andystahl

House Natural Resource Committee Republicans have floated a “discussion draft” of a county payments bill. It would phase out the current system of payments from the Treasury to be replaced by mandatory payments from national forest gross receipts. This scheme will surely cost the Treasury much more than the current payments.

The reason is simple. In most national forests, it costs the Forest Service substantially more than a dollar to produce a dollar of revenue. The bill tries to reduce these costs by eliminating most environmental laws. But the laws aren’t the source of the problem — the high-value trees have mostly been logged. The national forests, especially in the West, are not productive places to grow timber.

The bill would also create a new legal mechanism that allows counties to sue the Secretary of Agriculture to force him to spend whatever it takes to produce the necessary receipts.

The bill would mean the end of stewardship contracting in most places. No longer would the Forest Service afford to use timber value to purchase work in the woods. The counties’ mandatory revenue payments would soak up all the timber value.

Environmental groups will also blister the bill because it repeals NFMA, NEPA and the ESA. I don’t know why (as the courts have said it “breathes discretion at every pore”), but the bill even repeals the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act. And the bill exempts national forest logging and other revenue-generating projects from any and all review in the courts.

As a “discussion draft,” it is sure to engender a lot of discussion. But it is not a serious piece of legislation that will see the President’s desk in this Congress.

Oregon’s longest-serving senator, Mark Hatfield, died yesterday at 89. As a youngster, I remember my mother campaigning for Hatfield in his first election to the U.S. Senate (1967), notwithstanding her life-time Democratic Party affiliation. As Oregon’s governor, Hatfield had opposed the Vietnam War, and that was enough to earn my mom’s support. Later, as an adult, I got my own chance to see him at work.

The first time was during the Mapleton litigation, circa 1982. My employer, the National Wildlife Federation, sought to reform logging practices in the steep and erosion-prone Oregon Coast Range. For a generation, the Forest Service had paid little heed to its own scientists who warned that clearcut logging and roadbuilding would accelerate mass wasting and landslides. When environmental disclosure documents fabricated erosion calculations, we sued and won a court injunction stopping timber sales on the Mapleton Ranger District. Throughout the lawsuit and its aftermath, I made it a point to stay in constant contact with Senator Hatfield natural resources staff. Sure enough, the Senator used his Appropriations Committee chairmanship to attach a rider that allowed buy-back timber sales (sales returned to the government due to purchaser speculative bidding) to go forward, notwithstanding the court’s order. It was a measured legislative response (we had not sought to stop these sales in the first instance) to the beginnings of an inexorable reformation in Coast Range logging practices.

A couple years later, Hatfield presided over a fractured Oregon delegation as it passed the 1984 Oregon Wilderness Bill. His office vetted every roadless area included in the bill, which, among other things, gave Siuslaw coastal rainforests their first (and, so far, only) wilderness protection.

Although Hatfield did not have any great interest in forest or environmental policy — his scope was much broader — his last act as a legislator was the protection of Opal Creek’s ancient forests.

In today’s era when many elected officials seem less leaders than supplicants, Hatfield stood tall as a true Oregon statesman.

This week, in a 3-0 opinion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Forest Service’s use of a deer habitat suitability model was “arbitrary and capricious” because key numbers in the model were altered without any rational explanation. The case is a testament to the persistence of Greenpeace’s Larry Edwards, a Sitka resident, the advocacy skills of co-plaintiff Cascadia Wildlands Project (one of my favorite grassroots outfits for its combination of smarts and passion) and their legal counsel’s (Chris Winter of Crag Law Center) talents.

It is the back story that it is especially poignant to me.

That story begins six years ago, when Tongass wildlife biologist Glen Ith emailed me aerial photographs taken by an Alaska Department of Fish and Game employee. The photos showed on-going logging road construction to access the Overlook project area. Overlook was an old-growth forest timber sale that is prime winter range habitat for Sitka black tail deer. What caught Glen’s eye was that the Forest Service had not yet completed the Overlook NEPA analysis, but had already started building the roads. Turns out that there were several million dollars that Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) had earmarked for Tongass road work; money that if not spent by fiscal year’s end would be lost to the Forest Service, and incur Stevens’ displeasure. Overlook’s NEPA documents were behind schedule, but that didn’t stop the road engineers from moving forward. [NB: The conspiracy to spend the money was broader than the engineers alone, including district and forest-level planning staff, line officers, and contracting officials.]

Glen and FSEEE filed suit, challenging the Overlook and Traitors Cove (another site of illegal “advance” work) road building. It was the first-ever environmental lawsuit by a Forest Service employee. We won. The Forest Service retaliated, suspended Glen from work, and eliminated his job. Several days thereafter, Glen passed away from sudden heart failure.

Early on in our roads litigation, Glen told me that the Tongass was using irrational numbers in its deer habitat capability model. He wanted to cure the errors. We agreed the on-going roads case wasn’t the place to do so, primarily because the issue was not ripe as the timber sale environmental reviews were not complete. Glen said he would try to work internally to fix the modeling problem, but he wasn’t confident he would be successful. He believed the errors were intentionally designed to allow the Forest Service to defend logging high-value old-growth forest habitat.

Glen assiduously documented the problems with the deer habitat model; documents that Greenpeace’s Larry Edwards later found in the administrative records. Glen also administratively appealed the Scott Peak sale on these grounds.

Larry Edwards dedicated this week’s court victory to Glen’s memory.

Last week the Colville and Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forests released their “proposed actions,” a new step in NFMA planning preceding the draft EIS and proposed forest plan.

This gem from both plans (the plans appear identical — only the maps differ) illustrates that adding more process does not make plans any more timely:

While the U.S. demand for timber remains relatively high and is expected to increase in the future (USDA FS 2000), timber harvests from 1990 to 2002 in Washington have declined by 39 percent (Washington State Department of Natural Resources 2004). United States lumber markets have relied increasingly on foreign imports, such as from Canada, to help offset declining timber harvests in the state. Softwood lumber imports into the Seattle Customs District from 1992 to 2002 have increased by 11 percent (Warren 2004), while inflation adjusted wholesale prices for Douglas-fir 2x4s have dropped by 33 percent (Warren 2004).

Washington DNR has issued no fewer than five state-wide timber harvest reports since the 2004 report cited here. And Deb Warren has published five more annual statistical summaries, up through 2009, since the 2004 version.

Lo and behold, using the more up-to-date statistics shows that softwood lumber imports into the Seattle Customs District have dropped 70% since 2002 — a far different picture from the 11% increase claimed in the already out-of-date plan.

I suspect that these “proposed actions” were actually written several years ago and have been gathering dust on the shelves while the Forest Service tried to sort out its planning process. Rather than up-date these documents, the FS just slid them out the door with nary a glance.

Just one more illustration of how silly it is for the FS to bite off more planning than it can chew.

Tomorrow is the deadline for commenting on the Forest Service’s draft fire retardant EIS.

FSEEE’s comments can be read here. The associated spreadsheet collects together national forest-level data over an 11-year period on initial attack success rates, numbers of fires by size class, and retardant use. These data are the basis for FSEEE’s statistical analysis of retardant effectiveness.

Here is our take-home message:

“The fact of the matter is that each and every year the Forest Service drops millions of gallons of a toxic chemical slurry, predictably killing about a half-dozen air personnel while jeopardizing dozens of protected plant and animal species, all for a program that could best be characterized as faith-based firefighting. The Forest Service can and should do better.”

At midnight tonight, NFMA planning ceases to exist. All forest planners will be furloughed. No more collaborations, assessments, EIS writing, model-building, monitoring, or map-making. Will the sun still rise on Monday morning without NFMA planning? Will the deer still browse and the birds still sing? Will trees still grow, die, burn, and rot without planning to guide them?

Tune in next week to find out.

Last week, after attending the NFMA roundtable in DC, my 12-year-old daughter McKenzie and I had dinner with Dan Sarewitz, his wife Erica Rosenberg and their 10-year-old son Jonah. Erica and I have known each other since her tenure on the House Natural Resources Committee staff where she helped shepherd the first iteration of Secure Rural Schools through Congress. Jonah and I have played ping pong a couple of times — he’ll be really good some day!

Although I have read several of Dan’s writings on science policy, this was our first meeting (actually, we met the day before dinner on Connecticut Avenue as McKenzie and I walked to the metro after visiting the national zoo — small world, indeed).

Dan asked me a question that has defied easy analysis for twenty years. Did winning the spotted owl lawsuits do more harm than good? I invite your thoughts. I’ll save mine for the next post.

In 1990, with one round of NFMA plans under its belt (but not yet knowing the wheels were about to come off), the Forest Service critiqued its planning process. The first recommendation to issue from that critique was to “Simplify, Clarify, and Shorten the Planning Process.”

Does the proposed new rule do so? The 1982 (aka, the current process) rule has 15,548 words. The proposed rule has 15,227 words. For perspective, the “unworkable” 2000 rule had 13,300 words. With those statistics, I doubt the new rule simplifies, clarifies or shortens.

[Updated — The 2012 rule has 13,252 words.]

BTW, my proposed K.I.S.S. rule has 1,400 words.

SECOND UPDATE — The FS planning blog is working now.

UPDATE — The FS’s planning rule blog appears to be back on-line. Peter Williams ([email protected]) is moderating it. Still no comments from anyone on the new rule.

Thursday, 2/10, saw the Forest Service unroll its proposed new forest planning rule. The rule’s unveiling was featured on the FS’s homepage. Media from coast-to-coast covered the event. And the public was invited to comment on the new rule, including on the planning rule blog.

Previous blog posts had received anywhere from several to several dozen comments, so I expected the rule’s release to stimulate some vigorous debate.

By Tuesday, 2/15, not a single comment had been posted on the FS’s blog. What’s up with that, I wondered? So I posted a comment (well, re-posted something cynical I had already placed here).

Now I know the FS moderates its blog, just as NCFP does. But by day’s end, nothing had appeared. So I emailed the blog moderator. Got the following response:

I will be out of the office starting 02/13/2011 and will not return until
08/15/2011.

I’m on detail to CEQ through mid August. If you have questions about the
planning rule please contact Megan Wertz ([email protected]), Linda
Parker ([email protected]) or Martha Twarkins ([email protected]).

We really do want your comments . . . we’re just not home to receive them.