE: THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST’S INVASIVE SPECIES MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

Cheatgrass chokes the steppes, encouraging fire and driving out shrubs and grazers. Star thistle sucks the moisture out of grasslands, creating impenetrable fields of spines. The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid is destroying one of the east’s most recognized tree species. Nationwide, nonnative invasive species cause an estimated $137 billion annually in damages, and are responsible for one-third of the species on the endangered species list. In their native habitats, invasive species are controlled by predation or competition, but once they arrive in new lands, their populations expand unchecked. They not only displace native species, but they can fundamentally alter ecosystems, disrupting processes that humans and other species rely on.

President Clinton called biological invasion a “catastrophic wildfire in slow motion.” U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth declared invasive species to be one of the four biggest threats to the national forests, and the Healthy Forests Initiative is pumping new money into the effort to stem their spread. The question is no longer whether the Forest Service should take action to deal with invasive species. The question is how.

In Oregon and Washington, a new set of management directives attempts to answer that question. One percent, or 420,000 acres, of all Forest Service land in the region, is infested with invasive weeds, and they are spreading by approximately ten percent annually.

The draft environmental impact statement, published in the fall of 2004, claims that the new policy will enable the Forest Service to control invasive plants within the next thirty years. Like so much of forest policy coming from the Bush administration, the directives take dramatic and expensive action on issues that are poorly understood and highly complex. It is almost as if, following Clinton’s comparison of biological invasion to fire, we are throwing a program as weighty as the National Fire Plan behind invasive control. We should not be using our failed management strategy for fires as a model for invasive species management.

There are two prongs to any invasive management strategy: prevention and treatment. The spread of invasive species is closely linked to human activity. Seeds can be transported long distances by truck tires or by seed-infested hay carried as feed for pack animals. They sprout easily in areas where native vegetation has been removed or disturbed by roads, logging and overgrazing; intact ecosystems are much more resilient to invasion. Once established, invasive weeds can be expensive to remove, sometimes requiring repeated pulling by hand or multiple herbicide sprayings to destroy their root systems and remove seed stores from the soil. The history of biological invasion is littered with the carcasses of poorly planned control efforts: when rats invaded tropical islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, mongooses were introduced to eat the rats. Instead, the mongooses joined the rats in eating the native fauna.

The proposed management plan focuses on expensive and poorly understood treatment strategies, ignoring cost-effective possibilities for prevention. It does not use ecological data to prioritize projects and evaluate success. Instead of taking simple measures to prevent the spread of invasive species, such as requiring weed-free hay for all livestock on Forest Service land (the proposed requirement for weed-free hay only covers wilderness areas), it emphasizes expensive and high-risk removal activities such as herbicide spraying. Much of the plan includes non-binding language, making invasion prevention an option rather than a priority. And the plan lacks meaningful analysis of the costs, benefits and risks of the strategies adopted—its estimate of thirty years to control the spread of nonnative plants is based more on wishful thinking than solid analysis.

The additional money that is coming out of the Healthy Forests program to fight invasive species ought to be spent on methods that are scientifically defensible and cost-effective. But, the new National Invasive Strategy put forward by Chief Bosworth proposes to eliminate environmental reviews for invasive species projects to “ensure that environmental analysis does not inhibit environmentally sound rapid response or control efforts.” If that language sounds familiar, it should. It is the same doublespeak that is being used to justify eliminating environmental protections throughout the federal system. Based on the mistaken premise that forests are only healthy when subjected to human intervention, the Forest Service is investing its new funds in expensive, harmful and potentially ineffective herbicide treatments. This sort of project is exactly why we need environmental review and public oversight.

The new strategy is not yet law, and Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has reviewed the new environmental impact statement and submitted extensive comments encouraging the Forest Service to follow scientific advice and adopt a more aggressive prevention approach in the Northwest. We will continue to monitor this issue. Current planning documents for the Pacific Northwest invasive management strategy can be viewed online at www.fs.fed.us/r6/invasiveplant-eis/. —Forrest Fleischman