January/February 2001. Whistleblowing, Canadian style. Dombeck’s legacy.

Speaking Out for Grizzlies

The right of government employees to speak out on public issues has come under assault in British Columbia. The Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, which oversees fish and wildlife management in British Columbia, has issued internal directives to its employees who seek to silence criticism of MELP policies.

The issue catalyzing MELP’s crackdown concerns sport hunting of grizzly bears. British Columbia is home to one-quarter of North America’s grizzlies. Unlike the lower forty-eight states, where grizzlies are protected under the Endangered Species Act, in British Columbia sport hunting is legal and regulated by MELP. Grizzly hunting is staunchly defended by hunting groups such as the B.C. Wildlife Federation, commercial outfitters and guides and high-ranking officials within MELP. These bureaucrats set the seasons and bag limits for grizzlies, and many of them hunt grizzlies themselves. However, polls show that two-thirds of British Columbia citizens oppose grizzly hunting altogether.

Over the last several years, a MELP wildlife scientist has circulated several analyses of grizzly bear management that are critical of MELP’s hunting policies. MELP’s response has been to embargo the reports and to prohibit the scientist from discussing the matter with anyone outside the agency. When internal gag orders proved insufficient to silence the scientist, MELP suspended the biologist without pay for two weeks. In addition, MELP has issued two directives to all employees threatening disciplinary actions, up to and including termination, for any criticism of MELP policies.

MELP’s heavy-handed tactics have been called into question by a September 5, 2000, Canadian federal court ruling involving Ministry of Health employees who spoke out publicly about their agency’s failure to properly regulate bovine growth hormone. In the first case to apply Canada’s 1985 constitutional protections for free speech to whistleblowers, a federal judge ruled that “preventing the Applicants from going to the media in cases of legitimate safety or health concerns regarding policies within Health Canada is unreasonable.”

Canada’s provinces have a long history of going their own way when it comes to the authority of the federal government. The court’s ruling has had no immediate effect on MELP’s gag orders. Meanwhile, the scientist has served his suspension without pay, but is forbidden indefinitely from discussing grizzly bear matters with anyone beyond his immediate superiors. —Andy Stahl

Dombeck’s Legacy

“The days have ended when the forest may be viewed only as trees and trees viewed only as timber. The soil and the water, the grasses and the shrubs, the fish and the wildlife, and the beauty that is the forest must become integral parts of resource managers’thinking and actions.” A quarter-century ago, Senator Hubert Humphrey made this promise as chief sponsor of the 1976 National Forest Management Act. But not until this year has a U.S. Forest Service chief taken significant steps to implement Humphrey’s words.

A trio of new rules governing national forest management highlights Mike Dombeck’s tenure as chief. Most prominent are rules that protect wildlands from new roads and commercial logging. These roadless rules will ensure that about 50 million acres of public forests not yet put under the yoke of development remain as wilderness. Except for rare allowances for tree removal to prevent imminent catastrophic forest fires or to preserve endangered species, the roadless rules are fundamentally conservative. They will preserve the on-the-ground status quo for millions of backcountry acres.

No less significant, but enjoying a much lower public profile, are new rules to govern management of the Forest Service’s vast network of forest roads. The roads rules require each national forest to retain only those roads necessary to access the forest for today’s uses. Many forest roads built for yesteryear’s logging no longer warrant the maintenance expenses to keep them open and safe. These roads will be decommissioned over time, focusing the agency’s scarce maintenance dollars on the roads used by the visiting public.

The roads rules will resolve many of the Forest Service’s most nagging environmental ills. Fifty years of exuberant logging across the mountainous West have left a spaghetti-like network of roads more than 300,000 miles long. These roads are a major source of erosion into streams and noxious weed invasions into the backcountry. Timber dollars built the roads originally, while subsequent logging dollars kept them maintained. But as logging levels plummeted on the national forests, dropping by three-quarters in the last decade, so too has road maintenance money.

Poor road maintenance contributed to the devastating landslides in Oregon and Idaho national forests during the heavy rains of 1996. In FSEEE’s Torrents of Change video documentary, Forest Service scientists and managers explained that roads often cause more and bigger landslides by funneling water onto slide-prone slopes. Siuslaw National Forest Supervisor Jim Furnish appeared in Torrents of Change to promote his new Siuslaw roads policies that had successfully lessened landsliding on recently decommissioned roads. Not coincidentally, Dombeck handpicked Furnish to be deputy chief of the Forest Service and placed him in charge of fashioning the new national road management and roadless area rules. He has certainly justified Dombeck’s confidence in giving him the biggest promotion (from forest supervisor to deputy chief) in Forest Service history.

New rules to implement NFMA’s forest planning duties complete the rule set. Congress passed NFMA to reform the Forest Service’s fixation on logging at all costs. The law placed new limits on clear-cutting, capped logging levels at no more than sustained-yield levels and required the Forest Service to involve the public when preparing plans to govern management of each national forest. National Forest Products Association lobbyist Doug MacCleery led the timber industry’s campaign in opposition to the 1979 NFMA rules written by the Carter administration. After his appointment as deputy assistant secretary of agriculture under President Reagan, MacCleery lost no time in rewriting NFMA rules in 1982 to accomplish what he had been unable to achieve while employed by the timber industry. MacCleery’s rules remained in place for eighteen years, and although MacCleery had to step down from his administration post when President Clinton gained office, he managed to secure a high-ranking civil service job within the Forest Service as deputy director of timber management, where he works today.

This fall, the Clinton administration finally replaced MacCleery’s rules after several false starts. The NFMA rules eliminate MacCleery’s requirement that forest planning calculate the costs of environmental protection measured in foregone timber volume. This tradeoff analysis preoccupied Forest Service planners throughout the 1980s as they machinated numbers of questionable reliability to try to prove that protecting water quality, scenery, wildlife and recreation were not worth the trouble.

Though long on flowery language about sustainability, the new NFMA rules are notably short on rules as such. For example, missing are any limits on clear-cut sizes, which NFMA requires be addressed in the rules. The Forest Service asserts it will deal with clear-cut sizes in its internal manual, which is not subject to public review or comment. In the absence of a public rule limiting clear-cut sizes, it is questionable whether the Forest Service legally will be able to clear-cut at all.

Earlier Forest Service efforts to revise the 1982 NFMA rules focused on their protection for species viability, which was the lynchpin of spotted owl litigation in the late 1980s. The new rules add considerably to the analytical process required to assess species viability. And they appear to maintain the fundamental duty established by the 1979 rules (and retained, after a tough congressional fight, in MacCleery’s 1982 rules) to protect species viability.

Good policies and rules at the national level of the Forest Service are a first step. But unless these new directives are embraced by managers in the field, they may be of no more use than the paper on which they are written. —Andy Stahl

Forest Magazine | FSEEE