Winter 2003. The election, direction for a new fire plan and Bush rallies to bring down the Northwest Forest Plan.

Public Lands Purgatory

With war, taxes and homeland security dominating the national agenda, the environment was a no-show in November’s midterm congressional elections. Nonetheless, expect the environment to be front and center on the new Congress’s agenda.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans will continue to control the agenda and chair environmental committees. Perhaps the most significant House environmental change of leadership is the retirement of Resources Committee chairman Jim Hansen, a Utah Republican. Leadership of that pivotal committee has traditionally rested in the hands of a legislator from a natural-resource-dependent western state, such as Alaska or Utah. Unless one of the committee’s ranking Republicans is willing to exchange chairs (e.g., Don Young, an Alaska Republican, giving up his Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair), the new chairperson may be an easterner or, even more provocatively, a Californian. Representative Elton Gallegly, a real estate broker from the Los AngelesÐarea suburb of Simi Valley, is the highest-ranking Republican on the Resources Committee who is not already a committee chair (House rules prohibit a member from chairing two committees). Gallegly’s voting record is mixed on the environment, which, should he become chairman, would be a striking change from his two predecessors who trumpeted their 0 percent League of Conservation Voters ratings.

Other possibilities for leadership of House resources are John Duncan of Tennessee, Joel Hefley or Scott McInnis of Colorado, or Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland. There’s not much to choose from among this foursome—all have worse environmental voting records than Gallegly. Give the nod to Hefley if Gallegly doesn’t get the post just to keep the position safely in the hands of a westerner.

It is, of course, in the Senate where leadership changes hands wholesale. With at least fifty-one Senate Republicans, the GOP retakes control of the Senate it thought was theirs two years ago before Jim Jeffords, the Vermont Independent, jumped ship. However, leadership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, with jurisdiction over the U.S. Forest Service, will not go to its former chairman, Frank Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who traded his Senate seat for the governor’s office. That leaves Pete Domenici of New Mexico next in line. But Domenici may choose to lead the influential Budget Committee, where he is also the ranking member, over Energy and Natural Resources. Next in line is Oklahoman Don Nickles, proud owner of a 0 percent League of Conservation Voters voting record, but with Nickles also holding the position of party whip, the leadership of this key committee may end up in the hands of Idaho’s Larry Craig.

Regardless of whether Craig chairs the full committee or simply resumes his position as Forests and Public Land Management Subcommittee chairman, he will be in the catbird seat on forest policy for at least the next two years. Although Craig is without his able assistant Mark Rey, now undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the Forest Service, Rey is only a phone call away. Expect these two political veterans to work closely as they resume their efforts to rewrite national forest policy.

First on the new Congress’s forest policy agenda will be President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative, which failed to gain sufficient support in the Democratic-controlled Senate to reach the floor for a vote. It will not be so this time around. The new leadership on the Senate side will move the president’s bill to the floor as quickly as possible, probably as an amendment to the Interior Appropriations Bill, making a filibuster by Democrats an unlikely long shot.

Negotiations on a forest fuels reductions bill in the House between leading Democrats (George Miller of California and Oregon’s Peter DeFazio) and Republicans almost resulted in a compromise acceptable to both sides this year. With House Democrats no longer able to rely on their Senate colleagues for leverage, expect House Republicans to walk away from the bargaining table and move a bill of their own liking. It will fall to moderate House Republicans, primarily from the East and southern California, to leaven the pro-timber industry extremists within their caucus. Their willingness to do so will be wholly determined by the constituent pressure they receive at home.

The Agriculture Department is also likely to change its strategy to take advantage of the more propitious Congress. Rey was forced to use the cumbersome and inherently temporary process of administrative rule changes to promote his agenda. Now he has a real chance to go after the trio of environmental laws that have shaped Forest Service policy for thirty years—the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act. While Rey probably won’t get wholesale repeal of these statutes, he will send to the Hill a ream of technical exemptions that nickel-and-dime the laws to death. That strategy will force his opponents to pick and choose their targets, virtually guaranteeing that some of Rey’s agenda will become the new law of the land.

Old Growth: Regime Change

After closed-door negotiations with the timber industry, the Bush administration announced in late October that it would amend the Northwest Forest Plan to eliminate rules that protect old-growth forests in Oregon, Washington and northern California. Targeted by the White House are portions of 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which resolved a decade-long legal and political fight over the fate of ancient forests.

The old-growth forest saga began in the 1970s with the discovery that old forests are ecologically distinct from young forests and that these differences have implications for plants and animals. In 1981, in the seminal research report on old-growth forests, U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State University scientists reported that some species “may require old-growth to maintain viable populations.” Determining which species and how much old-growth forest they need preoccupied researchers, forest managers, politicians and activists for more than twenty years.

The Forest Service spent the 1980s answering these questions in its own way, by logging as much of the old-growth forests as possible. Logging of Douglas-fir old-growth forests peaked in the middle of the decade at 6 billion board feet a year—about 1 million truckloads and 150,000 acres.

Although hundreds of species live in the old growth, scientists focused their studies on one, the northern spotted owl. The owl came to symbolize—politically, legally and scientifically—the fight over ancient forests.

It took a series of environmental lawsuits and injunctions in the late 1980s and early 1990s to slow the old-growth logging juggernaut. At every turn during this legal battle, the Forest Service sought to minimize the scope of the issues. The agency focused its analysis on one species only, the spotted owl, and tried to sweep the hundreds of others under the rug, notwithstanding its own rules requiring that the viability of all species be protected.

In 1992, District Judge Bill Dwyer put a stop to the Forest Service’s obfuscation. He ordered an end to all old-growth timber sales until the agency put in place a protection scheme for all the creatures that call old-growth forests home, not just the spotted owl.

The Forest Service empanelled a scientific analysis team led by the soon-to-be chief of the agency, Jack Ward Thomas, to make recommendations in response to Dwyer’s order. The team identified species linked to old-growth forests, evaluated the viability of each species under five different forest management scenarios and looked at options to protect species whose viability was threatened. The 1992 team warned that there was “little or no scientific information on ecology, life history, and habitat relationships” available for many of the species.

The team identified 312 plants, 149 invertebrates, 112 stocks of anadromous fish, four species of resident fish and ninety terrestrial vertebrates “closely associated” with old-growth forests. Given the paucity of data with which it had to work, the team was forced to make qualitative assessments of the risks posed to these species by various logging and old-growth forest protection alternatives. Data were so sparse for some classes of species, such as nonvascular plants, that the team warned that “viability could only be rated with great uncertainty, if at all.” In sum, the team found that sixty-seven species (excluding invertebrates and fish) faced a moderate or high risk to their viability if the logging enjoined by Dwyer were allowed to go forward. Including invertebrates and fish boosted this number to 328 species.

Two years later, in 1994, the Clinton administration released the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan called for a regime of surveys designed to protect old-growth species whose viability was in doubt while concurrently filling the information gaps that had plagued Thomas’s team. For some species, such as the red tree vole, the plan required that prospective logging sites be surveyed for voles and, if found, habitat protected for the vole. For other species, the surveys were designed to gather information across broad landscapes, rather than protect species from particular logging projects.

From the outset, however, high-ranking Forest Service officials decided to ignore the plan’s survey requirements. Biologists were told to return to the office and suspend survey operations. Instructions issued to exempt species from the plan’s survey requirements, and most of the broad, landscape surveys were never completed. It didn’t take long before Dwyer again intervened to hold the Forest Service’s feet to the fire.

In 1999, Dwyer ruled the plan’s survey requirements were “clear, plain, and unmistakable.” He explained that “far from being minor or technical violations, widespread exemptions from the survey requirements would undermine the management strategy on which the plan depends. The surveys are designed to identify and locate species; if they are not done before logging starts, plants and animals listed in the Plan will face potentially fatal loss of protection.”

The Bush administration’s answer to Dwyer, who died in 2002, is simple—return old-growth policy to the 1980s and recommence logging. As far as Bush and his political appointees are concerned, old-growth forests need a regime change. —Andy Stahl

Forest Magazine | FSEEE