Here’s the link..thanks to Matthew Koehler.
Collaborative’s logging plan still controversial
By Mike Garrity – IR Your Turn | Posted: Tuesday, November 8, 2011
A Nov. 1 article in the Independent Record reported that a “collaborative” group developed and submitted to the Forest Service a proposal to log thousands of acres in and around an inventoried roadless area southwest of Lincoln. The article neglected to mention that the Forest Service proposed a similar timber sale called “Nevada Dalton” in the late 1990s. That project was halted when President Clinton’s Roadless Rule went into effect in 2001. Since both the Roadless Rule and the reasons for initially halting the project are even more valid now, the project should be dropped once again.
Despite an attempt by the Bush administration and corporate logging and mining interests, the Clinton-era Roadless Rule remains in effect and has just been bolstered by a recent decision of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, both the 9th and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeal have found the Roadless Rule to be valid and carry the force of law.
“Collaboration” by a small group of people — including those with commercial interests in for-profit timber mills — does not make a timber sale in national forests on inventoried roadless lands legal. These lands belong to all Americans, not just a handful of local Montanans, and the manner in which activities on these lands are conducted must therefore follow federal law.
But there are more problems with this proposal than just its intrusion into roadless lands.
According to a quote from one of the collaborators, this logging proposal will fix “… a forest that, because of 100 years of fire control and logging, is out of sync.” Yet, the article doesn’t explain how more logging will fix the problems caused by previous logging. Nor did it explain how a natural forest ecosystem can be “out of sync” with anything except the traditional Forest Service goals of “getting out the cut” to benefit the timber industry. Quite frankly, the public is being asked to simply accept the Bush-era political propaganda that we can make forests “healthy” by cutting them down.
Neither the collaborators nor the Forest Service explained how and what wildlife will supposedly benefit from more multimillion-dollar timber sales or the 6.5 miles of new logging roads and new noxious weed infestations that go with them.
The IR’s readers deserve to know what’s at stake here.
Lynx: The area proposed for logging is in federally designated critical habitat for lynx, currently listed as threatened and, thus, protected under the Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately, the article neglected to mention that logging destroys lynx habitat since it drives out the snowshoe hare and ground squirrels upon which lynx prey. The Forest Service’s own research shows that forests that have been logged are avoided by lynx.
Grizzly bears: The Forest Service admits that logging and the new roads that go with it will reduce important wildlife hiding cover and that similar logging on similar private lands has harmed big game and grizzly bear habitat. Yet, the agency and the collaborators who support the logging plan have not explained how reduction of existing cover levels on our national forests can possibly be called restoration.
Cost: The huge cost to taxpayers for this timber sale is glaringly omitted. A look at the Helena National Forest’s budget reveals that taxpayers lose over $2,000 an acre on commercial timber sales, so this 2,182-acre timber sale, including over 400 acres of clearcuts, could cost taxpayers over $4 million with little in return except the destruction of critical wildlife habitat.
Given the current national debate over government spending, we want to know why taxpayers are being asked to fund an expensive and destructive timber sale to marginally benefit logging companies.
And finally, after logging destroys the forest and stream habitat, will the Forest Service and collaborators then ask taxpayers for even more money to restore the habitat for lynx and grizzly bears?
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies will fully participate in the Dalton timber sale public process, and we encourage others who are concerned about the viability of native species and responsible federal spending to participate as well. We hope the Forest Service will answer our and all of the public’s questions and make a decision based on facts, science and the law, not political pressure to subsidize timber corporations.
Mike Garrity is executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
Note from Sharon.. here’s a link to the information on this project.
In the scoping doucment, I found this..
Summary of Treatments in Roadless Areas
Nevada Mountain IRA — 1,815 acres in the project area fall in this IRA. Proposed treatment includes prescribed burning on
405 acres, including non‐commercial hand slashing and pre‐treatment of the units.
Ogden Mountain IRA —4,906 acres in the project area fall in this IRA. Proposed treatment includes 248 acres of fuels reduction
by hand felling, and 2,482 acres of prescribed fire. The prescribed burning includes non‐commercial hand slashing and pre‐treatment of the units.
So the op- ed said
Since both the Roadless Rule and the reasons for initially halting the project are even more valid now, the project should be dropped once again.
But I see nothing in the 2001 Roadless Rule that would not allow fuels reduction (exception “To maintain or restore the characteristics of ecosystem composition and structure, such as to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects, within the range of variability that would be expected to occur under natural disturbance regimes of the current climatic period”); or prescribed burning.
Sounds like Mike Garrity has an anti-logging and anti-local jobs agenda going and is preparing his arguments for a court ordered obstruction to the proposed forest management plans. Some things really do remain the same from the 1990s.
Statements such as “after logging destroys the forest and stream habitat” kind of reveal his perspective. There are several more. To use these arguments as potential “wastes of taxpayer dollars” is why words such as “disingenuous” exist. I hope taxpayers aren’t stuck with his legal bills, in any instance.
Also, I wonder what Mr. Garrity’s academic credentials are and how long he has been employed and how much he is paid by his organization? This type of “environmentalism” has already cost our nation billions of dollars and millions of acres of healthy forestlands. At some point it has to stop — and hopefully for the right reasons.
Also not clear is whether lynx is actually present within the project area(s). When I last worked in Montana, there was an arbitrary elevational line that walled off all lands above as “Potential Lynx Habitat”. What was most noteworthy about those stands was that they were mostly dead and dying.
With grizzly bears having such a wide and varied historical range, how could one “harm” their habitats? Of course, the bears surely have their preferred habitats. It seems that the battle is more about “de-humanized habitats”, exclusively set aside for certain species only. Since those kinds of habitats are more “endangered” than the animals, that seems to be an underlying issue.
Just announcing that “logging destroys lynx habitat” doesn’t make it so. It would be more honest to specify which kinds of treatments in the project harms the habitat(s) in which ways. Sure, I’ll say that clearcutting IS “destruction”. Highgrading is usually pretty harmful but, forests grow back. Economical thinning doesn’t even approach “destruction” but, catastrophic wildfires, indeed, often do!