Matthew Koehler

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has announced it’s logging agreement with Plum Creek Timber Co (now Weyerhaeuser) on 111,740 acres of national forest land in Montana has been terminated after a Federal Court ruled the logging done by TNC on Forest Service lands was illegal.

The public was notified of this in the Flathead National Forest’s draft Decision Notice and Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for the Chilly James Project in Montana’s Swan Valley.  The Chilly James Draft Decision Notice stated that on January 5, 2016, The Nature Conservancy notified the Forest Service that their logging agreement with Plum Creek was terminated and that they have no future logging  plans on Montana Legacy acquisition lands.

Last summer, the federal district court in Montana reaffirmed and clarified its September 2014 ruling that the U.S. Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it approved logging procedures for 111,740 acres of newly-acquired national forest lands.  The Court’s ruling requires the Forest Service to halt logging until it complies with both the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act requirements to analyze “potential environmental effects, reasonable alternatives, and cumulative impacts on those lands” and “comply with the consultation requirements of Section 7 of the ESA with respect to those protected species affected on the lands.”

These so-called “Legacy Lands” in Montana’s Swan Valley were former Plum Creek Timber Co. lands which were purchased by the federal government and are now part of the national forest and subject to federal laws that protect the environment and threatened or endangered species.  These lands are critical habitat for grizzly bears, lynx, wolverine, bull trout, and a very rare plant called water howellia.

TNC bought these lands from Plum Creek Timber in 2008. A condition of the agreement called for TNC to sell Plum Creek Timber 92 million board feet of timber off its former lands over the next 10 years, a condition carried over even though the public then purchased the lands from TNC via a $250 million tax credit to TNC.

Four conservation groups Swan View Coalition, Friends of the Wild Swan, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit in 2013 in Federal District Court challenging the logging by The Nature Conservancy on these former Plum Creek lands.

“It’s good to know The Nature Conservancy won’t be logging any more of the few trees Plum Creek left on these lands,” said Keith Hammer, Chair of Swan View Coalition. “It’s time for the Forest Service to now turn the page and begin restoring these industrial lands to a more natural state by removing a substantial number of the logging roads that came with them.”

“Since the Agreed Operating Procedures between the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy were deemed illegal by the court it is right and appropriate that the logging agreement is terminated,” said Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan. “This protects what’s left of the trees in riparian areas and old cutting units on these heavily logged and roaded lands and allows wildlife habitat to be restored.”

“The U.S. Forest Service authorized logging procedures and thousands of acres of clearcutting on these lands without any analysis of how the logging might affect and harm endangered species in the area,” said Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.  “Of particular concern to local conservationists is the lynx, a rare forest cat that requires large expanses of unlogged area for survival.  The Swan Valley is one of the best potential habitats in the Lower 48 states for lynx, but lynx are declining in the area due to logging.”

“The bottom line,” Garrity concluded, “is very good news for the threatened and endangered species that call these lands home, since all commercial logging on these ‘Legacy Lands’ by The Nature Conservancy has stopped.  The American people paid $250 million for these lands.  The Nature Conservancy should not have been allowed to continue clearcutting land they no longer owned.”

BACKGROUND: Here’s some background information, first from the Fall 2014 newsletter of the Swan View Coalition and next a previous post from this blog.

But some environmental watchdogs, wilderness specialists, and academics worry that the [collaborative] approach is also setting dangerous precedents. In their pursuit of land preservation and wilderness, critics charge, environmental groups frequently horse-trade inappropriately with the public’s lands—shutting out dissent, undercutting their conservation mission, and even eroding bedrock environmental laws….

And why not? “Collaboration” sounds great. It suggests consensus and compromise—the idea that everyone will be heard and their ideas made part of the finished product. But as George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch, has said, compromise sometimes means “three wolves and a sheep talking about what’s for dinner.”

In short, whether collaboration is a good thing or not depends a lot on where you stand—and what you stand to gain. A 2013 study found that the groups most likely to collaborate are large, professional environmental organizations that often represent diverse agendas. According to Caitlin Burke, a forestry expert in North Carolina who has studied collaborations, if such trends continue, “we will see a marginalization of smaller, ideologically pure environmental groups [whose] values will not be included in decision making because they are unable or unwilling to collaborate.” ….

Despite appearances, collaborations are undemocratic, argue critics like Gary Macfarlane of Friends of the Clearwater, an environmental group in northern Idaho. The public already has a process for how changes can be made to our public lands, Macfarlane says: the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. Macfarlane describes it as “a law that tells federal agencies to look before you leap” and says you have to allow all interested parties to participate. The act also mandates that the best available science be considered. Collaborations don’t have to do that, says Randi Spivak, director of the public-lands program for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Then there are the concerns about wilderness. Designation of new wilderness areas has often been a centerpiece of collaborations over the past 15 years. But in order to push wilderness through, the big environmental groups have been willing to make sometimes disturbing compromises, critics say—even to the Wilderness Act itself.

Compromise has long been a central part of wilderness politics, of course. The 1964 Wilderness Act took eight years and 65 bills to become law, and the final act grandfathered in some grazing and mining. But the old compromises were largely about boundaries—what’s in and what’s out. The new deals embrace a more insidious type of compromise, not just about where wilderness will be, but also about how it will be managed.

“Our fear is that some conservation groups look at the 1964 act as the place to begin a new round of compromises,” says Martin Nie. That shift, he adds, “could threaten the integrity of the system.”

In collaborative efforts, large conservation groups that badly want to protect wilderness must deal with groups that sometimes loathe the idea, so conservationists increasingly feel pressure to make wilderness more palatable to opponents—and that means watering it down, says critic Chris Barns, a longtime wilderness expert who recently retired from the BLM.

The number of special provisions—exceptions added to a wilderness bill, almost always leading to more human impact—has increased in the past several years, according to a 2010 study in the International Journal of Wilderness. The Lincoln County deal was saddled with a raft of such provisions. The Owyhee deal, given a thumbs-up by such groups as Pew and the Wilderness Society, lets ranchers corral cattle using motorized vehicles, which is supposed to be forbidden in wilderness. The result of such compromises, Barns and others say, are areas known as WINOs—”wilderness in name only.”

Another problem with these exceptions is that they become boilerplate for future bills, Barns says. A provision that first appeared in 1980 has since turned up in more than two dozen wilderness laws. Such changes might seem small, says Barns, but they erode, bit by bit, America’s last wild places….

By George Wuerthner

The recent commentary on community collaboratives that was signed by a number of timber company representatives and forester along with the Montana Wilderness Association (MWA) promotes myths instead of truth with regards to forestry issues in western Montana.  As a former MWA board member, it particularly disturbing to see the organization championing frivolous timber sales that cost taxpayers money and destroy forest ecosystems. It appears the MWA is suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome.

Among other things, the commentary says that people are frustrated  when lawyers and judges trump local professional land managers. What the MWA doesn’t acknowledge is that no one wins a lawsuit unless there is a clear violation of rules and laws. Apparently the MWA is supporting illegal actions on our national forests.

Indeed, one can be thankful that at least some conservation organizations see their role as protecting the taxpayer purse strings and the land from money-losing timber sales and destructive forest practices instead of lining the pockets of private timber companies.

Their commentary champions collaboratives as “democracy” but fails to note that the vast majority of people and interests do not get to participate. While paid foresters and lobbyist for timber companies can attend the numerous meetings that are held during work week days, most people are not represented, particularly the majority of Americans who own these lands – a fact that the MWA apparently does not acknowledge.

Furthermore, the MWA supports the timber industry propaganda about thinning.

The bulk of the plant communities burned in Montana are high elevation forests dominated by lodgepole pine, fir and spruce. These forests naturally burn infrequently in high severity fires often hundred of years apart. These forests are neither out of their historic condition and are perfectly healthy. Fire in these ecosystems are driven by climate/weather, not fuels. Therefore, logging cannot preclude blazes in these forests.

Large fires only occur when there are severe fire weather conditions of high temperatures, low humidity, drought and most importantly high winds. Put those combinations together with an ignition source and you have unstoppable fires. The overwhelming conclusion of numerous scientific reviews is that under severe fire weather, thinning has no effect on fire spread. But you won’t get that information from the Montana Wilderness Association.

Even more importantly large severe fires are ecologically important. Indeed, there are numerous wildlife species that live in mortal fear of green forests because they are highly dependent on the periodic input of snags and down wood that is created by large wildfires. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the MWA to mention this.

Finally, logging is not benign. Logging roads spread sediment into streams affecting fish. They help to spread weeds. Logging removes biomass and down wood important for habitat. Logging removes the carbon that is stored in forests and even burnt forests store more carbon than logged forest sites. Logging disturbs sensitive wildlife like grizzly and elk. And finally logging can scar scenic values. But you will never see the MWA mention any of these associated and cumulative impacts.

It seems the MWA measurement of success is whether it can have a beer with timber and other former foes. There’s nothing wrong with sitting down to discuss common interests. But the real measure for a conservation group should be the wildlife habitat and wildlands it has saved. By this measure, the MWA is failing miserably. It’s time for the MWA to relinguish its mantle as a wildlands advocate and admit it has been captured by the timber industry. Patty Hearst would understand.

George Wuerthner is a former MWA board member, an ecologist and an author of 38 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. 

The following piece was written by Jeff Juel, National Forest Chair of the Upper Columbia River Group of the Sierra Club, which successfully objected to the Mill Creek A-to-Z timber sale, and appeared this weekend in the Spokesman Review.

What do folks on this blog think about the fact that the Forest Service contracted a private timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to run the NEPA process from start to finish on this public lands timber sale? Or that “an agency contract expert expressed concern about the objectivity of this new process, asking how the Forest Service rationalizes the ability of the contractor to invest upfront without any guarantee of compensation and ‘without artificially deflating the stumpage value or artificially inflating the costs of other service work.’”

If this is the path that ‘collaboration’ is taking on public lands what other significant red flags does this situation raise? – mk

Privatizing our national forests doesn’t mean ownership necessarily changes hands. It does, however, mean control is handed over to a private entity.

The concern about keeping public forests in public hands was one reason why, in August, conservationists objected to a major timber sale in the Mill Creek watershed northeast of Colville: the A-to-Z Timber Sale on the Colville National Forest. In October, the U.S. Forest Service did right by withdrawing the timber sale.

The Mill Creek watershed was heavily and unsustainably logged years ago. Only about 154 acres of ancient forest remain out of 12,802 acres of national forest in the project area. That’s about 1 percent.

Given prior damage to wildlife habitats and watershed values, should further logging occur? If so, how much? Answering these questions requires careful, thorough, and unbiased analysis. Indeed, that’s what the laws protecting our National Forests require; laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and laws informed by nearly two centuries of deforestation on the American continent.

NEPA requires an objective process be completed for every proposed project and decision affecting federally managed lands and resources. Various alternatives are to be explored, environmental impacts thoroughly analyzed and disclosed, and scientific controversies and public concerns fully aired. And it’s the federal agency’s job, in this case the U.S. Forest Service, to prepare the environmental analysis on our behalf.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Forest Service contracted a private timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to run the NEPA process from start to finish, or from “A to Z” as this pilot project is revealingly titled. According to Vaagen Brothers, they’ve already spent about a million dollars.

In an internal document found on the A-to-Z project website, an agency contract expert expressed concern about the objectivity of this new process, asking how the Forest Service rationalizes the ability of the contractor to invest upfront without any guarantee of compensation and “without artificially deflating the stumpage value or artificially inflating the costs of other service work.” The Forest Service replied that it was presented that way by Vaagen Brothers “and supported by the collaborative group… Contractor would recoup its costs by not having to competitively bid on the timber.”

Can the public really expect a logging company’s analysis of environmental risks and benefits to be objective and thorough? Or provide a balanced exploration of the scientific controversies say, over whether logging truly restores fire-dependent ecosystems when the logging company puts up $1 million to kick-start the project?

Having private, local collaborators cheer on the privatizing of our national forests should not be comforting, even if collaborators include environmental groups. This A-to-Z sale of the NEPA process to the highest bidder represents an ominous step towards privatizing our national forests.

To make ethical decisions about our national forests and the environment generally, actual or potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed and understood. For example, it’s not widely known that The Lands Council, one of the collaborating groups, takes annual contributions from Vaagen Brothers Lumber, one of its so-called “business partners.”

Decisions must be made by professionals, subject to strict codes of conduct, after the analysis is completed, not as a vaguely implied condition of the contract granting rights to prepare the NEPA documents. We must restore ethical integrity in our government’s decision-making process in order to restore ecological integrity in our forests.

The A-to-Z also teaches important lessons nationally because Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has touted it as a pilot process in moving legislation (HR 2647), impacting the entire national forest system, through the U.S. House of Representatives. This deceptively named “Resilient Federal Forests Act” is, as noted by the Seattle Times, “an opportunistic remedy that doesn’t pass the smell test, and the Senate needs to douse it quickly.”

This bill would exempt national forest logging up to 15,000 acres from normal NEPA analysis. Citizens challenging illegal and damaging timber sales in court would be required to post a bond upfront, making the constitutional right of judicial redress unaffordable in most cases. The bill would prohibit important watershed improvement by requiring local county commissioners to agree to the decommissioning of unneeded roads on national forests. It would also severely weaken protections for ancient forests in eastern Oregon and Washington, such as on the Colville.

Our national forests help define the Inland Northwest. The A-to-Z Timber Sale and the shenanigans in Congress are a reminder that constant public vigilance is a price we pay to keep our forests standing.

Below is a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.– mk

An armed militia has taken over a federal building in southeastern Oregon as part of a long-running campaign of violence, intimidation and right-wing paranoia that has festered for decades in the West, most recently with the standoff with Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014. Among the demands at the latest standoff is to shut down Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which provides crucial protections for wildlife, especially birds that migrate through the area.

“This is the latest in a long-string of armed, right-wing thugs attempting to seize America’s public lands and enact their paranoid, anti-government dream bought by guns and intimidation,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve seen it with pipebombs planted on wilderness trails and sent to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. We saw in 2014 with Cliven Bundy and his racist and violent rhetoric in Nevada and now we’re seeing it with his sons in Oregon.”

Bundy stopped paying the federal government for the privilege of grazing his cows on public lands in Nevada and owes about $1 million to taxpayers. Bundy, who was quoted in an interview with The New York Times wondering whether black people were better off as slaves, was the center of an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in April 2014 that ended with the BLM backing away and Bundy’s continued trespass on federal land. Among the anti-federal government militia who were defending Bundy at his ranch was Jared Miller who just three months after the standoff at the ranch went on a shooting spree with his wife that included the ambush-murder of two Las Vegas police officers as they ate at a restaurant. They draped the officers with a Gadsden flag — a symbol of liberty used by both the antigovernment “Patriot” movement and members of the Tea Party movement.

The latest standoff near Burns, Ore. followed a judge’s call for additional prison time for a father and son – 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and 46-year-old Steven Hammond – who prosecutors say lit a fire on federal land in 2001 to cover up the illegal slaughter of a deer herd. Both were convicted of arson and are scheduled to report to federal prison on Monday.

The wildlife refuge’s headquarters was seized by Bundy’s sons and others on Saturday. The men are armed and say they are willing to occupy the building for years if needed. According to the Oregonian, Ryan Bundy said that they’re willing to kill and be killed if necessary. Also among the armed occupiers of the wildlife fefuge building is Jon Ritzheimer, an infamous anti-Muslim activist who has repeatedly threatened violence.

“Despite their flags and patriotic overtures, don’t mistake this standoff for anything than what it is: An attempt to use guns to seize control over what taxpayers own and bully the government into acquiescing to their demands,” Suckling said. “But there’s a larger context here. What’s happening in Oregon is a logical outgrowth of right-wing rhetoric that demonizes even the concept of federal land – places like national parks and forests — and villianizes those who believe that publicly owned land should be more than just a source of profit for ranchers and corporations.”

There’s been a growing movement among politicians in the West to seize control of federal lands and hand them over to state and local government, where they’re more likely to be logged, mined and drilled for profit.

“These are special places that deserve protection for values that we all hold dear: clean air, water and refuge for wildlife,” Suckling said. “Americans, collectively, have decided that these public lands need and deserve protection. That shouldn’t be undone at the behest of men with guns and a dangerous view of how a government should be run.”

I haven’t checked the stats for this site in quite some time; however, I couldn’t help but noticed that around December 24, 2015 the site reached 500,000 total views, which seems like a milestone worth celebrating. Also worth noting is that there have been over 18,000 comments on the site.

As a Montanan I am blessed to live in a place of incomparable beauty and wealth of natural resources.  In appreciation of that I find myself moved to make a plea to thoughtful citizens to resist the corrosive effects of growing threats to the quality of life we enjoy.

The Wilderness law has delivered to us who live here an irreplaceable part of our American Heritage. The quality of wildness, of autonomous and unfettered nature, was the central concern of those of us who, in the 1950s and early 1960s, wrote and worked for enactment of the Wilderness Act. Now, after a lifetime of work for wilderness, I ask its defenders to never forget: Wildness is foremost the quality of wilderness that we must seek to preserve. It is the forces of nature at full play in the absence of human intent.

Only fifty one years ago, when I helped organize the uniquely American popular movement to pass the Wilderness Act, we did not dream of the pace of change and rapid exploitation of natural resources that we face today. In this age of climate change, species extinction and all too widespread unraveling of the natural world that we all depend on, it is more critical than ever to preserve what wilderness we have left.

Wilderness is land left to be wild as well as a principled idea. It is the embodiment of reverence for nature and the humility to withhold the hand of man from exploitation. Sadly, such wild land and grace-filled humility seem to be in short supply and disappearing quickly due to dominance by moneyed self interests.

Commodification of the natural world is, as it was, often based on resource extraction. Now it is increasingly made even more pervasive by the profitable industry and expanding self interests of recreation. Humility is too often replaced by a sense of entitlement and selfishness. We are seeing accelerated loss of wilderness as well as the erosion of selfless values and actions that set the stage for Wilderness designation. The ascendancy of recreation, an optional pastime, even when at the expense of wildness is a sad comment on the state of American values.

One new vehicle contributing to this damaging trend is the increasingly popular Trojan horse of so-called ‘collaboration’. Industry and recreation interests sit down at a table sanctified by politicians beholden to industry campaign money and divide up America’s shared natural legacy. They are the self-selected deciders for all Americans and serve to displace meaningful participation by other Americans who live further away or can not afford the time to sit unpaid at the table. The way ‘collaboration’ is being used amounts to collusion by a small club divvying up valuable American public assets.

I cautioned groups like the Montana Wilderness Association and The Wilderness Society at a recent Wilderness Conference to “resist the fuzzy, fuzzy Neverland of collaboration,” and begin to advocate for real wilderness protection as the law was written and intended.

The willingness of certain conservation groups to compromise wilderness and their organization’s mission has been rewarded by lavish foundation funds, often from foundations like PEW (Sun Oil), founded with private profits derived from exploiting publicly owned resources.

We now see some well funded conservation non-profits collaborating with the Forest Service and sacrificing wilderness, then accepting taxpayer funds for ‘in-kind’ work participating in ‘partnerships’ that serve the federal agency’s goals.

We conservationists should not advocate for deals that include release of protected wildland areas or the inclusion of non-conforming, wilderness damaging uses, baked into the very enabling legislation. Exercising the necessary altruism we must continue to instill a love for wilderness and rededicate ourselves to the mission of protecting areas for their wildness, using an ecosystem approach based on conservation biology principles, while accommodating traditional recreation to the extent it does not diminish wildness or other wilderness characteristics.

Post-fire clearcutting on the Stanislaus National Forest in the Rim fire area, eliminated the wildlife-rich snag forest habitat and left only stump fields. Photo by Maya Khosla.

[NOTE: The following article first appeared in the Earth Island Journal. – mk]

Clearcuts for Christmas?

Pro-logging “rider” bill in Congress would allow clearcutting in our national forests

By Dr. Chad Hanson

When Americans think about the presents they want for the Holidays, clearcuts on our national forests and other federal public lands is not what they have in mind.  But that is exactly what radical, anti-environmental members of Congress are proposing to do right now — make a generous gift to the logging industry.

Republicans in the Senate are using the upcoming December 11 government-funding deadline and fear and misinformation about wildland fire in our forests, to pressure some Democrats and the Obama Administration to go along with a logging bill that would be attached as a “rider” to the Omnibus appropriations act in the coming days. The logging rider would suspend environmental laws to allow commercial logging projects to go forward on our national forests and other federal forestlands through “categorical exclusions.” The rider would, among other things, effectively exempt logging from any environmental analysis or disclosure of adverse impacts on imperiled wildlife species, watersheds, or forest carbon storage. The provisions of the logging rider are similar or identical to many of those in HR 2647, which House Republicans passed earlier this year.

Troublingly, though the logging rider is being led primarily by Republicans, some Democrat Senators from states with an active timber industry presence too, appear to be willing to go along with the proposal. Worse, there are indications that President Obama may be willing to acquiesce to Republicans on the logging rider in exchange for an agreement over increased funding for ill-advised and ineffective backcountry fire suppression. Indeed, the recent fire-phobic and pro-logging rhetoric coming from a few western Democrats, such as Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, is virtually indistinguishable from the media messages coming from logging industry spokespersons.

Built on deceptions, the logging rider promotes the planned expansion of timber sales on our public lands under the guise of “fuel reduction”, “restoration”, and fire management, Much of the increase in logging would be clearcutting of both old forest and ecologically vital post-fire habitat.

For example, one of the logging categories in the rider promotes clearcutting of mature and old forest ostensibly to create “early seral” conditions for wildlife. This sort of hyper-cynical spin is what now passes for cleverness in Washington, D.C. But the advocates of the logging rider are profoundly at odds with current science. As more than 260 scientists told Congress and the Administration in a recent letter, “complex early seral forest” is one of the most ecologically vital and wildlife-rich forest habitat types, and it is only created by patches of intense fire in forests and is destroyed by post-fire logging.  Clearcutting removes and damages habitat, and there is not much wildlife activity in a giant stumpfield.

In fact, there is actually a deficit of post-fire forest habitat created by these beneficial fires, and many of the wildlife species that depend upon the unique “snag forest habitat” created by more intense fire patches have become rare and imperiled, and/or are declining, due to fire suppression, “fuel reduction” logging, and post-fire logging, as detailed in the recent book, The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.

The fundamental premise upon which this “Clearcuts for Christmas” logging rider rests — that environmental protections supposedly lead to more intense fire and logging reduces fire intensity — is quite simply one of the most profound deceptions in the history of forest management.

An ecologically-rich complex early seral forest, or “snag forest habitat”, created by high-intensity fire, with an abundance of snags (standing fire killed trees), native flowering shrubs, natural regeneration of conifer saplings, and downed logs used by small mammals and amphibians. Photo by Chad Hanson.

In one large fire after another in recent years, such as the California Rim fire of 2013 in the Sierra Nevada, the forests with the least environmental protections and the most significant logging history burned most intensely, while forests that were completely protected from logging, with no logging history, burned the least intensely. This is true even when key factors such as forest type and topography are taken into account. Nor does logging conducted under the banner of “thinning” meaningfully reduce fire intensity.

Research shows that it is previous fires, not thinning, that modify fire intensity and spread. For example, forests that have been thinned tend to burn more intensely when wildland fire occurs. Forests that have a combination of both thinning and prescribed fire tend to burn about the same as those with prescribed fire alone, and no thinning; in other words, thinning does not make forests burn less intensely but can sometimes increase fire intensity. Though the term sounds benign, in fact most “thinning” projects on national forests and other federal lands are intensive logging projects that often remove 50 to 80 percent of the trees in a given stand, including many mature and old trees. Such projects do not effectively modify fire intensity and unnecessarily cause significant damage to wildlife habitat for imperiled species like spotted owls and black-backed woodpeckers, while costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Moreover, increased logging and fire suppression in backcountry forests on our public lands will do nothing to help homeowners in rural forested areas where fire is a natural occurrence. In fact, by diverting scarce federal resources away from home protection, and focusing on logging and fire suppression in remote forests, the logging rider, and the fire suppression measure with which it is likely to be associated, would actually put rural homeowners at greater risk from fire. Further, the rider would increase risks to wildland firefighters by unnecessarily putting them in harm’s way in steep, difficult, remote terrain, as they try in vain to stop weather-driven, mixed-intensity fires that are creating important wildlife habitat and ecological benefits. As The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires details, the only effective way to protect homes is to focus on making the homes themselves more fire-resistant, and to help homeowners create “defensible space” within 100 to 200 feet around homes by reducing combustible vegetation and removing lower limbs on mature trees.

It’s ironic that this logging rider is being proposed even as world leaders meet in Paris to address climate change. If the rider is passed, the increased logging on our public lands would substantially reduce carbon storage in our forests, significantly undermining climate solutions. There will be very little carbon storage in the thousands upon thousands of acres of stumpfields that would be created on our public lands if the logging rider becomes law.

The timber industry’s allies in Congress — in both political parties — want Americans to be as scared and confused about wildland fire as possible, because that’s the only political context in which something as regressive, unscientific, and wrong-headed as this logging rider has any chance to pass. This is particularly true in the cover-of-darkness type of legislating that occurs during appropriations season. There is no public dialogue, no open committee hearings, or informed debate. There are only closed-door meetings and back-room deals.

But the truth is that we shouldn’t be afraid of fire in our forests. Fire is not “destroying” our forests, as self-serving, pro-logging members of Congress would have you believe. Rather, fire is doing important and beneficial ecological work on our national Forests and other federal forestlands. And, if homeowners take basic, proven steps to protect their homes and the immediate vicinity, homes have a better than 90 percent chance of surviving a wildland fire.  Homeowners need help to do this, but the logging rider, coupled with more backcountry fire suppression, would take us in exactly the wrong direction.

What you can do: Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121, ask to be transferred to the offices of your Senators, and leave a comment with the environmental aide for each of them, urging Senators to stand firm against the “Clearcuts for Christmas” logging rider, and oppose any logging riders from being added to spending bills.  Please also call the White House at 202-456-1111 and urge the President to oppose the logging rider. Finally, please write letters to the editor to your local newspapers to get the message out there about this issue.

Chad Hanson, the director of the John Muir Project (JMP) of Earth Island Institute, has a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California at Davis, and focuses his research on forest and fire ecology in the Sierra Nevada. He can be reached at [email protected], or visit JMP’s website at www.johnmuirproject.org for more information, and for citations to specific studies pertaining to the points made in this article.

UPDATE: Here are some more John Muir Project photos from post-fire logging on the Stanislaus National Forest from within the Rim Fire area.

UPDATE #2: Wildfire-logging deal throttled by Senate ENR leaders (as well as grassroots forest protection groups, such as John Muir Project) [LINK]

If anyone saw the Missoulian on  November 16th it was hard not to notice an epic, off-the-rails rant from the Montana Wilderness Association’s ‘communications manager’ Ted Brewer (entirely propped up by strawman arguments) against longtime environmental and public lands champion George Ochenski. Here’s how Ted Brewer’s Montana Wilderness Association piece opened up:

Recently the Missoulian published two columns on its Opinion page that were, topically speaking, quite different. Psychologically speaking, however, they were quite similar.

One column claimed the U.S. government is controlling the weather through commercial airliner exhaust, known as “chemtrails.” The other was George Ochenski’s column claiming the Forest Service is using tax dollars to “buy” the support of conservation groups for logging, grazing and other resource extraction projects.

A friend of mine who used to work at a daily newspaper calls the Opinion page a “fact-free zone,” but these two conspiracy theories, printed on the same day, turned the Missoulian’s Opinion page into a paranoia playground, where President Obama makes it rain and an extravagantly funded Forest Service slips bags of cash to conservation groups while dining on filet of bull trout and leg of Canada lynx.

I’m the communications manager at Montana Wilderness Association, certainly one of the top entries on Ochenski’s list of enemies and a longtime, routine target of his column. (If Ochenski goes a few months without blasting MWA, I start to wonder if his mind might be slipping.) I’ve also been a writer for the past 20-odd years. I’ve written a fair number of magazine stories that have required me to dig for the sources that back my claims. It’s part of the job and the fun of doing credible journalism.

But once you start making outrageous claims without providing proof, then you’ve joined the ranks of birthers, chemtrail conspiracy mongers, and other ideological zealots and crackpots with personal and political axes to grind. That’s where we find Ochenski these days, so desperate to smear his enemies that he compares them to Nazis (yes, he did that) or tries to embroil them in controversies of his own paranoid concoction.

In the opinion piece, the Montana Wilderness Association compares Ochenski to “birthers, chemtrail conspiracy mongers, and other ideological zealots and crackpots.” The Montana Wilderness Association also calls on the Missoulian to replace George Ochenski (their very popular, weekly progressive columnist).

Apparently, what caused the Montana Wilderness Association to go completely off the deep end was the following information Ochenski included in a recent opinion column, in which he highlighted the comments by Wilderness Legend Stewart Brandborg (the only living person who was responsible for passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964). Brandborg recently warned groups like MWA at a Wilderness Conference to “resist the fuzzy, fuzzy Neverland of collaboration,” because Brandborg believes that groups like MWA are giving up huge chunks of America’s public lands legacy in exchange for basically what amounts to some Wilderness crumbs.

What’s strange is that it’s absolutely no secret to anyone that for the past 10 years the Montana Wilderness Association has been ‘collaborating’ with the timber industry and others (sometimes in secret meetings, such as during the formation of the Beaverhead Partnership) to dramatically increase industrial logging on public National Forests in Montana through politicians simply mandating higher logging levels.

Not only this, but the Montana Wilderness Association has also gone to court to support more public lands logging in Montana. For example, just last month the Montana Wilderness Association took the incredible step of actually intervening in a timber sale lawsuit on the Kootenaa National Forest. The logging project MWA is in federal court supporting actually calls for nearly 9,000 acres of logging, including over 3,000 acres of clearcuts in critical lynx habitat.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Montana Wilderness Association is being represented in court supporting this timber sale by timber industry lawyers from the American Forest Resource Council. That’s right! The very same timber industry lawyers at the American Forest Resource Council who sued to stop the Roadless Area Conservation Rule are now representing the Montana Wilderness Association in court to support 9,000 acres of logging, including over 3,000 acres of clearcuts in critical lynx habitat on the Kootenai National Forest.

Here’s the part of George Ochenski’s column (in his own words, not in the lies and twisted strawman arguments of the Montana Wilderness Association) that sent the Montana Wilderness Association over the cliff:

If one wants to see where millions of federal taxpayer dollars have gone to buy collaborative partners, check out this link from the Southwest Crown of the Continent laying out the Forest Service’s publicly funded largesse to groups such as Trout Unlimited, the Montana Wilderness Association, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and many more.

This scheme pays taxpayer funds to private groups that provide ‘in-kind services’ to collaborate with the federal agency’s goals, many of which are directly connected to increased logging, grazing and resource extraction from public lands under the rubric of ‘forest health’ or ‘restoration.’

Yes, the truth is that the Forest Service is actually giving ‘collaborators’ with multi-million non-profit groups like the Montana Wilderness Association, Trout Unlimited and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation millions of taxpayer dollars to help manage public lands! In the case of the Montana Wilderness Association, they collected $100,000 in taxpayer money from the U.S. Forest Service to do trail work on Forest Service lands. Isn’t that an incredibly slippery slope that threatens to compromise the “Keep It Public” mantra we so often hear from these groups? Wouldn’t it be better for taxpayer money to simply fund the U.S. Forest Service to do its job, rather than having the Forest Service give this taxpayer money to multi-million non-profit groups who ‘collaborate’ with the Forest Service?

Honestly, given the Montana Wilderness Association very well-documented love affair with ‘collaboration’ and given the Montana Wilderness Association’s very well-documented demands for more taxpayer-subsidized public lands logging on National Forests in Montana (despite terrible lumber markets, despite global economic realities, etc) it’s just bizarre why MWA would be so upset with George Ochenski for pointing out the fact that MWA and other groups have been able to collectively get millions of dollars to hire their own staff and get paid for their volunteers to manage our public lands.

As Keith Hammer with the Swan View Coalition recently pointed out:

While these funds on the one hand enable partners to do some monitoring and watershed restoration work by repairing or decommissioning roads, it also appears to silence public criticisms by partners of the more controversial timber sales being conducted under the guise of “forest restoration.” Moreover, some SWCC partners have collectively promoted“restoration” logging and asked Congress to work with collaborators and not with “organizations and individuals who oppose collaborative approaches to forest management.

If you love America’s National Forests and our tremendous public lands legacy please don’t be lulled to sleep by groups like the Montana Wilderness Association.

The bottom line is that some of these very well-funded, multi-million groups are using ‘collaboration’ in an attempt to greatly increase public lands logging (including MWA’s well-documented calls for politicians to simply mandate huge increases in National Forest logging levels), while at the same time they are using ‘collaboration’ to secure huge chunks of taxpayer funds (via the Forest Service) in order to increase their staff size and essential embark down that slippery slope where the management of America’s National Forests is essentially ‘out-sourced’ and ‘privatized.’