July/August 2001. Sierra plan success charted. Dear Undersecretary, I don’t envy you.

FSEEE Helps Shape Sierra Plan

Land management in the Sierra Nevada should improve under an amended forest plan approved in January by the U.S. Forest Service. The record of decision affects the 11.5 million acres of the eleven national forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Modoc Plateau and is the product of a substantial three-year contribution by Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Assuming a sincere effort by the Bush administration to implement the specific elements of the decision, the improvements include:

• Special recognition of the value of old-growth ecosystems and the protection of 40 percent of the Sierra landscape as “old forest emphasis areas.”

• Reductions in logging, from 314 million board feet per year to about 187 million board feet annually. Most logging would be done to reduce the risk of high-intensity wildfires by thinning small-diameter trees and other fuel treatments.

• Increased levels of protection for a variety of wildlife species, including at-risk amphibians, California spotted owl, northern goshawk, willow flycatcher and Pacific fisher.

• Increased protection of aquatic values through the establishment of “critical aquatic refuges,” wider riparian conservation areas and adoption of more stringent management standards.

• Greater commitment to monitoring and adaptive management, including a more cautious approach in using vegetative treatments for “forest health” purposes.

In May 1997, FSEEE formed an interdisciplinary team of natural resource professionals and scientists to develop a Sierra Nevada plan that emphasized the conservation of old growth and fish and wildlife.

In November 1998, under FSEEE’s sponsorship, this team completed the first phase of the project with the release of a draft plan for peer review. At about the same time, the U.S. Forest Service announced that it was initiating a public process to amend plans for eleven national forests in the Sierra Nevada.

In December 1998, the Forest Service and FSEEE met and agreed to collaborate on the development of an alternative for the environmental impact statement. It would be based on the management concepts contained in the FSEEE-sponsored plan. In January 1999, FSEEE retained one of its members, W. Dean Carrier, a wildlife biologist and Forest Service employee for twenty-three years, to help finalize the FSEEE plan and facilitate the collaboration with the agency.

Through much of 1999 and 2000, FSEEE met with team members to discuss appropriate elements to include in the management strategy and to ensure proper characterization of FSEEE’s proposals.

In November 1999, FSEEE completed revisions of its plan based on the extensive peer review comments, published its final plan on the Web (www.fseee.org/sierra/sierra-report.htm) and submitted it to the Forest Service. The report was later published in hard-copy format. More than fifty Forest Service employees and a total of more than 100 natural resource professionals from various agencies and institutions contributed to this report.

At about this time, FSEEE also met with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials to explain FSEEE’s management strategy for the Sierra. The Fish and Wildlife Service later used some of the elements of the FSEEE plan to construct an alternative for the environmental impact statement, called Alternative Eight. That plan was again modified and formed the basis for the January 12 record of decision.

In May 2000, FSEEE formed an independent team of scientists to review the eight alternatives and the environmental analysis included in the draft environmental impact statement. The team’s review comments were compiled and submitted to the Forest Service for consideration in August 2000.

During this time, FSEEE’s own plan garnered extensive support from the scientific community. That support included submission of a joint letter (www.fseee.org/sierra/sierra-225scientists.htm) to the president on August 11 signed by Don C. Erman, chairman of the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, and 225 other leading scientists nationwide.

Although the FSEEE plan was not adopted as a package by the Forest Service, we are pleased that the new Sierra plan is consistent with many of the ideas put forward by the FSEEE team of natural resource professionals and scientists.

An Open Letter to the New Undersecretary of Agriculture

Dear Future Undersecretary of Agriculture,

I don’t envy your job as the Bush Administration’s point person for national forest issues. Your radical right constituency thinks the electorate issued a mandate to turn back the U.S. Forest Service’s clock to the good ol’ logging days. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as you well know. But good luck convincing the wise-use groupies. Their sense of desperation is palpable: four years is an impossibly small window of opportunity to reverse a generation of increasingly protective public land environmental policies.

Those zealously outraged at the Clintonites will call upon you to rescind protection for roadless areas, vacate new forest planning rules that emphasize ecosystem values and reopen the Northwest Forest Plan to increase old-growth forest logging. They’ll want you to replace Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and the other civil servants whose fingerprints are on these new policies.

But what your nominal supporters ask of you will be nothing compared to what the environmentalists have planned. To the every-tree-is-sacred crowd, you’ll be the devil incarnate. Before you’ve even moved into your new office, your timber beast résumé will be boldfaced in sky-is-falling fundraising letters from coast to coast. You’ll be accused of pro-timber, pro-mining and pro-livestock-grazing motives for every move you make, no matter how benign.

You’ll inherit a dispirited and cynical Forest Service sliced and diced into so many factions that you’ll need a dramatis personae to keep track of them. The embattled “ologists” feel distrusted by the foresters who themselves feel disillusioned by plummeting timber sale volumes. The women feel discriminated against by the men, who feel discriminated against by affirmative action. Line officers are so far removed from the land they manage it’s often hard for them to remember for which agency they work. And everyone’s day is spent in endless meetings doing endless planning to no end.

You’re not going to get much help from above, either. Try not to dwell on the fact that Bush’s dad presided over the biggest legal train wreck in public land history—the spotted owl. If Bush Jr. wants to head down the same path, there’s little you’ll be able to do about it.

So what to do? First, you’ll replace Dombeck. Regardless of whether you agree with his forest policies or not, the days when the Forest Service could remain independent from changes in the White House are over. National forest issues are simply too political to be left solely to career bureaucrats. You’ll need a chief with whom you can work and in whom you have confidence. And replacing Dombeck is the minimum you’ll have to do to placate your right wing.

Replacing Mike, however, does not mean you’re obligated to rescind his policies. In fact, if you can separate the man from his decisions, you’ll find many with which you agree. The new roads policy, for example, makes sense. No prudent forestland owner builds or maintains more roads than needed to get the job done, as the Forest Service does today. Roads are expensive to maintain, can be environmentally damaging and take land out of production, whether for timber, clean water, or wildlife habitat. They are a cost of management, and like all costs, should be minimized.

Maybe you’ll be able to bring some on-the-ground meaning to Dombeck’s vision of collaborative stewardship. Your predisposition to “active” forest management will find fertile ground in the urban-forest interface of the dry interior West, where fire risks are real and overstocked forests from fire exclusion are a natural disaster just waiting to ignite. Beware, however, that your best efforts to bring people together can easily be undercut by a single stupid old-growth timber sale or road into a pristine wild area. These will become the poster children for the environmental campaign to paralyze every move you make.

I hope you’ll come to see, as Dombeck has, that Americans want more recreation, clean water, solitude, beauty, wildlife and fish from their national forests than ever before. Meeting those needs should be your first priority. Make sure that the national forest visitor has fun, gains the spiritual re-creation that recreation is all about and learns a little something about forests and their ecology along the way.

Building a constituency that uses and cares about our national forests is what your public service should be all about. If you succeed in doing so, you’ll have done much to make the Forest Service an agency to be proud of. —Andy Stahl

Forest Magazine | FSEEE