Uncategorized

Last week, Forest Service Chief Tidwell issued a press release lauding the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) “new opportunities to advance environmentally responsible forest management and help reduce the use of illegally-sourced wood through their Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system.” Let’s spend a moment unpacking the Chief’s press release.

First, for those unfamiliar with it, the USGBC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation known popularly for its creation of LEED, a system for ranking buildings on the basis of their “green” energy efficiency. From its IRS filings, one learns that USGBC’s CEO/Founder earns $1.37 million a year (NGO envy alert!). Most of USGBC’s approximately $50 million income derives from “management fees” and “membership dues.” For example, a manufacturer of windows can pay USGBC to certify that its windows meet LEED standards and market those windows at a premium. Some federal and many state and local regulatory agencies require and/or reward LEED-certified buildings through regulation and taxpayer-financed subsidies. USGBC is the lobbying arm of the industries that encourage and profit from these governmental actions.

There’s more here than just the head of a minor U.S. land management agency promoting a private corporation’s business and lobbying agenda. What are we to make of the “illegally-sourced” wood hook? Wood cut illegally is a big deal in Third World countries where petty corruption makes timber theft easy from government-owned forests. In the U.S., however, the Forest Service institutionalized illegal logging from national forests, e.g., more than a half-century of clearcutting in violation of the 1897 Organic Act, making criminal logging a relatively minor concern. But, I digress.

To understand the full import of the reference to “illegally-sourced” wood, one needs to examine closely the new LEED standard the Chief’s press release promotes. And to understand the LEED standard, in turn, one must read the fine print of ASTM D7216-10, on which the LEED standard relies. The key sentence in this ASTM is: “Products certified to the globally recognized forest certification standards will meet the “Certified Sources” category regardless of their origin.” In other words, if a 2×4 is certified under any “globally recognized” certification system, it is deemed legally sourced and, thus, can be credited as LEED certified, too.

So who wins with this change? Check the contemporaneous and competing press releases. Ta da! The timber industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (a “globally recognized forest certification standard”) is delighted that SFI-certified wood is now LEED certified, too!

Who loses with this change? Aww . . . feel sorry for the Forest Stewardship Council, which has had its monopoly on wood products LEED certification dashed by LEED’s behind-the-scenes collusion with SFI. FSC has “serious concerns” and is calling on its members to pressure USGBC to end this illicit love affair with SFI.

One wonders whether Chief Tidwell knew that his press release pisses on FSC while kissing SFI? Or did the Forest Service’s press office simply xerox USGBC’s media release because it was a slow news day in the Chief office? And how much in licensing fees and membership dues are SFI and its timber industry affiliates paying USGBC for this backdoor LEED certification? You gotta figure it’s more than FSC has been paying.

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 National Association of State Foresters is supporting a bill that would allow the USFS to sell or swap small inholdings. The draft bill would apply to:

* parcels of 40 acres or less which are determined to be physically isolated, to be inaccessible, or to have lost their National Forest character;

* parcels of 10 acres or less which are not eligible for conveyance under such Act, but which are encroached upon by permanent habitable improvements for which there is no evidence that the encroachment was intentional or negligent; and

* parcels used as a cemetery, a landfill, or a sewage treatment plant under a special use authorization issued by the USDA.

<a href=”https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1214″>The bill is here.</a>

Here’s the press release….

NASF sends Small Tracts Act Amendment letter to Senate

Friday, April 1, 2016

The National Association of State Foresters urges the Senate to pass legislation allowing the USDA Forest Service to sell isolated parcels of land and utilize those funds for acquisition of access and inholdings.

HR 1214 passed the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate for consideration on September 17, 2015. It passed the House on a roll call vote of 403-0.

The Administration has proposed similar language in the Forest Service Budget Justification for 2017 (Appropriations Language Changes, Small Tracts Act Conveyance Authority, page 60).

This is legislation that has broad based support and is desperately needed. These small isolated parcels which would be available for sale, are largely unmanaged “no-man’s lands.”

Many are among or near residential neighborhoods and are often the sites of trash dumping, wildfire ignitions, etc. The agency spends untold amounts of time dealing with law enforcement, trespass and easement issues; time which could be much better spent managing the actual main body of the forest. The agency estimates there may be as many as 25,000 small isolated parcels which fit the definition in the legislation.

Clearly defined ownership patterns make for much more effective and efficient management. As State Foresters, we would rather focus our limited resources on assisting landowners, preventing and fighting fires where these patterns are better defined. The Forest Service shares that perspective. We urge the Senate to pass this important legislation in this legislative session.

(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.

From the Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle

Funding cuts begin to hit Forest Service

An op-ed from a New Jersey newspaper, by a NJ forester (and SAF member):

Modern management needed to keep our forests thriving

This does not involve federal land, but the The Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area, where the “forest stewardship plan has been subject to acrimonious debate.” The idea is to provide a diversity of forest structure and thus a diversity of wildlife habitat on the 3,500-acre WMA. The same argument made by Professors Franklin and Johnson regarding the need for “ecological forestry” in the PNW.

Read the comments below the article for opposing views and a link to a 36-page critique of the plan.

Both of these companies say a shortage of logs from federal land (in Oregon and Calif., respectively) is a main reason for closing:

Mary’s River Lumber Co. closes

Sierra Pacific Announces Permanent Closure of Arcata Sawmill; More than 100 Jobs Lost

But the demand for lumber will not change, of course, so lumber will come from other places.

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.