Winter 2002. Fear mongering has no place in fire management. Judge orders hard look at stock use in Sierra.

Fear Mongering Has No Place in Forest

Few natural events are scarier than a raging forest fire, especially if it’s headed toward your home or community. The people of Montana’s Bitterroot valley tasted that fear a year ago when forest fires blackened hundreds of thousands of acres. Some lost their homes; thankfully none lost their lives.

Now the U.S. Forest Service is deciding how best to manage those burned forests. Ten or twenty years ago, that decision would have been simple: log all the wood that is economic to remove. Foresters believed then that salvaging burned trees had no environmental downside. After all, a dead forest is a dead forest; you can’t make it more dead by logging.

But it turns out that a burned forest is far from dead. Instead, it is like a newborn baby and struggles to grow from the moment the flames die out. As all parents know well, babies require constant and tender care. Physical abuse that an adult could tolerate will easily kill or permanently maim a newborn.

Like an infant, the land after a forest fire is fragile and delicate. Seeds are germinating and young plants are trying to get established in the fire-scorched soil. With few plant roots to bind the soil together, the land is easily eroded when winter snows melt. With much of the forest floor duff burned off, the soil is easily compacted from logging machinery and other vehicles.

The new, young forest must rely on the legacy of its parent as it grows. The burned trees provide essential nutrients as they fall and decay, rebuilding the soil’s organic layer lost to the fire. Wildlife find new homes in the dead trees and, for some species such as woodpeckers, an outstanding opportunity to expand their populations as they gorge on insects chomping on the dead wood. The long-term survival of some wildlife probably depends on these postfire population explosions to compensate for depressed numbers when food and resources are less available.

Salmon and trout are particularly vulnerable after a major forest fire. Fires highlight past management mistakes, such as unstable logging roads, by removing the vegetation that traps erosion, preventing it from reaching streams. Without this vegetative buffer, erosion into streams skyrockets after a fire, stressing and even killing fish. Any further erosion from salvage logging only exacerbates this already serious problem.

The Forest Service, faced with significant pressure from Montana’s congressional delegation and the timber industry, proposes to do to the recovering forest what the agency would never think of doing before the fires. The Bitterroot National Forest wants to more than double logging levels as a part of its burned area recovery plan. Logging would add roads, run heavy machinery over the landscape and remove trees at levels and in places that the Forest Service would not have touched before last year’s fires.

With today’s ecological knowledge of forests and fire, the Forest Service knows it cannot justify salvage logging as environmentally benign. Instead, it has created a fear-mongering straw man—the re-burn of the Bitterroot. Without significant salvage logging, the Forest Service claims, you will again feel the fear of fire bearing down upon your homes and children, if not next year, then twenty or thirty years from now.

Pure poppycock. Fires get started and are sustained by small fuels—twigs, needles, grass and saplings. Big tree boles, the type loggers want to cut, do not burn easily and add little, if any, to the risk of catastrophic forest fire. As Forest Service fire specialist Denny Truesdale noted in a C-SPAN interview last year, “Old growth is not the problem. What is needed is to take care of the underbrush and dry twigs. The majority of the material that we need to take out is not commercial timber.”

The future of the Bitterroot forest hangs in the balance. The Forest Service can choose to nurture the new forest born from catastrophe and struggling to grow. Or it can choose to exploit the last few dollars from the Bitterroot, setting back its recovery decades or, for some imperiled species, perhaps forever. Fear mongering over future fire threats has no place in this important debate.—Andy Stahl

Judge Orders Hard Look at Stock Use

Wilderness rangers have for years documented significant resource degradation resulting from overuse by commercial outfitters in popular lake basins, meadows and other fragile areas of California’s High Sierra. The Inyo and Sierra national forests have failed to protect these areas from further harm and instead have continued to allow commercial outfits to bring large numbers of stock animals into the wilderness. A court-ordered injunction in a case brought jointly by Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, the High Sierra Hikers Association and Wilderness Watch may help change that.

On November 1, a federal judge in the northern district of California ordered a 20 percent reduction in recreation use by commercial pack stations in portions of designated wilderness that the U.S. Forest Service has identified as problem areas where “current use is affecting resource quality.”

The federal injunction applies to the Ansel Adams and John Muir wildernesses, which together encompass about 800,000 acres along the highly scenic Sierra crest. These areas are extremely popular for hiking, backpacking, fishing, horse packing and other recreation. Their popularity has led the Forest Service to apply certain use limits, such as trailhead quotas that specify the maximum number of persons per day that may enter the wildernesses at each portal or trailhead. In recent years, the agency has come under increasing fire for its failure to apply those limits equitably to both commercial and noncommercial users.

The federal injunction came as a result of an earlier June 5 ruling by the same judge, Elizabeth LaPorte, that the Forest Service had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by issuing special-use permits to commercial pack outfits without first completing an analysis of the environmental impacts.

LaPorte also ordered the Forest Service to evaluate, for the first time, the cumulative environmental impacts associated with the many pack stations operating in the two wildernesses. The agency will have until 2005 to consider numbers of stock animals used by commercial outfits, limits on group size, trail suitability for various types of use, and other factors that the Forest Service has not previously evaluated in an open process with full public participation. The cumulative effects analysis may prove highly significant in that it opens the door to a number of changes in commercial uses that certain Forest Service employees, watchdog groups and others have requested for a long time.

In her ruling, LaPorte explained that “the pack stations [with only two exceptions] have no valid authorization to operate in the wilderness areas until compliance with NEPA is achieved.” To ensure Forest Service compliance with NEPA, LaPorte also ordered the Forest Service to prepare site-specific environmental analyses prior to issuing special-use permits to individual pack stations.

LaPorte’s ruling found “disturbing evidence of environmental degradation from stock usage” and stated this degradation “will be compounded with each successive season.” This finding led not only to the ordered reduction in commercial use by pack stations, but also to an additional requirement that the Forest Service accelerate its implementation of new trailhead quotas for commercial pack stations. In the past, the Forest Service has applied trailhead quotas to use by the general public, but not to most commercial outfitters.

This injunction hopefully will serve as a wake-up call to the Forest Service. In many ways, it merely serves to remind the agency of its legal obligations under NEPA. Now the real work begins. FSEEE intends to work with Forest Service decision-makers to fashion a lasting solution that recognizes the values for which these wildernesses were created while also allowing appropriate levels of recreation by the general public.

Julia Olson of Wild Earth Advocates in San Francisco and Pete Frost of the Western Environmental Law Center in Eugene, Oregon, represented FSEEE in the lawsuit.—Bob Dale

Forest Magazine | FSEEE