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The following guest post was written by Chris Krupp, WildEarth Guardians’ Public Lands Guardian. Chris grew up playing in the fields and woods of his grandparents’ dairy farms in central Wisconsin. He received his J.D. from the University of Washington and his B.A. in Economics from Lawrence University. Prior to joining WildEarth Guardians, Chris was staff attorney for Western Lands Project for fifteen years. He enjoys camping and hiking with his family, as well as vegetable gardening and cooking. – mk

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light the importance of wild places in all our lives. Yet the Trump administration is intent on their destruction through unmitigated extractive uses such as oil and gas development, mining, logging, and grazing to benefit private industries.

Wild places—most of which, at least in the U.S., are on public lands—safeguard and improve public health in numerous ways. Studies confirm what is intuitive to anyone enjoying a beautiful day in nature: greater contact with the natural world reduces stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as physical manifestations that often accompany these conditions.

Paradoxically, wild places keep us healthy by limiting our exposure to nature’s ills by creating a physical buffer between human populations and the wildlife that can transfer bacteria and viruses. Covid-19 is not the only recent example of a disease existing in the wild prior to jumping to humans—Lyme disease in the U.S. and the Ebola virus in Africa have been traced to human encroachment upon wild places. Lyme disease, which is transmitted to humans through the bite of ticks infected with a particular species of bacterium, was first diagnosed in Connecticut in 1976. Its current prevalence is thought to be the result of the expansion of suburban neighborhoods into formerly wooded areas and an accompanying reduction in predator populations that control the numbers of deer and rodents that normally host the ticks.

More broadly, wild places support greater biodiversity than places where humans have a heavier presence on the land. And biodiversity gives resilience to the natural systems and cycles that make the planet habitable to humans, as healthy, species-rich ecosystems adapt more easily to stressors such as climate change. It’s no exaggeration to say there’s no humanity without biodiversity.

Wild lands are also carbon sinks that capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—especially forests, though grasslands and deserts store significant amounts of carbon as well. Preservation, and even expansion, of wild places will be crucial in tempering the extent of climate change.

At a time when the need for wild places and public lands is so clear, it’s infuriating and illogical that the Trump Administration is pushing hard for the removal of protections for endangered species, clean air and water, and public participation in land management decisions, all while federal land management agencies are ramping up efforts to drill, mine, graze and cut trees on public lands across the West. In Utah, the Bureau of Land Management is plowing ahead with plans to offer more than 100,000 acres of public lands near Canyonlands and Arches national parks for oil and gas leasing. The Trump administration has proposed reopening public lands on the north rim of the Grand Canyon to uranium mining despite a 2012 moratorium imposed to prevent further poisoning of the landscape. In an effort to push projects through faster and with less public oversight, the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service announced they will no longer analyze the environmental or public health impacts of vast categories of extractive uses—including fossil fuels, logging and grazing—that generate corporate profits at the expense of public lands and human health. Capitulation to the extractive industries has also had a disproportionate impact on low income, Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities. Every extractive industry seems to be getting a sweetheart deal, while vulnerable communities, wildlands, wildlife, wild rivers, and public health bear the consequences.

In the recent past, we have seen states and extractive industries pushing for the transfer of public lands into private or state hands that don’t have to comply with all the federal environmental laws that protect the lands, waters, species, and neighboring communities. Yet advocates for public lands privatization or “transfer” to the states have been surprisingly silent during the coronavirus pandemic. Maybe they’re self-aware enough to know their perceived grievances won’t register with a country currently grappling with systemic racism, a public health crisis, and economic dislocation.

Or maybe they remember that past efforts to legislate the mass sale or transfer of public lands to states or private industries have been overwhelming failures. In 2012 Utah enacted the Transfer of Public Lands Act, which demanded that the United States “extinguish title to public lands and transfer title to those public lands to the state on or before Dec. 31, 2014.” The federal government has not felt compelled to respond to the absurd demand. Utah later passed a bill to authorize a lawsuit against the U.S. to “take back” those same public lands. It’s amounted to nothing, other than lining some lawyers’ pockets. And in 2017, then-Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), after facing widespread public outcry, was forced to withdraw his bill to sell off millions of acres of public lands across the West.

As a result of these past failures, conservative lawmakers and industry proponents have looked to alternative means to make it easier for extractors and developers to exploit public land resources. That’s largely what we’re seeing now: the effective privatization of public lands by weakening the regulatory safety nets that protect wildlands, waters, species, and public health; as well as the removal of public oversight from agency decision-making. It should come as no surprise the Secretary of the Interior was a long-time industry lobbyist who advocated for privatization, reduced public oversight, and weakened environmental laws. Or that the person Trump finally nominated for Bureau of Land Management Director is a dyed-in-the-wool racist climate-change-denying sagebrush rebel.

Despite the recent silence, we shouldn’t expect those who’ve clamored for privatization or state control to keep quiet for long. The issue is too central for its proponents, and the pandemic’s aftermath may offer new pretexts for privatization and state control: boosting government revenue and restarting national and local economies.

The arguments that environmental laws are too burdensome and that public lands have been “locked up” by “Washington bureaucrats” for too long are as short-sighted as ever. But with states facing budgets in shambles and unprecedented unemployment, privatization or transfer may appeal even to those who normally see this scheme for the plundering of public resources it is. We cannot afford to let down our guard.

Public lands in public hands means we all share in the benefits public lands provide—clean water, clean air, recreation, physical and mental health, hunting, fishing, birdwatching, biodiversity, protection against disease, protection of historic and cultural resources, and moderation of the impacts of climate change. Just as important, public lands in public hands means we can all participate in planning and making decisions for how public lands are managed for future generations, through laws such as the National Forest Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

For now, we maintain the right to determine whether public lands protect us from disease, or bring it to our doorstep; help us adapt to climate change, or contribute to the crisis; provide refuge for wildlife, or serve as a feedlot for livestock. We must remain vigilant in our defense of public lands against effective or actual privatization by those who seek to destroy them for private gain. Luckily, Guardians, our supporters and our conservation allies are fighting tooth and nail to keep existing environmental safety nets in place. We will continue to do so, and hope you will continue to join us.

The following piece was written by Leia Barnett, Greater Gila Campaigner with WildEarth Guardians. – mk

Last week, I fell in love with country. Not This Country. Not Our Country. Simply country. I perched atop peaks above 10,000 feet and peered out across distances incomprehensible. I squatted beside rivers that swayed and snaked for hundreds of miles, wild from source to sea, flexing their hydrologic muscle to carve canyons and move mountains. I star-gazed, open-mouthed and full of wonder, remembering what’s small and what’s precious and what’s worthy of protecting. I saw black hawks and blue jays and arching sycamores and barking elk and trundling bears and trotting wolves. Yes, trotting wolves! Three of them to be precise. Yipping and stalking and howling and moving something inside me that once was wild and fiercely free.

All in the Gila, that seemingly eternally unfolding expanse of hills and vales and mountains and vistas and wild silences that spread themselves across southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, what we at WildEarth Guardians refer to as the Greater Gila Bioregion. This is a landscape long inhabited by the Mimbres and Mogollon cultures, and later the Apache, Navajo, Acoma, and Zuni. This place is anciently sacred, humming with the footsteps of Native Ancestors seeding Indigenous Knowledge Traditions deeply prescient for their time. This is a place ecologically abundant, tending to a biodiversity greater than that of Yellowstone. This is a landscape that has known a fire regime and management practices more progressive than anywhere else in the West, where the long-lived cycle of over-grow-burn-regenerate has been allowed to persist with minimal human intervention. This is country wild, where humans have come since time immemorial to travel softly and fit themselves snuggly into the astounding web of living selves, to rest beside Mogollon Death Camas and Mimbres Figwort, to gaze upon Gila chub and Loach minnow, to become, once again, quiet dwellers rather than raucous extractors.

This is the country we need. It requires no undiscerning patriotism, no flaring bias or political unilateralism. It only asks that we give our attention to a greater sense of self, that we assume our membership in this grand community of bipeds and four-leggeds and root-growers and wing-flappers, and that this membership rise to the top of our list of things to be tended to. You may leave your flag and your fearful ideologies at home. Come with me to the Gila, where we may all, once again, fall in love with country. 

Three recent stories in a series by Rob Cheney:

From the Santa Fe New Mexican…. Excerpt:

One would suspect that this ruling will have a significant impact on many U.S. Forest Service forest plan revision processes currently on-going in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Here’s a press release from Western Environmental Law Center and WildEarth Guardians, which is also pasted below.

MISSOULA, Mont. —Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration and state of Wyoming’s appeal of a 2018 decision restoring endangered species protections for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of grizzly bears. The original decision halted states’ planned trophy hunts in the ecosystem, which would have harmed other imperiled populations of grizzly bears.

WildEarth Guardians, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, one of the plaintiffs and victors of the original lawsuit, played a central role in the appeal process, one of the first COVID-19 “virtual court hearing” scenarios.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of grizzly bears in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana totals about 728 animals, up from its historic low of 136 when endangered species protections were enacted in 1975. In the original case, opponents of federal protections for grizzly bears argued that protections were no longer necessary and that a sport hunting season to effectively manage down the population was justified despite the fact that the population represents only a fraction of its historical abundance, and has yet to achieve connectivity to neighboring populations near Glacier National Park and elsewhere.

The recovery of other grizzly bear populations depends heavily on inter-population connectivity and genetic exchange. Absent endangered species protections, dispersing grizzlies essential to species recovery would have to pass through a killing zone outside Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks where Wyoming and Idaho rushed to approve trophy hunts.

“Grizzlies require continued protection under federal law until the species as a whole is rightfully recovered,” said Matthew Bishop, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “The best available science says not only are grizzly bears still recovering, but they also need our help to bounce back from an extinction threat humans caused in the first place. Misrepresenting the facts to promote killing threatened grizzly bears for fun is disgraceful. I’m glad the judges didn’t fall for it.”

The Ninth Circuit agreed with the original ruling that the delisting was premature, did not rely on the best available science, and improperly failed to analyze the impact killing grizzlies just outside the safety of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks would have on other imperiled populations in the lower 48 states. The Ninth Circuit wrote: “…because there are no concrete, enforceable mechanisms in place to ensure long-term genetic health of the Yellowstone grizzly, the district court correctly concluded that the 2017 Rule is arbitrary and capricious in that regard. Remand to the FWS is necessary for the inclusion of adequate measures to ensure long term protection [p. 45].”

“WildEarth Guardians applauds the decision of the 9th Circuit Court—a triumph of science over politics—in ensuring that Yellowstone grizzly bears are allowed to truly recover and thrive,” said Sarah McMillan, conservation director for WildEarth Guardians. “Grizzly bears are an iconic species whose very existence is intertwined with the concept of endangered species protection in the United States. This decision solidifies the belief of numerous wildlife advocates and native tribes that protecting grizzly bears should be based upon science and the law and not the whims of special interest groups, such as those who want to trophy hunt these great bears.”

Grizzlies in the Yellowstone region remain threatened by dwindling food sources, climate change, small population size, isolation, habitat loss and fragmentation, and high levels of human-caused mortality. The Yellowstone population is isolated and has yet to connect to bears elsewhere in the U.S., including to bears in and around Glacier National Park. Grizzlies also have yet to reclaim key historic habitats, including the Bitterroot Range along the Montana-Idaho border.

Hunted, trapped, and poisoned to near extinction, grizzly bear populations in the contiguous U.S. declined drastically from nearly 50,000 bears to only a few hundred by the 1930s. In response to the decline, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, a move that likely saved them from extinction. The species has since struggled to hang on, with only roughly 1,800 currently surviving in the lower 48 states. Grizzlies remain absent from nearly 98 percent of their historic range.

A copy of today’s ruling is here: http://pdf.wildearthguardians.org/support_docs/2020.07.08-Grizzly-Appeal-Decision.pdf

Received a press release today (below) and links to a Bioregional Assessment of Northwest Forests by the US Forest Service. Lots to read and discuss. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

Although there are benefits from consistent land management policy, land managers struggle with a one size fits all management approach that does not always fit the circumstances. For example, some plan direction hasn’t worked well in distinguishing between the dry and wet forest ecosystems across the national forests and grasslands in the BioA area, especially given the fire adapted ecology of some forests. The landscape-level amendments have focused on protecting and developing habitat for aquatic and old forest-dependent species, and they don’t necessarily reflect today’s understanding of dynamic landscapes. Some habitat types in the wetter parts of the region, such as vegetation that emerges after forest-replacing disturbances, are becoming scarce across the landscape. And, although the Forest Service is one of the largest suppliers of outdoor recreational opportunities in the area, the NWFP and other land management plans and amendments lack modern direction supporting sustainable recreation.

The BioA offers management recommendations to address some of these challenges. As the modernization effort moves into individual national forest and grassland assessments, analyses, and planning, we will use the BioA as a tool during conversations with diverse stakeholders to more fully address the social aspects surrounding natural resource management.

We acknowledge that land management planning alone won’t resolve conflicts in values or tradeoffs. We are committed to learning how and why stakeholders hold different values and to providing transparent public engagement opportunities throughout the entire planning process to increase shared learning and build trusting relationships. We believe that improving and maintaining trust among the Forest Service, Tribes, other agencies, local partners, and communities is essential to developing broadly supported land management plans, which help ensure that we’re moving toward the desired conditions on the lands we manage. With public and stakeholder participation, we’ll determine what current land management plan direction should be carried forward and what can be improved upon based on new information, today’s issues, and what best meets the needs of today’s communities and stakeholders.

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Press release, July 8, 2020:

Forest Service Releases Assessment of Current Conditions of Northwest Forests

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service released a Bioregional Assessment evaluating the social, economic and ecological conditions and trends covering 19 units across WA, OR and northern CA in a brief and easy-to-understand format. The assessment uses the best available science and focuses on capturing current conditions and changes on the national forests and grasslands. It provides recommendations on how the Forest Service could address the challenges facing forests, grasslands and communities in the plans that govern how land management decisions are made.

“The release of this assessment gives our region the data and scientific analysis to make future well-informed, landscape-level decisions that benefit our six northern forests,” said Randy Moore, regional forester for the Pacific Southwest Region in California. “Furthermore, we’re now able to move forward and prepare for updating land management plans to provide essential commodities and recreational opportunities, manage and reduce risk from wildfires through vegetative management and other proactive landscape efforts, provide clean air, water and habitat for plants and animals, and preserve our cultural resources, for present and future generations.”

The Forest Service and other federal land management agencies are required by law to develop plans that guide the long-term management of public lands. These plans are developed using public input and the best available science. They establish priorities for land managers and provide strategic direction for how the plan area is to be managed for a period of ten years or more. They may be periodically amended or revised entirely to address changing conditions or priorities.

“This assessment will make it more efficient to modernize our land management plans and reflect the new science, and changes to social, economic, and ecological conditions across this region,” said Glenn Casamassa, regional forester for the Pacific Northwest Region in Oregon and Washington. “It will also preserve the tenets of the Northwest Forest Plan that are working well, so that work can continue effectively and efficiently.”

The Northwest Forest Plan covers nearly 25 million acres of federally managed land in Oregon, Washington and northern California focusing on managing the entire landscape for long-term social and economic stability. The Bioregional Assessment is not a decision document and does not impact current forest management. Instead, it will be used to shape ongoing engagement with stakeholders, state, county, Tribal governments and Forest Service staff as they prepare for the next steps in the planning process together.

More information on Modernizing Forest Plans in the Northwest is available online, and subscribers will receive monthly updates.

• Bioregional Assessment of Northwest Forests Map.pdf

RENO, Nev. – In a decisive win for Bi-State sage-grouse, the Nevada District Court today denied off-roaders’ attempts to gut protections for the imperiled bird in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

Conservation groups had intervened to defend U.S. Forest Service measures that protected the bird’s breeding and nesting habitat from motorized rallies and contests by requiring  buffers and seasonal limits to racing in the area.

“The Forest Service restrictions preventing a 250-mile dirt-bike rally through the middle of sensitive Bi-State sage-grouse habitat in the middle of the breeding season were based in sound science and responsible land stewardship,” said Erik Molvar, executive director with Western Watersheds Project. “That kind of motorized mayhem isn’t multiple use, it’s wildlife abuse. Public lands are some of the last remaining habitat for the Bi-State sage-grouse, and the public interest is best served by prioritizing these habitats for sage-grouse conservation, not motorbike rallies.”

The lawsuit, brought by the Sierra Trail Dogs Motorcycle and Recreation Club (STD), sought to strike down a forest plan amendment that blocked motorcycle and off-road vehicle races and contests in sage-grouse breeding and nesting habitats during the spring and early summer, when those areas are most important for sage-grouse nest success and chick survival. Today’s ruling means the club must abide by the Forest Service requirements.

“It’s troubling that an off-road group tried to put its own convenience and hobby ahead of the survival of native wildlife,” said Scott Lake, Nevada legal advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Thankfully the court wisely struck down this attack on common-sense sage-grouse protections. The Forest Service is doing the right thing to protect these beautiful birds, which are teetering on the brink of extinction.”

The Bi-State sage-grouse population is isolated from all other sage-grouse populations in a unique area in the Mono Basin along the California-Nevada border. There are an estimated 3,305 total birds, far below the 5,000-bird minimum viable population threshold established by sage-grouse experts. Conservation groups are also in court to challenge the denial of Endangered Species Act protections for the Bi-State sage-grouse, citing plummeting populations and ongoing threats from livestock grazing, mining, habitat development, and other human activities.

“This is a rare and imperiled population of sage-grouse that deserves the strongest possible protections,” said Judi Brawer, Wild Places Program Director with WildEarth Guardians. “The Forest Service did the right thing by protecting them from motorized use and abuse, and we were happy to step in to support the agency’s decision and defend it from STD’s misguided and selfish challenge.”

The conservation groups who intervened in court to defend the Forest Service’s limits on motorized use in sage-grouse habitats were represented by attorneys from the Stanford Law Clinic and Western Watersheds Project.

The July edition of the Journal of Forestry will have a paper of interest here: “US Forest Service Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act: Fast, Variable, Rarely Litigated, and Declining,” be Forrest Fleischman et al. I don’t have permission yet to post the full text (it’s open to SAF members), but here’s the abstract and Management and Policy Implications — grist for the discussion mill. The last sentence in the Implications is perhaps the root of many of the agencies challenges: “This may suggest that USFS no longer has the resources to conduct routine land-management activities.” But of course there’s much more to the story.

Abstract
This paper draws on systematic data from the US Forest Service’s (USFS) Planning, Appeals and Litigation System to analyze how the agency conducts environmental impact assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). We find that only 1.9 percent of the 33,976 USFS decisions between 2005 and 2018 were processed as Environmental Impact Statements, the most rigorous and time-consuming level of analysis, whereas 82.3 percent of projects fit categorical exclusions. The median time to complete a NEPA analysis was 131 days. The number of new projects has declined dramatically in this period, with the USFS now initiating less than half as many projects per year as it did prior to 2010. We find substantial variation between USFS units in the number of projects completed and time to completion, with some units completing projects in half the time of others. These findings point toward avenues for improving the agency’s NEPA processes.

Management and Policy Implications

There has been much public debate on how the US Forest Service (USFS) can better fulfill its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) obligations, including currently proposed rule-making by the agency and the Council on Environmental Quality; however, this debate has not been informed by systematic data on the agency’s NEPA processes. In contrast to recently publicized concerns about indeterminable delays caused by NEPA, our research finds that the vast majority of NEPA projects are processed quickly using existing legal authorities (i.e., Categorical Exclusions and Environmental Assessments) and that the USFS processes environmental impact statements faster than any other agency with a significant NEPA workload. However, wide variations between management units within the agency suggest that lessons could be learned through more careful study of how individual units manage their NEPA workload more or less successfully, as well as through exchanges among managers to communicate best practices. Of much greater concern is the dramatic decline in the number of NEPA analyses conducted by the agency, a decline that has continued through three presidential administrations and is not clearly related to any change in NEPA policy. This may suggest that USFS no longer has the resources to conduct routine land-management activities.

The following guest post is written by Adam Rissien. 

Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue flew into Missoula on June 12 to sign a memorandum directing the U.S. Forest Service to essentially double-down on its continued push to prioritize logging, mining, drilling and grazing, all while limiting environmental reviews. During the campaign-style signing event, Secretary Perdue—a former agribusiness CEO whose previous political campaigns were bankrolled by Monsanto and Big Ag interests—not only bragged that “we see trees as a crop,” but also ironically compared America’s bedrock environmental laws to “bubble wrap.” Apparently it was lost on Secretary Perdue that bubble wrap protects valuable things from being destroyed.

Missing from the secretary’s statements was any recognition that America’s national forests, 193 million acres in all, are actually diverse ecosystems that are home to hundreds of imperiled fish and wildlife species, and contain the last remnants of wildlands in this country that millions of people cherish. The secretary failed to mention how numerous communities rely on national forests to provide clean drinking water, or the fact that intact forests do more to remove atmospheric carbon than do stumps. In fact, national forests have a crucial role to play as part of global, natural climate change solutions.

Returning to the past, when resource extraction and exploitation ruled the land is hardly a blueprint for the future. Yet, this is exactly what the secretary ordered and what the Trump administration has been pursuing from Day One. In fact, Perdue’s memorandum comes on the heels of two recent Trump Executive Orders allowing industry and federal agencies to waive compliance with long-standing environmental laws that safeguard fish and wildlife. These orders follow Trump’s wholesale rolling back of rules requiring federal agencies to involve the public, take a hard look at the environmental consequences of its actions, and consider alternatives.

A recent Journal of Forestry article demonstrates the rationale for these rollbacks and attacks is baseless. Even without further “streamlining processes,” the Forest Service approved over 80% of projects between 2005-2018 by categorically excluding them from environmental analysis. The same study also showed that less than 1% of all projects were challenged in court.

Of course, this administration and industry proponents would never let facts change their story, especially when it plays on people’s fears and hopes. For years, those opposed to public land protection keep weaving nostalgic hints of returning to the good ole days when the mills were humming and the logging trucks filled with big trees, all the while knowing economics and automation make this impossible. At the same time, they use fear of wildfires as cover for industrial logging, sidestepping the reality that climate change and the historic drought gripping much of the West increases wildfire risks far more than cutting trees will ever address. The wildfires we see today matches what climate science tells us. If we truly want to see fewer large-scale wildfires, then we need to stop burning fossil fuels and do more to preserve intact, mature forests. Further, it is hubris to believe, and irresponsible to purport, that timber harvest will prevent wildfires. No one talks about hurricane-proofing the Gulf Coast, or tornado-proofing Oklahoma, but the Forest Service suggests if given enough latitude it can reduce forest fires – though the degree of which is left to the public’s imagination and that’s the point.

Ultimately, Secretary Perdue and the Trump administration believe national forests are little more than crops and the best, highest use for public lands is to exploit them with more logging, grazing, mining and drilling. The fact is, national forests and public lands are complex, living ecosystems with inherent value that deserves our moral consideration. These public lands are homes to grizzly bears, mountain goats, elk, trout, salmon and a whole host of other iconic wildlife species. Their survival depends on us, and we need to be better environmental citizens with our non-human neighbors.

America does need a “modernization blueprint” for the future of national forests, one that re-envisions their purpose so we can move beyond viewing forests simply as sources of lumber. In the 21st century, we need to strengthen forest protection, maximize the ability of national forests to serve as part of natural climate change solutions, and heal the scars left from decades of exploitation through true restoration, which cannot be done with a chainsaw.

Adam Rissien writes from Missoula, Montana where he’s the Rewilding Advocate of WildEarth Guardians. Learn more at https://wildearthguardians.org/