July/August 2000. FSEEE files wilderness access lawsuit. One confusing plan from the U.S. Forest Service. Protect the Tongass.

FSEEE Files High Sierra Lawsuit

Last spring, FSEEE and two other conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging U.S. Forest Service mismanagement of the Ansel Adams and John Muir wildernesses in California. These two popular areas, prized by backpackers, hikers, horse packers and anglers, encompass more than 800,000 acres along the scenic crest of the Sierra Nevada.

The Sierra’s high-elevation meadows, lakes and streams are highly vulnerable to environmental damage caused by overuse. In the 1970s, the Forest Service instituted entry limits, known as trailhead quotas, in high-use zones of both wilderness areas to address the increasing number of people using them. The quotas were based on estimated capacities of various zones within the areas.

Unfortunately, for nearly two decades, the Forest Service has deviated from its own management direction, failing to limit the number of people who can visit the most popular areas at any one time. In particular, the agency has illegally exempted commercial outfitters and guides from the quotas (November/December 1999). The Forest Service has even allowed outfitters and guides to issue their own wilderness permits to their clients. Meanwhile, the agency limits access for private citizens who want to visit the areas on foot or horseback.

In effect, the Forest Service has allowed commercial enterprises to sell privileged access to both the Ansel Adams and the John Muir wilderness areas, a practice that has resulted in severe overcrowding on summer weekends and holidays. The agency’s failure to limit use within established capacities has inflicted unacceptable damage to mountain meadows and popular lake basins.

“The Inyo and Sierra national forests have consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to limit wilderness use even though the law requires it,” said Gary Guenther, a former wilderness ranger for the Inyo National Forest. Guenther resigned from the Forest Service in 1995 in part because of concerns over the agency’s illegal permitting practices.

Last year, FSEEE asked the supervisors of the Inyo and Sierra national forests to obey the law and follow their own wilderness management plans. The agency refused. “The Forest Service appears to be dragging its feet in an attempt to avoid making the difficult, sometimes controversial decisions needed to protect the wilderness from overuse,” FSEEE field director Bob Dale said. “We’re hopeful that this lawsuit will lead to an equitable solution that safeguards wilderness values.”

FSEEE anticipates that the lawsuit will favorably influence the Forest Service’s ongoing effort to formulate a new wilderness plan for the Ansel Adams and John Muir wildernesses, which is expected next year. As Forest Magazine went to press, the agency had not yet formally responded to the legal claims.

FSEEE is joined in the lawsuit by High Sierra Hikers Association and Wilderness Watch.

Include the Tongass

This spring, the U.S. Forest Service released its draft plan for protecting national forest wildlands from new roads. But the agency left out the biggest national forest of them all: Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

The Tongass holds the last remaining temperate rain forest in the nation. Here the grizzly bear is not threatened and salmon are plentiful. But will they remain that way? Much hinges on whether the Clinton administration is willing to stare down Alaska’s congressional delegation and grant the Tongass the protection it deserves.

With more than 500 miles of logging roads planned for construction in the Tongass’s roadless areas, this single forest accounts for more than 60 percent of all the miles of logging roads that the Forest Service proposes to build into wildlands. In other words, leaving the Tongass unprotected means slashing the roadless protection plan by more than half.

The Forest Service has sought to log the Tongass since the 1940s. Early efforts proved futile because the trees were too remote, markets too far away and costs too high to turn a profit.

In the 1950s, the Forest Service came up with a new scheme: offer any company a fifty-year timber contract at rock-bottom prices, pay for the needed logging roads out of tax dollars, and cream off only the biggest and most valuable trees. Two companies took the government up on its generous offer.

As long as the high-quality timber was cheap and plentiful, the companies turned a profit, taking 500-year-old trees and turning them into pulp. But by the 1990s, the best and biggest trees were depleted and world competition weakened pulp prices. The mills could no longer compete. They shut their doors, sued the government for breach of contract to extract their last possible nickel of tax subsidies and walked away from Southeast Alaska. They left behind communities struggling to diversify economically and Forest Service offices grown bloated with money from servicing their favored timber clients.

Today’s Forest Service in Alaska has yet to wean itself from logging. More than 100 engineers work for the agency in Alaska, designing new logging roads to push back the wilderness frontier. But for these new roads, the engineers would have to find work elsewhere.

The timber industry doesn’t even want to buy the trees those roads would lead to. More than 50 million board feet of timber sales went unbought last year because no company thought the trees were worth buying, even at the bargain price offered by the Forest Service.

The Forest Service could meet industry demand for timber from the already roaded and developed areas of the Tongass. It needn’t build any new roads in wild, undeveloped areas. But doing so would mean fewer roads built and fewer jobs for Forest Service engineers.

The Forest Service needs to hear that the Tongass should not be sacrificed to political expediency. Preserving our last, biggest rain forest is more important than sustaining a few hundred government engineer and forester jobs. Don’t get me wrong. We need resource professionals in our agency doing good work. But there’s more than enough work to go around restoring our overlogged lands. We don’t need to keep people employed by destroying our last frontiers.—Andy Stahl

A Confusing Sierra Plan

After years of work, the U.S. Forest Service has released its long-awaited draft plan for managing the eleven national forests that span California’s Sierra Nevada range. The draft environmental impact statement, released in three hefty volumes on May 5, offers eight management options for consideration. Three of the alternatives were formulated using input from nonÐForest Service organizations, including FSEEE. However, none of those was selected by the Forest Service as a preferred alternative.

In a highly unusual move, the Forest Service selected two management options—Alternative 6 and Alternative 8—as the agency’s preferred alternatives. When it adopts a final plan, the agency must, of course, choose only one. That decision will almost certainly call for significantly less logging than in the past and more prescribed burning and thinning of dense stands of timber to reduce the threat of high-intensity wildfires and to improve the health of forests suffering from decades of fire suppression.

But the draft plan raises many questions, and its complexity is sure to produce a great deal of confusion. According to earlier Forest Service statements, Alternative 3 was to be based on FSEEE’s employee-based plan, Restoring Our Forest Legacy: Blueprint for Sierra Nevada National Forests. In fact, the alternative strays significantly from FSEEE’s proposal. We’d be hard-pressed to recommend it to anyone.

FSEEE is not alone in its concerns. Several groups have questioned the Forest Service’s approach in the draft plan. An editorial in the Sacramento Bee on May 18 lamented, “What seems best for the Sierra among these eight options? It’s troubling to admit, but in attempting to decipher this document, we simply can’t tell.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell. Instead of clearly articulating the choices, the Forest Service has obscured the options with a document that almost anyone will find difficult to decipher. Still, the issues are important, and we suggest you try.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE