The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), a bill that would give permanent Wilderness protection to 23-million acres of roadless lands in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and Washington has just been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and 7 other senators, including Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara Boxer of California. The House version of NREPA was introduced last year and currently has 37 co-sponsors. 

What follows is an article about today’s NREPA introduction in the Senate from Friends of the Wild Clearwater. – mk

Washington D.C.- U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) in the Senate yesterday. The bill, S 3022, would give permanent wilderness protection to 23-million acres of America’s premier roadless lands in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and Washington, as well as designate about 1,800-miles of rivers and streams as Wild and Scenic. Fellow co-sponsors included: Sen. Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Durbin (D-IL), Sen. Markey (D-MA), Sen. Menendez (D-NJ), Sen. Reid (D-NV) Sen. Schumer (D-NY), and Sen. Shaheen (D-NH).

“We all depend on our forests and rivers for our health and wellbeing,” said Senator Whitehouse. “This legislation would preserve an important and productive wilderness for future generations, secure important habitat for wildlife, and help to reduce climate change in the process.”

Brett Haverstick, Education & Outreach Director for Friends of the Clearwater welcomed news of the legislation being introduced in the Senate. “Some of the most biologically diverse and important roadless wildlands and rivers in the Lower 48 are located in the Clearwater Basin of north-central Idaho. Future generations will look back one day and thank our elected leaders for permanently protecting some of the best wild country left in America.”

Singer-songwriter Carole King added that many Americans don’t know their taxpayer dollars are being used to destroy the last of these incredibly beautiful and important wild places that are owned by all Americans. “One result of not having NREPA has been a tremendous loss of populations among species such as wolverine, lynx, grizzly bear, fluvial Arctic grayling and bull trout. Plus protecting the Northern Rockies Greater Ecosystems will attract tourists from around the world, and, unlike logging, tourism is a sustainable economy that will benefit local communities for generations to come.”

Congresswoman Maloney said, “I’m pleased Sen. Whitehouse has brought NREPA to the attention of the Senate. This region’s native plants and animals are worthy of our country’s highest protective status for wild lands as permanent wilderness. NREPA will protect natural biological corridors, connect whole ecosystems, and restore more than 1-million acres of damaged habitat and watersheds.”

Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies thanked Senator Whitehouse and all of the cosponsors for introducing NREPA in the Senate. “The Northern Rockies are headwaters to three of our country’s major waterways that provide water to tens of millions of Americans — the mighty Columbia, Colorado and Missouri Rivers,” Mike Garrity explained. “The drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has reminded us just how essential clean water is to human health. These headwaters, which provide some of the cleanest water on the planet, deserve to be designated as permanent wilderness.”

Garrity also emphasized that the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act will save taxpayers millions of dollars annually by eliminating wasteful subsidies to the logging industry while protecting the vast forests that are some of our nation’s best and most effective tools to fight global warming. ”National Forests absorb an astounding 10% of the carbon that America creates and unlogged and old growth forests absorb the most carbon,” Garrity explained. “It makes no sense for Congress to continue to subsidize logging the nation’s few remaining roadless areas that President Clinton worked to protect with his Roadless Rule.”

Read the news release of NREPA being introduced in the House.

See a map of NREPA.

Learn more about NREPA.

A new report from the Swan View Coalition in Montana gives a thorough rundown on how the Flathead National Forest in particular – and the Forest Service and Congress in general – are using the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and other collaboration and “restoration” initiatives to keep its bloated road system and fool the public into thinking the problem in America’s forests is too many trees and not too many roads.

For those involved in bull trout and water quality issues, the report also documents ongoing road-related travesties in Bunker, Sullivan, Coal, and other key watersheds on the Flathead National Forest. The report also describes how the Flathead National Forest is trying to cheat its way out of road decommissioning and begin to instead rebuild roads decommissioned previously.

Read the full report here.

Executive Summary

In order to protect water quality and fish, the Flathead National Forest is required to either remove or monitor annually all culverts and bridges in roads closed in threatened bull trout habitat. Similarly, the Flathead is required to develop a monitoring plan for each road it chooses to simply close in providing Security Core habitat for threatened grizzly bear, rather than conducting the preferred reclamation by removing all stream-crossing structures.

Our investigation finds the Flathead has developed none of the required stream-crossing monitoring plans for roads closed to provide Security Core. Nor has it annually monitored stream-crossing structures on closed roads in bull trout habitat. Though the Forest Service set forth these requirements and the need for them, the Flathead has failed to implement them. Rather than correct the problem, it has instead set upon a course to do away with such requirements – as culverts and bridges continue to fail on roads both open and closed to motor vehicles.

This report will discuss how the Flathead tracks its roads and stream-crossing structures, discuss how it does and does not monitor them, and provide examples of the consequences when it fails to adequately manage them. It will conclude with recommendations on how to get the effort back on track rather than abandon it to the detriment of fish, wildlife and taxpayers.

Wow! Imagine that. Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.

Old-growth forests in the Northwest have the potential to make the extremes of climate change less damaging for wildlife. New research out of Oregon State University shows complex forests do a surprisingly good job of regulating temperature on the ground – even compared to fully mature tree plantations.

“On a sunny day, if you were sitting underneath them, you’d get a similar amount of shade,” says study co-author Matt Betts, an Ecologist at OSU.

But the kind of forest makes a big difference on temperature.

“The more structurally complex the forest, the more big trees, the more vertical layers – the cooler it was,” he says.

The research showed differences as much as 4.5 degrees on warm days. Old growth forests also held in heat during cold weather. Overall, these forests have a moderating effect on temperature extremes.

One reason, researchers suspect, is that tree plantations, even mature ones, don’t have nearly the understory material – small trees, shrubs, ground cover – as more complex stands. Nor do these single-age plantations have a lot of big trees – unlike old growth stands.

“We think one of the mechanisms causing this is thermal inertia,” Betts says. “That takes these trees longer to warm up and longer to cool down. And that could be providing some of the buffering capacity of these older forests.”

Betts says these stands of old growth could provide refuges for temperature-sensitive wildlife in the face of climate change.

“It gives us some hope that how we actually manage our forest, can influence positively those species that are declining,” he says.

The study was published Friday in Science Advances.

[The following is a press release from Friends of the Wild Swan and Alliance for the Wild Rockies. -mk]

Conservation groups Friends of the Wild Swan and Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed a lawsuit in the Portland federal district court challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s bull trout recovery plan.

The Plan fails to ensure the long-term survival and recovery of the species, ignores the best available science, ignores its own previous findings about the status of bull trout and what they need for recovery and instead relies on novel and inadequate criteria for recovery devoid of any objective population criteria.

For example, the plan allows an arbitrary 25% of bull trout local populations in the Coastal, Mid-Columbia, Upper Snake and Columbia Headwaters Units to be extirpated without consideration of whether those populations are significant genetically or essential to achieve recovery. This is a total reversal of the Service’s 2010 designation of bull trout critical habitat that identified unoccupied habitat that is essential for expanding, not contracting the range of bull trout.

At the time of listing (1998-1999) bull trout numbers had already been reduced by 60%; under this plan bull trout local populations can be lost yet bull trout will be “recovered”.

“This plan allows bull trout populations to decline even further and doesn’t address the looming threat of climate change,” said Arlene Montgomery, Program Director for Friends of the Wild Swan. “Our detailed comments that included relevant science and threats facing bull trout were ignored and the Service is continuing on a path that will lead to less fish than when they were listed. That’s not recovery.”

The focus of the recovery plan is to “effectively manage and ameliorate the primary threats in each of the six recovery units at the core area scale such that bull trout will persist in the foreseeable future.” However the plan does not contain habitat standards or population criteria so it is not possible to gauge whether threats are being “managed” and bull trout numbers are increasing.

Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies said, “The Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service needs to come up with a real recovery plan that addresses global warming instead of just saying climate change is going to cause a lot of bull trout to die and there is nothing we can do about it. Their plan is an extinction plan, not a recovery plan. The Fish and Wildlife Service also needs to address the other main threats to bull trout, habitat degradation caused by logging, mining and grazing.”

This case marks the 7th time in 20 years that these groups have sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to require them to comply with their obligations under the ESA to list bull trout, designate its critical habitat, and now establish a recovery plan for the species that will lead to their conservation, recovery and eventual de-listing.

Why Bull Trout are Important

Bull trout need the coldest, cleanest water of all salmonids. Their stringent habitat requirements make them an excellent indicator of water quality.

The Five C’s characterize good bull trout habitat:

• Clean water with very little fine sediment in the stream bottom.  Fine sediment fills up the spaces in the spawning gravel, restricts oxygen flow and smothers bull trout eggs.

• Cold water temperatures are very important for bull trout.  If water temperatures rise above 59 degrees F then it creates a thermal barrier that restricts migration and use of available habitats.

• Complex streams with intact riparian vegetation to provide shade, woody debris, bank stability and deep pools.

• Connected watersheds allow the fish to migrate.  Bull trout spawn and rear in stream habitats.  At about two years of age they migrate from their spawning stream and mature in lakes or rivers, traveling up to 150 miles.  They return to their natal stream to spawn but unlike salmon make the journey between stream and lake many times in their life.

• Comprehensive protection and restoration of bull trout habitat must done be throughout the range of this native fish.

The decline of bull trout is primarily due to habitat degradation and fragmentation; blockage of migratory corridors by roads, culverts or dams; poor water quality from warm temperature, sediment or pollutants; past fisheries management practices such as introductions and management of non-native fish; impoundments, dams, or water diversions; and non-native fish species competition and predation. Climate change is an additional threat to the cold water that bull trout need to survive.

I just saw these new photographs of the Jim’s Creek logging project on the Willamette National Forest posted on Facebook by Doug Heiken, who has sometimes commented on this blog.

Today, on Facebook, Doug wrote:

“The Forest Service logged the crap out of this old forest in 2008 in order to ‘save’ the old pines which are uncommon on the west side of the Cascades, but the thinned stands became vulnerable to winter winds that wiped out the very pines they hoped to protect. Now they want to log it again to “salvage” the down wood. Thankfully, some of the down trees will be used for stream restoration. Unfortunately, the FS wants to do more projects like this, only bigger. We would rather they focus on thinning young plantations instead of taking big risks by logging old forests.”

In the past, some of us have expressed concerns that ‘thinning’ forests makes them hotter, drier and windier…which aren’t exactly three positive outcomes, especially in an era of global climate change.

Date: March 31, 2016 at 4:03:32 PM MDT
To: [email protected]
Cc: Mary Erickson <[email protected]>

Please see the attached letter regarding the Gallatin Community Collaborative and our recommendation for the Gallatin Range Wilderness.  The letter is being provided on behalf of 14 organizations and 4 individuals.

March 29, 2016

RE: Gallatin Community Collaborative process

To Whom It May Concern:

We the undersigned organizations and citizens object to the Gallatin Community Collaborative (GCC) process. It is undemocratic and allows a small select group of locals to exert undue influence over Federal land management policy. We object to these efforts to exert local control over public lands that belong to all Americans. While local citizens will almost always have more opportunity to influence public land decision- making than do citizens living thousands or even hundreds of miles away, local-control groups like the GCC ensure the vast majority of citizens will be excluded from decisions made about their lands. Such “user group” driven processes lose sight of the fact that most Americans cherish their public lands for the benefits these lands provide to wildlife, plants, and ecosystem processes, rather than the desires of those who care mostly about their particular use or activities.

We support wilderness designation for the entire 229,000 acres roadless portion of the Gallatin Range that lies north of Yellowstone National Park on the Custer-Gallatin National Forest. The Gallatin Range is one of the premier unprotected national forest roadless areas in the nation and is a vital component of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem wildland complex. It may be the best remaining unprotected wildlife habitat in the entire national forest system. Half of the range north of Yellowstone is already “roaded and developed” and the remaining wildland should not be further fragmented or reduced in size in order to satisfy vested local interests. These lands belong to all Americans and all Americans should have equal opportunity to weigh in on their future.

Click here for a discussion about concerns with the Gallatin Community Collaborative debated previously on this blog.

(The following is a press release from Wilderness Watch. – mk)

MISSOULA, MONTANA – This week Wilderness Watch released a detailed analysis of the wilderness provisions found in Congressmen Rob Bishop’s (R- UT) and Jason Chaffetz’s (R-UT) discussion draft of their Public Lands Initiative (PLI) for dealing with public lands in eastern and southern Utah. Though the PLI proposes to designate some new Wildernesses, the new analysis shows that the PLI guts protections the Wildernesses would receive under the 1964 Wilderness Act, and includes numerous unprecedented harmful provisions never before found in any wilderness designation law.

“The dramatic and unprecedented nature of these provisions would strip from the Wildernesses in the PLI many of the protections afforded by the Wilderness Act,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch and a long-time Utah wilderness advocate. “The PLI would create nothing but WINOs,” Nickas added. “Wildernesses In Name Only.”

Wilderness Watch’s analysis focuses solely on the wilderness protection and wilderness stewardship provisions of the PLI. There are many other problematic provisions in the PLI, including poorly-drawn wilderness boundaries, giveaways to the oil and gas industry, land transfers and land giveaways, etc., but this analysis hones in only on the wilderness protection and stewardship provisions.

The full nine-page analysis is here.

“The PLI discussion draft unfortunately includes bad provisions that would damage Wilderness with language on wildlife management, motorized access,buffer zones and military overflights,” said Kevin Proescholdt, Wilderness Watch’s conservation director. “Some of those provisions have appeared previously in other wilderness bills. But the PLI also contains unprecedented damaging language for Wilderness in the areas of fire, insects, and disease control; livestock grazing; hunting, fishing, and shooting; trail and fence maintenance; water rights and water developments; land acquisition; airshed protection; and bighorn sheep viability.”

“This unprecedented language has never before appeared in any other wilderness bill that has passed Congress,” added Nickas. “It makes a mockery of the idea that the PLI would actually protect any Wilderness.”

“We should protect real, wild, authentic Wilderness in Utah,” concluded Proescholdt. “We shouldn’t be designating fake Wildernesses that rob the citizens of the State and nation of the real thing.”

# # #
Wilderness Watch is a national wilderness conservation organization with offices in Missoula (MT), Moscow (ID), and Minneapolis (MN). The organization focuses on the protection and proper stewardship of all Wildernesses in the National Wilderness Preservation System, and has developed extensive expertise with the implementation of and litigation over the 1964 Wilderness Act. See www.wildernesswatch.org.

Here’s a Forest Service and public lands policy issue that has been in the news more and more: Wilderness and mountain bikes.

Personally, I own a mountain bike, but I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core mountain biker. Then again, I’ve been known to use my mountain bike to haul deer and elk 12+ miles out of a U.S. Forest Service National Recreation Area from time to time.

I was also more than happy to put on my WildWest Institute hat and sign us onto this letter to Congress signed by a total of 116 conservation groups from around the country with one simple message: Please continue to keep bikes out of our protected Wilderness areas. Below is a press release from the organizations.

MISSOULA, MONTANA – This week 116 conservation organizations from across America have asked Congress to oppose attempts to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act and Wilderness protections by allowing bicycles in designated Wilderness.

“For over a half century, the Wilderness Act has protected wilderness areas designated by Congress from mechanization and mechanical transport, even if no motors were involved with such activities. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wildernesses have been kept free from bicycles and other types of mechanization and mechanical transport,” the 116 organizations wrote Congress.

A copy of the letter to Congress signed by 116 conservation groups is here: http://bit.ly/1VFoL1U

The letter to Congress comes as some mountain bikers and a mountain biking organization – the Sustainable Trails Coalition – have announced the intention to have legislation introduced in Congress to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes in units of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

“These mountain bikers erroneously claim that mountain bikes were allowed in Wilderness until 1984, but then banned administratively by the U.S. Forest Service. This claim is simply not true,” pointed out the 116 conservation organizations.

“At a time when wilderness and wildlife are under increasing pressures from increasing populations, growing mechanization, and a rapidly changing climate, the last thing Wilderness needs is to be invaded by mountain bikes and other machines,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch.

“Mountain bikes are exactly the kind of mechanical devices and mechanical transport that Congress intended to keep out of Wilderness in passing the Wilderness Act.  Mountain bikes have their place, but that place is not inside Wilderness areas,” explained Kevin Proescholdt, Conservation Director of Wilderness Watch.

“We believe that this protection has served our nation well, and that the ‘benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness’ would be forever lost by allowing mechanized transport in these areas. Please oppose attempts to weaken the Wilderness Act and wilderness protections by allowing bicycles in Wilderness,” the 116 organizations wrote Congress.

Imagine that.

Read the full article from Jonathan Romeo at the Durango Herald here. Below are some interesting snips from the article.

The Forest Service has long maintained such timber sales benefit the health of the ecosystem as it transitions from an old-growth to new-growth forest, but research from the University of Montana, as well as several conservation groups, challenges that idea.

“These areas where beetles killed trees is a really important habitat, ecologically,” said Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, a nonprofit group opposed to salvage logging.

“It sounds counterintuitive, but for wildlife species, those areas are a bonanza,” he said. “Science is telling us these habitats are every bit as important as the forest before the kill-off.”

An infestation begins when a female spruce beetle finds a weak tree and signals to more beetles to attack. The insects chew through the bark and then enter a layer of the tree where they lay eggs in a network of tunnels. The eggs hatch, the beetles grow up and fly away. Before leaving, the mature beetles spread a special fungus in the center of the tree that ultimately kills it.

But it’s what happens after that Hanson says is so important for the ecosystem.

After the beetle moves on, woodpeckers feed on the larvae left behind, which creates nest cavities in dead trees for other species – such as bluebirds, chickadees and even squirrels – who are unable to make the safe havens themselves.

Then come the wildflowers, which thrive on the exposed understory of the forest, typically covered in shade. Flies and other insects arrive to feed on the flowers, and in turn bring birds, bats and other small mammals, which attract larger predators.

“What you end up with is a very rich and biodiverse ecosystem,” Hanson said.

Clark University associate professor Dominik Kulakowski agreed. He said the result, a “snag forest,” is a favorable habitat for many invertebrates and vertebrates because of the creation of canopy gaps and enhanced growth of understory plants.

“Outbreaks create snags that may be used by various birds and mammals, including woodpeckers, owls, hawks, wrens, warblers, bats, squirrels, American marten and lynx,” Kulakowski said.

By removing the trees, you remove this process, both Hanson and Kulakowski said.

In her 2014 report for the University of Montana, entomologist Diana Six said the long-standing method of thinning and salvaging does little to reduce to risk of beetles spreading and forest fires.

Instead, underlying conditions – warmer temperatures and drought – are the main drivers of those threats by allowing longer seasons for beetles to thrive and weakening trees to fight infestation. What has resulted is the largest outbreak of beetle kill recorded in human history.

“During an outbreak, these treatments are doomed to failure,” Six told The Durango Herald. “If warm temperatures and drought are driving an outbreak, by cutting trees you can’t reduce the outbreak because it doesn’t change the conditions.”

Six said it’s human nature to want to do something to address the problem, so methods like logging gain traction. The forests look devastated, and our gut feeling is ‘My God this has been terrible,’” she said. “But if we step back and look at forest processes, sometimes just standing back and not doing anything might be the best approach.”

[The following is a press release from the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council.  No word yet if the Beaverhead Partnership ‘collaborators’ (ie Montana Wilderness Association, Montana Trout Unlimited, National Wildlife Federation and some timber mill owners) knew about this alleged secret clearcut logging that apparently was conducted without any public involvement or legally-required environmental analysis. – mk]

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit against Leann Marten, the Regional Forester of the Forest Service in Federal District Court in Missoula, after discovering a secret logging project, named Moosehorn Ditch Timber Sale, that logged an unknown number of acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest near Wisdom, MT, without any public involvement or legally-required environmental analysis.

“When I happened upon this, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Dr. Sara Jane Johnson, Director of Native Ecosystems Council explained.  “I was visiting the area to monitor some aspen livestock fencing projects when I came across the massive clearcut. The area looked like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb.”

SEE PHOTOS HERE.

Dr. Johnson has a Ph.D. in wildlife biology from Montana State University and was a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service for 14 years.  “Lynx are listed as ‘protected’ under the Endangered Species Act and the Forest Service has documented at least seven lynx sightings within 15 miles of this clearcut.  Even the agency’s own studies show that logging destroys habitat for lynx,” Johnson continued. “Yet, despite clear legal requirements to consider the effects of logging projects on National Forest lands, the Forest Service arbitrarily decided to ignore the requirements of our nation’s environmental laws.  The only thing they did was give this secret clearcut a name, Moosehorn Ditch Timber Sale.”

“This logging is particularly egregious because of the numerous other sensitive species that have been sighted within a 15-mile radius of the timber sale,” Johnson explained. “Goshawks and a nest, wolverines, sage grouse and a lek, Northern Rockies fishers, gray wolves, black-backed woodpeckers, pileated woodpeckers, northern bog lemmings, Brewer’s sparrows, and great gray owls have all been documented in the area.”

“The shocking thing is to see what the Forest Service will do if they think no one is watching,” Johnson concluded. “It was just pure luck that we found this illegal timber sale.”

Apparently the Forest Service got so tired of losing court cases on their timber sales that they now are pretending that our nation’s laws don’t apply to them,” added Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.  “When we asked the Forest Service for a copy of the legally-required environmental analysis for this secret timber sale and documentation of how the public was involved, the agency responded that there was neither.”

“Fortunately for the American public, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act are still on the books,” Garrity continued. “We are a democracy and only Congress can change laws, not federal agencies.”

“Congress passed these laws because the Forest Service was destroying our public lands by putting clearcutting ahead of preserving habitat for biodiversity, preservation of species, hunting, fishing and the clean, vital watersheds national forests provide,” Garrity concluded. “Bureaucrats can’t just pretend laws don’t exist when they get in the way of clearcutting the National Forests that belong to all Americans.  In our nation everybody has to follow the law and that certainly includes the taxpayer-funded Forest Service.”

Copy of the complaint is here.