U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, in a decision dated Jan. 29, ruled in favor of the U.S. Forest Service against the Wilderness Society and other environmental groups.
The decision upholds the Idaho roadless rule that Sen. Jim Risch negotated when he was governor. It means the Idaho roadless rule will remain in place, no matter what happens to the areas in other states.
The rule, which set up a unique system to protect nearly 9 million acres of roadless land in Idaho, had conservation groups divided. Trout Unlimited and the Idaho Conservation League are on the state’s side. The Wilderness Society, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and others are opposed.
The Obama administration, the state of Idaho, the Kootenai Tribe, counties and the Idaho Mining Association defend the decision.
Observing the stories in the press on our favorite topics over the past two weeks, I found a common set of questions that I hope can illuminate the controversies. ”Who’s at the Table and Who Decides?” There is another thread, in some of these stories, of the appropriate role of state and local governments.
In this post, we’ll examine the settlement of case against four forest plans (82 Rule) in southern California.
Here’s the link to the below quote. http://lakeconews.com/content/view/17531/931/ Here’s the link to another piece on the settlement on this blog.
SAN FRANCISCO – Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has announced a settlement that requires the U.S. Forest Service to reconsider its plans regarding wilderness lands in four national forests, including the Los Padres, home of the endangered California condor. “With this settlement, the state of California will now play an active role along with the Forest Service in determining which areas of Southern California forests will be preserved as wilderness,” Brown said. The settlement resolves a lawsuit brought by Brown and various state agencies and environmental groups against the U.S. Forest Service for its plans to allow roads to be built through hundreds of thousands of acres of wild lands in the Los Padres, Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests.
Who’s at the table? The plaintiffs (listed in the agreement) and the Forest Service and DOJ. Who decides? The Department of Justice and the Forest Service and the plaintiffs, which in this case includes the State of California.
It appears to me that the State and groups that used the tactic of litigation moved the decisions in forest plans from being an open process, where the FS decides, to a not- open process where it is not so clear who decides. If land management allocations are ultimately to be made in the courts, because plans are so complex that it is difficult to do one perfectly- especially when people are paid to find flaws- perhaps it tells us that more conflict resolution, and not more analysis is what is needed. Again, I think it’s OK to use that as a tactic, but using that as a tactic has potential negative ramifications, from the perspective of openness and transparency, that need to be acknowledged.
It looks like the settlement imposes roadless-rule like requirements or, in other words, establishes a policy for federal lands in part of the State. We have had the discussion before on this blog about whether settlement agreements actually set policy. This seems to be an example of that.
Here’s a story on the settlement to the four California forest plan litigation.
It sounds interesting:
Under the agreement, federal and state agencies, conservationists and off-roaders will work together to improve roadless areas. The Forest Service will reconsider protecting several of the areas permanently as wilderness.
In addition, parties will identify roads and trails that are degrading designated roadless areas, and the Forest Service will prioritize them for decommissioning and restoration. The agency also will protect all roadless areas from harmful activities, including those that could prevent them from being recommended as wilderness.
The compromise includes $250,000 to cover attorney’s fees and other costs incurred by environmentalists, who praised the deal as a step toward protecting natural resources on federal property.
“As the Southern California population pushes past 15 million, wild lands are even more critical to the region because they provide drinking water, clean air and outdoor recreation,” said Annette Kondo, spokeswoman for The Wilderness Society’s California office.
The Blue Ribbon Coalition and the California Association of 4-Wheel Drive Clubs were among the user groups who signed the deal. They could not be reached immediately on Thursday.
What strikes me about the agreement is how much it’s about roadless. I have to wonder if this agreement might have been reached without litigation. Here’s the settlement agreement.
Ahh. Echoes of Ed Abbey (he wrote One Life at a Time, Please). If Roadless is contoversial, and travel management is controversial, if we have roadless travel management do we get more than 2x the controversy? Here’s a news story on a lawsuit on a travel management plan.
It seems like Mrowka and Hawthorne disagree on some facts. Are these trails already used or not?
That’s what I find discouraging about the state of the press these days. Seems like sometimes they just quote two different opinions and leave it at that. That’s OK, except when there are fairly readily accessible facts. I’m not blaming press folks- I understand- because I have family members in the newspaper industry. But it seems like we in the public are left to our own devices if we want to delve further to find out facts.
The former Solicitor of the Interior, John Leshy, says there exists in wilderness politics a tension between idealism and pragmatism. This tension is evident in the 1964 Wilderness Act and subsequent wilderness laws, for each is generally the product of some negotiation and compromise. Though too simplistic, this split is helpful to understanding the past, present, and possible future of wilderness politics.
At one end of the continuum are idealists who rightfully worry that too many deals are being made in order to secure wilderness areas that are too compromised and too small, among other deficiencies. Their concerns are heightened when economic development, in whatever guise, is being traded for wilderness designation. At the other end are pragmatists who rightfully point out that wilderness has always been about compromise and that concessions have to be made in order to move the agenda forward. It is a debate that has been going on for some time. Instead of Yankees v. Red Sox, think of George Nickas of Wilderness Watch versus Doug Scott of Campaign for America’s Wilderness (no pay-per-view for the latter).
Compromise has always been part and parcel of wilderness politics. This most often entailed the size of an area, the drawing of lines on maps, the releasing of lands to multiple use management, the use of alternative protected land designations, and fights over non-conforming uses and special provisions related to such things as grazing, access, and water management.
Important to point out is the significance of precedent in these historic debates. Special provisions are often replicated in wilderness laws. Once used, provisions related to such matters as water rights and buffer areas are regularly stamped onto future wilderness bills as a matter of course.
This history helps explain why some groups are so concerned about incorporating more explicit economic development provisions into wilderness legislation. These concerns were sharpened with passage of Nevada wilderness bills beginning in 2002 that controversially included various federal land sales and other economic development goodies in exchange for wilderness.
And these concerns continue to manifest in recent debates. Take, for example, the proposed Boulder-White Clouds wilderness bill—the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act. This bill includes wilderness designation, land conveyances to Idaho counties and a city, and Congressional appropriations designed to assist adjacent counties. (And at this point, all of these sweeteners have yet to win over key political representatives in Idaho or the county government-focused Tea Party in the state).
To no surprise, wilderness legislation is a product of its time and political context. So many of the wilderness battles of the past pitted traditional gladiators against one another; wilderness advocates versus the timber or mining industries for example. That was a relatively simple dichotomy.
Also relatively simple was the fact that many wilderness battles of the past were about protecting rocks and ice—alpine and subalpine environments having relatively less economic value and pre-existing uses than lower-elevation lands. Many current wilderness proposals, however, now aim to protect lower elevation landscapes—and thus landscapes with more historic uses and entrenched interests. I suspect that the issue of political compromise and wilderness will become only more pronounced in the future because of the character of the lands being debated. (The recent designation of the Owyhee Canyonlands comes to mind for example).
So What’s Changed? What is newsworthy, perhaps, is to consider how the contemporary political context is changing the wilderness debate…again. Let me offer a few examples:
First, consider the widespread interest in forest restoration. At a general level, the forest restoration agenda has the potential of rearranging traditional political alliances. Restoration has certainly shaped a large part of Senator Tester’s controversial wilderness bill (see related posts on our blog). Its proponents are seeking a balance between roadless area protection, various forest restoration goals, and a steadier and more predictable flow of timber. Restoration is changing the terms of the debate in other places as well, with various “place-based” groups drawing new lines on maps, including areas to be prioritized for wilderness, restoration, and more active forest management.
Or take motorized recreation. This constituency is important for obvious reasons, and related concessions are made in several wilderness bills. But motorized recreation has changed the wilderness debate in other ways as well. There seem to be differences of opinion as to how great of threat motorized recreation is to future wilderness designation. Some people believe that there is an urgency to designating lands as wilderness because of the growing threat of motorized recreation. Some fear that motorized interests will increasingly use roadless areas and other protected lands and in doing so will establish historic use and diminish the characteristics that make these lands suitable for wilderness designation. This perspective believes that we don’t have the time or luxury of waiting for the perfect large-scale unblemished wilderness law. Those stars are unlikely to align, they say, so we must get on with more politically feasible protection strategies.
Energy law and policy provides my last example. This sprawling field will likely touch upon all of our federal land systems, wilderness included. Take, for example, the proposed California Desert Protection Act of 2010 (click and read only if you have nothing to do for the next two days). This gargantuan bill, in a nutshell (it wouldn’t fit), would designate wilderness areas, national monuments, and other protected lands and thus take roughly 1 million acres of the Mohave desert off-limits to renewable energy development. But 119 pages later, that same bill encourages solar power production on other federal lands, including those managed by the BLM, USFS, and Defense Department. Worked into the legislation is a hodgepodge of various provisions designed to expedite renewable energy—including its permitting and transmission—in California and other Western states.
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To conclude, I don’t want to overstate this trend because there are lots of old-fashioned wilderness bills and recently passed wilderness laws that are straightforward and uncomplicated. The last Omnibus Conservation Law passed in 2009 includes several examples. So there is nothing preordained about more compromise and economic development in future wilderness designation.
Nonetheless, issues like restoration, motorized recreation, and energy development, among others, will continue to change the way in which wilderness politics is debated in the future. They also bring to the fore a number of important questions.
For now, consider two. First, is wilderness law the appropriate vehicle to address related (and not-so-related) conservation issues such as energy development and forest restoration? And second, is the split between idealists and pragmatists a healthy one, a tension to be balanced? Or are these viewpoints working at cross-purposes to the disadvantage of wilderness and conservation?
This post is not really about the multifaceted and fascinating roadless controversies; it’s about clarity of communication in the press-where citizens should become informed on public policy issues.
Suppose you read this piece, “Forest Service cuts back logging in Oregon roadless area on fire safety project”
Here’s a quote:
The project scaled back commercial logging from 621 acres within roadless areas to 78 acres. It is all along a road on the western side of Diamond Lake that serves 102 private cabins on federal land, Dils said. Without the logging there is nowhere for firefighters to make a stand against a fire moving out of the roadless area toward the cabins, Dils said.
“When they designed this plan it really looked like they wanted to test the limits of the Obama administration on roadless,” said Steve Pedery, conservation director for Oregon Wild. “And from our cursory look the new plan looks like it scaled that way, way back, but it seems they still can’t resist pushing the envelope a little bit.”
People who take the English language literally might wonder how cutting trees along a road would impact “roadless” values.
I italicized the sentence about the fuelbreak for firefighters because that is a very clear statement of the objectives of fuel treatment in a WUI area, whether the trees are dead or alive.
Here’s another quote:
The two-year-old project was widely seen as a test of President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to protect the 58 million acres of backcountry that has never been commercially logged on national forests across the country.
But how can an area next to a road be considered “backcountry”? I am mystified as to why this apparent paradox does not seem to be addressed in this article.
Here is an article from the Idaho State Journal on TU and ICL filing a friend of the court brief in the Idaho Roadless litigation.
My problem with the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society position is that they are so philosophically committed to the concept of roadless area protection requiring a national solution that I don’t really believe they can be objective about the solutions proposed in a state’s rule.
Just compare the Chris Wood quote
“The Idaho rule is a demonstration of what can happen when common sense is applied to a common problem for the common good,” Wood said.
To the Craig Gehrke quote:
“We just don’t think a state approach is going to lead to good, consistent management, any more than having a state-by-state system for running the national parks,” said Craig Gehrke, regional director for the Wilderness Society. “Simply put, we have less protection with the Idaho rule than under the Clinton rule.”
Certainly one view is that everything of importance should be decided nationally.. however, that’s not my view. Nor, more importantly, T.U.’s. Is it about the principle or the protection?
P.S. photos of Idaho Roadless for this blog entry would be appreciated.
Roadless (litigation, rulemaking, projects) seem to be of interest to our group as it involves mapping and zoning, and attempting to make some of these designations permanent, through rulemaking rather than legislation. Right now it involves local (state) versus national decision-making, the role of national environmental groups and a host of other themes of interest to us.
I’d like to contribute to this dialogue by reviewing press articles and observing 1) how closely they stay to the facts (clarity and accuracy), 2) their fairness and 3) whom they choose to speak and the accuracy of the statements quoted. I’m expecting that this will be of interest because roadless areas and polices, unlike planning rules, have distinctive facts associated with them- sometimes that may be too complex to get across in a news article.
I’d like to improve the knowledge and the quality of discourse around this issue- which can be fairly ideological. This is not to criticize members of the press; in the space they have, sometimes all they can say is something generally true with quotes from people who have varying degrees of accuracy and agenda associated with their comments. That’s where I think blogging with people interested, and knowledgeable, with varying points of view, will add substantially to public dialogue on this important subject.
Our first example will be this piece from Noelle Straub of Greenwire in today’s New York Times.
I would give it a score of 15. 5 out of 5 for clarity. 5 out of 5 for accuracy. 5 out of 5 for fairness. That’s a 15 out of 15. Congratulations, great way to start us off, Noelle! If this were an iconic American summer sport, you’d have hit it out of the park!
