The following press release is from the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. – mk
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.
Four conservation groups, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Swan View Coalition, Friends of the Wild Swan, and Native Ecosystems Council, filed a lawsuit in 2013 in Federal District Court challenging the Glacier Loon Timber Sale near Lindbergh Lake in the Swan Valley.
“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 the best potential habitat in the Lower 48 states for lynx, but lynx may be declining in the area.”
“The federal court reaffirmed that the federal government violated the law and the ruling couldn’t have been more clear,” Garrity said, pointing to the language in the ruling that “the Court has compelled no substantive changes to Agreed Operating Procedures but merely required the Forest Service to take the procedural steps obligated by law.”
Moreover, in addressing Forest Service concerns that the ruling would enjoin new Harvest Plans until the required compliance with the law has been done, the Court put the blame directly on the agency, writing:
“In any case, the Forest Service’s argument regarding the difficulties and potentially adverse consequences of complying with the law carry little weight here, where the troubles complained of resulted from the Forest Service’s failure to follow the law in the first instance. Had the Forest Service conducted the requisite analysis prior to taking agency action through approving the Agreed Operating Procedures, the agency would not be in its current predicament.”
“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’ must cease until the Forest Service conducts the proper analysis required by the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act and puts in place appropriate protections for the endangered species in the area.”
UPDATE: Here’s more background information about this issue, from the Fall 2014 Newsletter of the Swan View Coalition, including a discussion about the Plum Creek Timber Co and Nature Conservancy’s “Montana Legacy Project.”
Letter published yesterday in an Alaska newspaper by Owen Graham, Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association. Subject is the Tongass, but Graham addresses “below cost” USFS sales in general. Text is below….
Timber Economics By Owen Graham
Dear Editor
Let’s talk about real timber economics. For years we have been listening to various environmental groups and others talk about Tongass timber sale subsidies. The reality is there are none; no matter how many times the falsehood is repeated. If the federal government provides billions in wind production tax credits; that’s a subsidy. When corn farmers and ethanol producers receive billions in tax credits and have their products supported with an ethanol gas mandate; that’s also a subsidy. However, if a local lumber yard or an appliance store spends more money selling lumber or appliances than it receives, that does not mean their customers are subsidized; it just means that the lumber yard or appliance store will soon go broke. Likewise, the timber industry is not subsidized when it purchases timber from the Forest Service. The industry is not responsible for, nor can it control how much a federal agency spends.
The Forest Service cost of preparing timber sales is very high compared to what the State spends preparing their timber sales, but that is a management issue, not a subsidy. After a timber sale is sold, the government still owns the timberland and they immediately start growing another crop of trees. The agency does a good job growing trees; they just spend too much money. The Forest Service also incurs costs designing and managing some of the access roads but like the land itself, the roads remain after the logging is complete and those roads are used for various purposes such as hunting and fishing access in addition to access for managing the land.
Federal agencies don’t go broke when they spend too much or produce too little, but they do respond to other kinds of incentives. For instance, environmental analyses (timber sale EISs) represent about half of the total cost of preparing federal timber sales. If environmental groups are sincerely concerned about federal fiscal responsibility, they could work to minimize the cost of these analyses rather than constantly demanding more.
A recent economic study by a Montana group criticizes the Forest Service for preparing below-cost timber sales (timber sales that cost more to prepare than the stumpage receipts). The issue is real, but the study grossly exaggerates the below-cost problem. However, instead of addressing the causes of this diseconomy, the study states that the agency should divert its funding to young-growth timber sales, recreation and fish habitat restoration. This not-from-Alaska group is evidently unaware that the young-growth on the Tongass is decades away from maturity and if it is harvested now, the below-cost problem will become much worse. The group also fails to recognize that the timber program has enhanced recreation opportunities and has not harmed fish habitat. In fact, fish populations have more than doubled in Southeast Alaska, particularly in the most heavily logged watersheds. The study also fails to address the issue of replacing year around, high wage logging and manufacturing jobs with low wage, seasonal jobs.
The Forest Service has done a good job managing the forest, even if it does spend too much money. All of the harvested lands support healthy, vigorous stands of young-growth timber, fish and wildlife populations are doing fine and the logging roads are providing access to the forest for everyone. The agency needs to honor the timber supply commitments it made many years ago and make the transition to young-growth timber as it becomes mature rather than submit to political pressure to reduce the timber supply and harvest the young trees prematurely.
Regards,
Owen Graham, Executive Director
Alaska Forest Association
Ketchikan, Alaska
About: Owen Graham is the Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association – a Statewide Association since 1957.
Part of the 449 page Public Lands Rider Package on the $585 Billion Defense Bill includes the SE Arizona Land Exchange, which will give 2,400 acres of the Tonto Nation Forest – ancestral homeland of the Apache Tribe – to a foreign mining company and allow them to put in a huge copper mine on these sacred lands (pictured above).
A coalition of 47 public lands, Wilderness and environmental organizations from across the country have issued a letter to all members of the U.S. Senate demanding the removal of damaging public land “riders” that have been added to the Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the U.S. House last week and now awaits action in the Lame Duck senate.
Title XXX (30) of the bill includes several controversial and harmful public land proposals, including an exchange of National Forest land to a foreign-owned mining company seeking to operate a mine on land sacred to the Apache, a giveaway of 70,000 acres on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to Sealaska Corporation, notorious for its scorched-earth logging practices, and a stealth provision that removes protections from two Wilderness Study Areas in eastern Montana. The bill also contains numerous public land conveyances as well as Wilderness bills with special provisions allowing helicopter use and habitat manipulation.
The coalition of 47 organizations is calling on the Senate to remove Title XXX from the Defense Bill. Some proposals thrown into the mix would gain the groups’ strong support as stand-alone legislation, but the bill’s numerous “poison pills” mean that too high a price would be paid for a few conservation gains. The groups are submitting their letter to Senators ahead of its being brought to the Floor Tuesday.
UPDATE: This video produced by the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition and Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition gives more information about the SE Arizona Land Exchange, which will give 2,400 acres of the Tonto Nation Forest – ancestral homeland of the Apache Tribe – to a foreign mining company and allow them to put in a huge copper mine on these sacred lands.
An elk hunter walks through a roadless area on the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana, part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The roadless area pictured here will NOT be protected as Wilderness by the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act (RMFHA). which is part of 449 pages worth of public lands riders attached to the $585 Billion National Defense Bill. Rather, under the RMFHA and other Defense Bill Riders, public lands livestock grazing in this roadless area must continue, regardless of the ecological consequences.
You may have seen the news of a supposed “Historic” day for Wilderness in Montana and America’s public lands legacy. For example: here and here.
For those who care deeply about the future of America’s public lands legacy, it’s very important for everyone to look at this 449 page pork-filled public lands rider package in its entire context, and what that means not only for Montana, but for America’s entire public lands legacy.
For example, the Sierra Club clearly has stated: “We’re not happy about how this thing unfolded. The losses far outweigh the wins. We should not be privatizing federal lands at the behest of a mining company. We should not be privatizing public lands that are sacred to Native Americans.”
Why would the Sierra Club say that? I mean, the Sierra Club is about as mainstream – and respected – as any conservation group in the country. You mean it’s not just “fringe environmentalists” and “obstructions” and those who volunteer or work for “pretend” groups that are opposed to this pork-filled public lands package? Well, read on and let’s look at some specifics.
WILDERNESS IN MONTANA & RELEASE OF WILDERNESS STUDY AREAS There are a total of 6,397,000 unprotected Wilderness-eligible roadless acres in Montana. This public lands rider would protect only 67,000 acres in Montana as Wilderness. That means that this “Historic” “new hope for Wilderness” would amount to protecting just 1% of the total Wilderness-eligible roadless acres in Montana as Wilderness.
Nationally, the number of Wilderness acres protected in this bill is even more pitiful. This ‘historic’ 449 page-long Public Lands rider attached to the National Defense Authorization Act would protect a whopping 0.2% of all remaining Wilderness-eligible roadless acres in the United States. Nothing says “Happy 50th Birthday Wilderness Act” than boldly protecting 0.2% of what remains, right?
Nothing says, “We ended Montana’s 33 year Wilderness protection drought by boldly protecting 1% of the remaining Wilderness-eligible roadless acres in the state,” right? Maybe in another 33 years we can get another 1% of the Wilderness-eligible roadless acres in Montana protected as Wilderness, right?
As you’ll see below, we must look at protecting 1% of the remaining Wilderness-eligible lands in Montana as Wilderness, and 0.2% nationally, in the context of what else is in the 449 page rider package.
Here are some more Montana Wilderness specifics. The Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act does designate 67,000 acres of this world-class habitat as Wilderness, but that’s a paltry sum of the Wilderness-eligible wildlands on the Rocky Mountain Front.
The RMFHA also locks-in taxpayer subsidized public lands grazing across the Front by stating, “The Secretary SHALL permit grazing” where it currently exists. Under existing law, grazing MAY be allowed to continue, but it’s not mandated that it MUST continue. As such, the RMFHA ties the hands of the Forest Service by mandating the government must keep a private, commercial enterprise operating on public lands into perpetuity, regardless of the ecological consequences.
Groups like the Montana Wilderness Association, who support the RMFHA – and have remained 100% silent as to the last-minute changes with the RMFHA that you’ll read about below – are also telling the public that an additional 208,160 acres of the Front have been “protected,” but that’s not really true.
Fact is, the RMFHA clearly preserves existing motorized use, grazing (now mandated to continue indefinitely) and logging on these 208,160 acres of public lands. However, what’s happened is that MWA and bill supporters have simply renamed these lands the “Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Management Area,” a name that they made up, but doesn’t really mean anything. Click here for more info.
It’s clear in the bill that current on-the-ground management will be unchanged within this 208,160 acres under the RMFHA, except that now the existing grazing leases must continue into perpetuity, so one could more honestly argue that these supposedly 208,160 “protected” acres actually have LESS protection as a result of the RMFHA.
Also, keep in mind that the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act was changed at the last minute – in secret, back room horse-trading process between Montana Democrat Sen Jon Tester and Republican Rep (Sen-elect) Steve Daines.
As the Montana Environmental Information Center points out in this blog post, Senator Tester and Rep Daines’ last minute change to the RMFHA now includes the release of two Wilderness Study Areas near Otter Creek, which is nearly 500 miles away from the Rocky Mountain Front. Plus they snuck into the RMFHA (again with no public input or process) a provision that will likely release another 14,000 acres of Wilderness Study Areas in eastern Montana near the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. These Wilderness Study Areas are about 350 miles from the Rocky Mountain Front.
Again, there were zero public meetings about this in Montana and Daines and Tester offered the public zero notice or opportunity to comment about their intent to release these public lands Wilderness Study Areas from their current protection. And clearly, Wilderness Study Areas 350 and 500 miles away from the Rocky Mountain Front have very little to do with a Rocky Mountain Front bill, other than Sen Tester and Rep Daines secretively used it as means to release eastern Montana Wilderness Study Areas for more development.
Also, according to MEIC, part of the public lands rider means that “Great Northern Properties gets its grubby hands on 112 million tons of coal adjacent to the Signal Peak mine. Great Northern has been wanting this coal for years as it knows developing the coal rights on Northern Cheyenne land would be difficult, if not impossible, to develop. The coal on the Northern Cheyenne reservation was omitted from the expansion of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 1900. Now the Signal Peak coal mine that sends most of its coal overseas to Asian markets can further expand, continue to pollute water quality in the area, cause subsidence of surface owners property, and be responsible for hundreds of millions of additional tons of climate changing carbon dioxide pollution. Wilderness is not immune to the effects of climate change so should we sacrifice the climate for wilderness designation?”
MEIC has stated that, for reference, 112 million tons of coal is approximately 3 years worth of coal production by every single coal mine in Montana, one of America’s top producing coal states. MEIC has also figured out that all that additional coal just given away by Senator Tester and Senator Daines with zero public input or notice during secret “horse-trading” meetings in Washington DC would result in an extra 224 million tons of carbon pollution.
So honestly, the end result of this supposed “historic” day for Wilderness in Montana may be a complete wash. Hey, but at least David Letterman – who has given generously to the Montana Wilderness Association – gets his own private Deep Creek Wilderness protected right next to his sprawling ranch, right? And at least the Montana Wilderness Association and The Wilderness Society in Bozeman have those fundraising letters all set to mail out telling supporters about their “historic” Wilderness protection efforts in Montana.
PUBLIC LANDS GRAZING The so-called “Grazing ‘Improvement” rider in the bill – as was pointed out by a work colleague/public lands policy expert – is a complete roll back of environmental law and public input into public lands grazing permit renewals. Essentially, public lands grazing permits would now be renewed regardless of a NEPA analysis, public land health conditions and regardless of the impact on wildlife, including endangered species.
“The only environmentally beneficial part of the Grazing Improvement Act — voluntary grazing permit retirement — was removed, making this bill a wholesale disaster,” said Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with WildEarth Guardians. “This bill would make it harder for government agencies to manage livestock grazing on public lands, and create new obstacles to restoring damaged habitats where livestock grazing is currently degrading the health of our public lands.” More info from a coalition of conservation groups is here.
Ironically, as the coalition conservation groups point out, and as Andy Kerr mentioned in the E&E article highlighted in a previous blog post, the Grazing “Improvement” Act all but ensures the US Fish and Wildlife Service will have to list greater sage-grouse under the Endangered Species Act as it completely circumvents the current process of revising land use plans by the BLM and Forest Service. In addition, extending public lands grazing permits to 20 years will continue the fleecing of U.S. taxpayers. A General Accounting Office (GAO) report found that federal land management agencies lose $10 for every $1 paid in grazing fees.
PUBLIC LANDS GIVEAWAYS, RELEASES OR PRIVITIZATION The 449 page riders also includes a number of public lands giveaways and privatization schemes, in which politicians such as Sen Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen Reid (D-NV) clearly pulled some strings to help their campaign contributors.
The SE Arizona Land Exchange in the bill will give 2,400 acres of the Tonto Nation Forest – ancestral homeland of the Apache Tribe – to a foreign mining company and allow them to put in a huge copper mine on these sacred lands. The area contains Apache burial grounds, important medicinal plants, and irreplaceable ceremonial grounds and cultural sites.
Specifically, the mining corporation is Rio Tinto, a foreign corporation that also happens to co-own a uranium mine with the Iranian government!!
As you can see here, Rio Tinto formed a subsidiary called Resolution Copper that has fully acknowledged they will take this part of the Tonto National Forest in Arizona, put in a massive copper mine, and ship copper concentrate to China to be processed. Finally, all this would circumvent the normal process of permitting mines located on public land.
A package of bills dealing with Nevada will undermine the Wilderness Act by allowing a number of non-conforming uses, while 10,000 acres of public lands in Nevada currently managed by the BLM will be conveyed to the City of Yerington to facilitate mineral production.
In Alaska some of the public lands pork includes a transfer/giveaway of 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest (including some amazing, ecologically important old-growth forests) to a private logging corporation for the purpose of cutting down the old-growth forests that were formerly part of the Tongass National Forest, and likely shipping them to Japan and China. This blog has had two previous posts on this issue, one by a retired Forest Service economist on the folly of the Sealaska Bill. The other previous Sealaska post was from two area biologists with the Alaska Dept of Fish and Game Habitat Division.
Another section of the rider extends an existing program to speed up and streamline processing of public lands oil and gas permits by the BLM (i.e. including the controversial practice of fracking, which currently produced around 280 billion gallons of wastewater in the U.S. annually). Another part sets the oil and gas permit processing fee at a flat rate for 10 years (likely yet another costly taxpayer giveaway to Big Oil) and adjusts the interest rate paid on oil and gas royalty (another taxpayer giveaway to Big Oil?).
Don’t be fooled by the politicians, industry spokespeople or the people who work for multi-million dollar conservation organizations. The Sierra Club is right on the money when they clearly state, “The losses far outweigh the wins.”
What’s highlighted here is just sampling of some of the terrible riders that will undermine America’s public lands legacy that were included in this 449 page package. Once the public and public lands policy experts actually have time to review the entire bill you can bet there will be more pork-filled egregious examples of how Congress completely sold America’s public lands down the river to benefit their campaign contributors, and how a small handful of very well funded conservation groups remained silent and/or celebrated this “historic” package.a
Bottom Line: This public lands package attached as a rider to an unrelated National Defense Authorization Act will mean more public lands grazing, mining, oil and gas development and logging…and less public input, less protection for wildlife species and less science-based management overall.
“Strikes the right balance?” “Historic?” Look at the details and decide for yourself if this is how to preserve and protect America’s public lands legacy.
UPDATES: Below are some of the many updates that have been coming in after citizens and organizations have actually had time to review the 449 pages of public lands riders. I’ll keep updating this original article as they come in. Thanks. – mk
What they didn’t tell you about the public lands riders
By Steve Charter, who ranches over coal that would be traded by the public lands proposal, and is the chair of Billings-based Northern Plains Resource Council.
When U.S. Rep. Steve Daines and Sens. John Walsh and Jon Tester were celebrating the public lands package they sneaked into a defense bill, I wonder if they thought about the landowners and taxpayers they threw under the bus by doing it. Their package transfers valuable coal under my family’s ranch and our neighbors in the Bull Mountains to Great Northern Properties, a mega-corporation spun off from the railroad years ago, in exchange for other coal in southeastern Montana. Great Northern Properties gets a windfall by giving up low-quality coal that will almost certainly never be mined and gains high-quality coal next to mines with a high likelihood of development. It’s like trading a trailer house for a mansion. [Full Article Here]
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47 Public Lands & Wilderness Groups Blast Riders in Defense Bill (Click here)
Both sections designating new Wildernesses in Nevada have bad special provisions that would undermine the viability of both areas as Wilderness in the long term. They include:
• Pine Forest Range Wilderness, Sec. 3064, p. 1366. A 26,000-acre Wilderness.
– Buffer zone language
– Military overflights language
– Water rights language (no federally-reserved water rights for the Wilderness)
– Release of two Wilderness Study Areas (Blue Lakes and Alder Creek)
– Fish and wildlife language. The State may continue to use aircraft (including helicopters) “to survey, capture, transplant, monitor, and provide water for wildlife in the Wilderness.” (presumably for guzzlers). Plus the State or its designee may conduct wildlife management activities in Wilderness in accordance with a 2003 MOU between BLM and the State.
• Wovoka Wilderness, Sec. 3066, p. 1395. A 48,000-acre Wilderness.
– Buffer zone language
– Military overflights language
– Water rights language (no federally-reserved water rights for the Wilderness)
– Fish and wildlife language. Allows the temporary and occasional use of motor vehicles and aircraft. The State may continue to use aircraft (including helicopters) “to survey, capture, transplant, monitor, and provide water for wildlife in the Wilderness.” (presumably for guzzlers). Plus the State or its designee may conduct wildlife management activities in Wilderness in accordance with a 1984 MOU. Also contains explicit language allowing the construction of guzzlers (“Wildlife Water Development Projects”).
As we have seen from the history of wilderness bills, setting bad precedents for one area often means that these precedents get replicated and expanded in future wilderness bills.
Former Interior chief Norton faults state bids for federal tracts
Corbin Hiar, E&E reporter
Published: Friday, December 5, 2014Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton questioned the viability today of conservatives’ efforts to transfer federal lands to state control and encouraged state legislators to follow a land-swap model pioneered by a polarizing Nevada Democrat.Asked by Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, president of the American Lands Council, about the prospects for states taking ownership of federal tracts, Norton said, “I have to admit, I’m somewhat hampered by experience.” She had just concluded a headline speech at a Washington, D.C., summit organized by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
Utah’s Legislature in March 2012 passed a law demanding that the federal government by Dec. 31 this year relinquish 31.2 million acres owned mostly by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service to the Beehive State. Proponents of the law believe Utah is owed the lands under its 1894 Enabling Act, but legal scholars say the demand is unconstitutional (E&ENews PM, Oct. 29).
While that effort is still in limbo, Norton, who led Interior in the George W. Bush administration, pointed to a previous attempt, known as “Project Bold,” that unsuccessfully tried to consolidate control of “checkerboard lands” in Utah, where federal parcels are interspersed with state and private lands.
“Even during the Reagan administration, that went down in flames,” she said.
Instead, Norton recommended that state lawmakers “explore some sophisticated approaches that can provide benefits that are more obvious to the public” than the loosely supported arguments they’ve offered so far (Greenwire, Dec. 5).
“I think a lot of people are really concerned about the notion that anything that’s not in federal ownership is immediately going to be paved over,” she said. “Clearly, that’s not the case, but that’s the concern you need to address.”
Furthermore, people across the country need to be assured that states can responsibly manage federal lands, Norton added.
“It’s not just the people of Utah that need to be assured that it can work, but the people of New York and California and so forth,” she said. “So it’s a real uphill battle.”
But Norton told her fellow Republicans that there was still cause for hope: “I’ve heard some discussion of increasing the amount of land that might go into parks or other protected spaces in exchange for releasing some of the lands back to state ownership.”
There could also be “some opportunities for shared management of those lands, especially in the checkerboard lands,” she said.
A land-management example Norton said she sought to follow during her time at Interior was created in part by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), “who you might think would be a real opponent.”
She noted that Reid was one of the original co-sponsors of the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which requires BLM to sell 27,000 acres of federal land in Clark County over a 20-year period (Land Letter, June 27, 2002).
“Because Las Vegas is completely surrounded by Bureau of Land Management lands, [the bill’s authors] came up with the concept of auctioning off some of those lands with all of that money designated either for conservation use or land acquisition of sensitive lands or things that would have an immediate benefit in the local area,” Norton explained. “Well, as a result, they got the support of environmentalists as well as the real estate developers and the local community.”
Sales authorized under the law had generated more than $2.7 billion, “which is huge in the context of public land management budgets,” she said. “That’s the kind of sophisticated approach and localized really targeted approach that I think might be successful.”
Several Montana newspapers have published stories about the just-released study, Collaboration at a Crossroads, from The Wilderness Society. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like it offers good summaries of 14 Montana projects.
This court order may offer some insight into the costs of litigation. Sometimes agencies are awarded costs. In this case, $9,502.12 “incurred in scanning, duplicating, collating, and Bates-stamping the administrative record, which numbered in excess of 24,000 pages.”
“More than 9 million acres of forest in Washington and Oregon should be selectively logged and burned to make the remaining trees more resistant to wildfire, disease and drought, according to a new study by the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.”
Although Ross Gorte has retired from the Congressional Research Service, where he made a career of critiquing fiscally irrational Forest Service timber management, his analytical skills are undiminished. In a report published this month by Headwaters Economics, Gorte and co-author Ben Alexander show that there has been no “transition to a second-growth economy” in the Tongass timber program. The Obama administration has promoted second-growth wood as the lynch pin of its Tongass political strategy. But, as Gorte and Alexander report, the FS budget and sale numbers show the transition has proven to be all rhetoric and no substance.
The cost and revenue figures should shock the conscience of any fiscal conservative. In the most recent five-year period of data (FY 09-13), the Forest Service spent $100 million more on its timber sale program than purchasers paid for the trees. And that’s selling 87% old-growth volume. The finances of second-growth, which no one wants to buy at any price, will prove even more fiscally ruinous (e.g., this pile of rotting logs from the Ocean Boulevard second-growth logging project where the FS paid the purchaser to cut the trees, not a single one of which ended up as a useable wood product).
None of this old-growth logging promotes “forest health,” decreases “fire risk,” “improves” wildlife habitat, or serves any other “restoration” or “ecosystem services” objective. This is pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned clearcut logging. Timber jobs in southeast Alaska number 281 (0.9% of the private sector workforce), while tourism and recreation employ 6,700. Tongass timber sale spending is all about the 100+ FS employees who make their living planning, selling and administering logging, even as FS recreation staff levels decline.
I could go on. Read the report. Here’s hoping that Ross gains even more traction as a private-sector advocate for land management fiscal sanity than he did within government.
“The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are seeking to eliminate key protections for watersheds, streams and salmon” — says this op-ed in the Eugene Register-Guard.
“In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan allowed federal forest management to free itself from court injunctions. The plan contains an aquatic conservation strategy, which provides protections for streams and critical support for threatened and endangered salmon. The BLM and Forest Service are revising all forest plans under the Northwest Forest Plan with a goal of increased timber harvests and lower standards for the aquatic conservation strategy.”
