LONG WAIT FOR WILDERNESS
Wilderness, in the immortal prose of Howard Zahniser, author of much of the Wilderness Act of 1964, is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, Wilderness Watch and the High Sierra Hikers Association won the latest round of a legal battle to protect the untrammeled character of two of America’s premier wilderness areas. The John Muir and Ansel Adams Wildernesses, deep in the heart of California’s Sierra Nevada Range, have fallen victim to years of overuse by commercial guides, whose packstock and large camping groups have denuded pristine meadows and lakeshores and imperiled wildlife species.
FSEEE and our conservation allies filed suit in 2000, charging that the U.S. Forest Service was illegally allowing commercial outfitters to exceed visitor quotas that had been in place for more than three decades. The Forest Service consistently favored commercial outfitters by restricting the numbers of unguided hikers while increasing the numbers of customers who pay outfitters to take them into the wilderness. In 2001, a California federal district court found that the Forest Service had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to disclose the environmental damage being done in sensitive alpine areas.
The Forest Service appealed this verdict, but in 2004 the California Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision. The appeals court also found that the Forest Service violated the 1964 Wilderness Act by failing to plan for reasonable limits on commercial operations.
The environmental impact statement the Forest Service completed in 2005 in response to this decision didn’t limit packstock traffic in sensitive areas—it increased it. FSEEE and other groups sued again.
Last October, U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Laporte ruled it was “irrational” for the Forest Service to assume the Wilderness Act allowed “further degradation through increased grazing in already impacted areas,” as the agency had argued. She ordered the Forest Service to limit commercial services to “the extent necessary” to achieve the purposes of the Wilderness Act, concluding that the simple “desire” for packstock use in the wilderness was not equivalent to the “need” to use packstock to achieve the act’s purposes.
Finally, the judge ordered the agency to protect imperiled species, such as the Yosemite toad, from livestock.
Over the next several months, Judge Laporte will hear arguments from FSEEE and other groups about the appropriate remedy for the Forest Service’s failure to comply with the Wilderness Act and other applicable laws. It is likely that the Forest Service will write a new management plan or revise the illegal plan. FSEEE will make sure that the new plan leaves wilderness untrammeled. — James Johnston
Research from a southern Oregon study area shows that several pairs of northern spotted owls abandoned their nests after thinning operations were conducted in their care areas. Photo © James Johnston
LEAVING THEIR NESTS
Thinning trees near sites where threatened northern spotted owls are nesting is causing the owls to abandon their nests, a trend that has researchers with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station concerned.
Researcher Janice Reid, who has studied the owl for twenty-four years, and her colleagues first noticed the disturbing trend in 2004. The Bureau of Land Management, which manages some of the acreage in an owl study area near Roseburg, Oregon, began commercially thinning young forests near nest sites within the area’s older forests. Although the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan prohibits logging in sections of these forests that are older than eighty years, it allows thinning in younger stands if doing so will create old-growth forest conditions more rapidly. However, the plan is clear that thinning can occur only if it meets the over-arching objective of protecting the owl.
A biological assessment for the study area refers to several instances of site abandonment by owls immediately following thinning within a pair’s core area. Reid’s concerns were heightened by data that showed a sharp decline in the spotted owl population since 2005. From 146 adult owls in 2005, the population dropped to 119 adults in two years. In the past two survey seasons, the number of spotted owl nesting pairs dropped to the lowest levels since the study began twenty years ago.
Reid oversees spotted owl research at the Tyee study area, one of eight federal spotted owl demographic study areas in the Pacific Northwest. Each year, scientists survey, capture, mark and re-capture every spotted owl living within the 615-square-mile area.
Reid and her colleagues have documented 107 sites where spotted owls have been known to nest. The biologists visit each site multiple times during the year to determine if the owls are present, nesting or producing young.
The Tyee study area is a mix of BLM and private land, much of it in a checkerboard of alternate square miles. Clear-cut logging on the federal portions of the study area has declined dramatically since the mid-1990s as a result of the Northwest Forest Plan. Logging on private land, however, has been largely unaffected by the designation of the spotted owl as a threatened species in 1990.
The Tyee includes within its boundaries four of the Northwest Forest Plan’s late-successional reserves—older forests, but not necessarily old growth—totaling more than 40 percent of the study area. Designated in 1994, the late-successional reserves are the backbone of the government’s attempt to ensure that northern spotted owl populations remain viable.
The Northwest Forest Plan’s objective for protecting owl habitat is clear. The plan’s intent is to “to protect and enhance” late-successional reserves and old-growth forest ecosystems that serve as habitat for certain species, including the owl. The plan specifies what kind of logging can take place in these reserves.
Forests within the reserves include recent clear-cuts in addition to old-growth forests, with older forests accounting for about half the reserve’s total acreage. The Northwest Forest Plan proposes that natural aging of younger forests over a hundred or more years will compensate for present-day logging of old-growth forests outside the reserves and provide sufficient protection for the spotted owl. The plan is as ambitious in its geographic scope as it is irreversible if it doesn’t work.
Reid knew from earlier studies that spotted owl nesting pairs are especially vulnerable to logging within their “core area,” which provides nesting and roosting sites and is where the owls are most apt to forage. Core areas also moderate air temperatures around the nest and roosting trees (spotted owls are sensitive to overheating). Thinning a forest opens up the canopy, exposing the spotted owl to a higher chance of predation and increasing air temperatures, which can lead to nest site abandonment.
BLM has been thinning within spotted owl nesting areas. District-wide, sixteen thinning projects occurred between 2002 and 2006 within the core areas of twenty-one pairs of spotted owls.
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics will continue to look into harvest practices that compromise remaining spotted owl sites throughout western Oregon BLM lands. If the trend continues and is ignored by BLM, there will be little recourse but to list the species as endangered in the near future. Northwest environmental groups have generally endorsed thinning as a source of substitute timber for the old-growth logging that used to dominate the region’s federal forests. Reid’s work shows that all thinning is not alike: as with real estate, location matters. — Andy Stahl
Forest Magazine | FSEEE
