Summer 2006. Dismantling the National Forest Management Act. Tongass puts roads before timber sales.
The Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands have few trees, making them a good test case for new forest planning regulations. Photos courtesy Jess Alford.
GUTTING ANOTHER LAW
They had to search high and low, but at last they decided they had found it: the unit of the national forest system with the fewest natural resource concerns, and the smallest public constituency. The Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands, in southeast Colorado and southwest Kansas, are now the test case for the Bush administration’s latest assault on the nation’s bedrock environmental laws—in this case, the National Forest Management Act.
The new forest planning regulation, published in the winter of 2005, is the centerpiece of Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey’s plan to reorient our national forests toward timber production and away from public accountability. The new rule is a dramatic revision of what a forest plan has been under the National Forest Management Act, which has provided guidelines for the plans since 1982. It is intended to eviscerate the wildlife and watershed protections that have delayed logging and mining projects throughout the country.
The new Cimarron and Comanche forest plan is purely aspirational—containing none of the binding standards found in the 1984 plan. The plan specifies goals, but the public will no longer be able to hold the government accountable for achieving—or violating—those goals. The viability rule, which required the agency to insure the viability of all vertebrate species, is gone, replaced with vague language about protecting “a diversity of species.”
The National Forest Management Act was conceived in response to a series of controversies in the early 1970s over clear-cutting and other management practices that betrayed what many believed to be the Forest Service’s preference for timber harvesting over other modes of management. When the National Forest Management Act was approved by the Senate in 1976, Senator Hubert Humphrey, its chief author, stated, “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.”
The act represented a sea change for the Forest Service. Prior to 1976, the agency had essentially been given a blank check. Gifford Pinchot’s dream in founding the Forest Service was to secure future forest wealth by replacing the rapacious railroad barons and ignorant backwoodsmen and settlers with educated bureaucratic experts who would have the wisdom to protect national forests for the public good. But as time went on, Forest Service policies diverged far from what the public perceived to be good.
The National Forest Management Act forced the Forest Service to be accountable to the public interest through the creation of forest plans. These plans would be created using a specific procedure, involving the public as well as an interdisciplinary team of scientists. Plans would make certain decisions about land use. Individual projects—from timber sales to building outhouses—would be created in compliance with the forest plan.
The act left the details of how to write the plans up to the Forest Service, and over the next six years the agency struggled through a series of drafts to arrive at a clear rule that would translate congressional intent into agency action. The 1982 rule, finalized by the Reagan administration, has governed forest planning ever since. The requirement to maintain viable populations of all vertebrate species has had particularly wide-ranging repercussions on forest management. The spotted owl lawsuits, which resulted in dramatic declines in logging throughout the Pacific Northwest and sent shockwaves through the national forest system in the early 1990s, were based on lawsuits over maintaining owl viability.
Many in the Forest Service have come to view forest plans as a burdensome and costly shackle on their ability to act quickly. These people would prefer a return to the days when the agency could act without being held accountable to standards that protect wildlife, streams and the public interest. The timber industry is even less fond of these rules, and ever since former industry lobbyist Rey rose to power as Undersecretary of Agriculture, they have been hoping to rewrite the rules to increase logging.
Because the Cimarron and Comanche are treeless grasslands, the Forest Service will not have to make decisions about which areas are suitable for timber harvest and clear-cutting, as required by the National Forest Management Act. This is one of the main reasons why the Forest Service has chosen them as its test case. The new regulations propose to eliminate forest plan review under the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires that the Forest Service prepare an environmental impact statement for each “major federal action.” The environmental impact statement process requires extensive public input, as well as comprehensive review of what effect proposed actions might have on the environment. The Forest Service claims that since the new forest plans make no decisions, they are no longer “actions.”
Rey and his timber industry cronies hope they will have an easier time making this case without the controversial and legally complicated timber issues. They also hope that the Cimarron and Comanche’s remoteness will help ease acceptance of the new regulations. In their timber-hungry eyes, these prairies are just wastelands.
Early settlers who failed to understand the fragile character of the area’s arid landscape did turn it into a wasteland for a time. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the plains were settled, was an unusually wet period and settlers believed that rain would follow their plows westward. But when one of the West’s periodic droughts hit in the 1930s, natural systems that had buffered climatic change for millennia were gone.
The buffalo and wolves had been hunted nearly to extinction, the prairie dogs poisoned, and most importantly, the rich soil horizons that had been held together by the roots of drought-tolerant grasses had been torn up by plows making way for wheat fields. The drought brought farming to a halt as the soil blew away—causing the dust storms and mass migrations immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie’s ballads.
As part of a massive attempt to rebuild the economy in the 1930s, New Deal legislation authorized the government to purchase land in affected areas, both to give landowners needed cash and to restore the damaged soil. The lands ended up in the national forest system as national grasslands. This public land is the last remnant of the great prairies that once stretched from Canada to Mexico—and it is still threatened by overgrazing, oil and gas development and prairie dog poisoning campaigns.
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics is determined to hold the managers of our public land accountable for preserving our precious natural heritage—be it our well-known national forests or these little-known prairie jewels. FSEEE has submitted detailed comments on the Draft Forest Plan for the Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands, aimed at ensuring that the Forest Service fulfills its statutory duty to manage these rare fragments of short-grass prairie for the benefit of future generations of Americans, and prevents a repeat of the disaster of the 1930s.—Forrest Fleischman
ROADBLOCKS
Thanks to a U.S. Forest Service whistleblower, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has discovered that the Forest Service is reopening and authorizing major reconstruction for a number of old logging roads on the Tongass National Forest. These roads would be used to haul timber from logging projects that are still in the planning stage. The Forest Service provided no public notice or analysis for these roads prior to the reconstruction, making the roads illegal under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Appeals Reform Act.
Two of the roads are associated with the Overlook timber sale, located on Mitkof Island in southeast Alaska. FSEEE and Forest Service biologist Glen Ith administratively appealed the project, arguing that the Forest Service was required to allow public input and also that it needed to prepare an environmental analysis prior to allowing the major road reconstruction. In response to FSEEE’s appeal, the Forest Service withdrew the challenged decision, explaining that the roadwork “could be described more clearly to the public.”
Because the Overlook logging roads remain in place, and similar roadwork is under way elsewhere on the Tongass, FSEEE filed suit against the Forest Service in April, 2006. FSEEE is challenging five road reconstruction projects, arguing that the Forest Service is required to seek public notice or input as well as an environmental analysis before it proceeds with major road reconstruction. FSEEE intends to seek a preliminary injunction to force the Forest Service to suspend roadwork scheduled for this spring. —Marc Fink