Wilderness

Towering Peaks of Central Idaho

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This will be the first of many postings to share my photography associated with our National Forests. I have worked on 23 National Forests across the country, in 11 states. The photos I took while working for the Feds will be available for free limited usage, if someone thinks it might help their cause. Others can be available matted and/or framed *smirks*

(Edit: Sharon wanted bigger!)

Several of these peaks in the Lost River Range of Idaho are over 12,000 feet.  I met this other detailer, who was doing wildlife surveys, and was shocked to learn that he was climbing part of the way up these mountains, looking for rare species. Yes, he was over 50 years old! I was doing aspen surveys, mapping, photographing and analysis, in support of a new grazing plan. It was in my power to recommend protective measures for the impacted aspen stands. Of course, everything that eats grass, eats aspen. I felt it was meaningful work.

The Mirage of Pristine Wilderness: From High Country News

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I thought this piece and the comments were both interesting. Here’s the link.

The mirage of pristine wilderness

by Emma Marris

One summer day, I went with my father and daughter to Schmitz Park in West Seattle, famous for being among the only chunks of old-growth forest within city limits. A few urban noises penetrated the 50-acre park, mostly airplanes and boat horns. But it was markedly quiet — and beautiful. The turf was springy with a thousand layers of needles. Creeks wended their way under fallen logs. Ferns and firs and hemlock quietly photosynthesized, cradled by the debris of dead trees. And all around us, right along the trail, were bushes heavily laden with red huckleberries. I ate a couple and gave several to my toddler — something I probably wouldn’t have done five years ago, when I took more seriously the solemn duty not to besmirch natural areas, especially old-growth forests, with my human presence.

As a kid growing up in Seattle, I was proud of the Northwest’s old-growth forests. We still had pristine wilderness, while the people of the Midwest and East Coast had used theirs all up. It made me feel smug.

But, of course, it isn’t that simple. For the last several years, I’ve been writing about ecologists and conservationists coming to terms with the fact that “pristine wilderness” is a mirage. Climate change, pollution, species movements, land-use changes — we’ve transformed the whole globe for good, every inch of it. And even if we could undo all that we’ve done, what would we go back to? Prehistoric humans changed landscapes much more than we once believed. And paleoecologists are teaching us to see familiar ecosystems not as eternal, unchanging, harmonious wholes so much as accidental, ephemeral aggregations — ships passing in the night in geological time. There never was a one right time, the ecologists say — no Garden of Eden.

A year or so ago, I interviewed Feng Sheng Hu, a paleoecologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He explained that the Northwest’s old-growth forests present a puzzle. Not because they are so old — because they’re so young. The very oldest gray, grand, massive Douglas firs in the region are about 700 years old. But their normal lifespan extends to 1,200 years, making those wise grandfathers just a titch over middle-aged. The reason, said Hu, was that the climate has only been cool enough for them for 700 years. Go further back, and you find yourself in a hotter time called the Medieval Warm Period, when frequent fires would have kept any Doug-fir forests from reaching a ripe old age. A mere 700 years ago, there were already people living in the Northwest. As Hu spoke, my pride was instantly shattered. The vaunted old-growth forest ecosystem wasn’t even one tree-generation old. It didn’t predate human settlement. It wasn’t unchanging. It was … what? Just a forest?

So as I walked through this little scrap of urban old growth, my daughter on my back, I was thinking hard about my emotional reaction. I wanted to see if it felt any different now that I know that old-growth forest isn’t the timeless, unchanging, right ecosystem I once believed it to be.

Among the skunk cabbage and black mud and moss and lichen, the big trees still seemed impressive, solid, silent — detached but somehow tender. I realized that even after we learn that old-growth ecosystems aren’t necessarily that old, the trees are still really, really big.

Then my father spoke. “We came here when you were tiny,” he said cheerfully. “You were still mastering walking longer distances, and I think you walked all the way up the trail.” This, then, was presumably back in the early 1980s, when my parents were still together. I felt a stab of nostalgia for my childhood, and my train of thought switched tracks. You can’t go home again, I thought. That’s the message of all this new research. First you learn that you can’t go back, and then you learn that there never was a home to go back to. Everything is always in flux; any date you pick is arbitrary, whether it is before or after Columbus, before or after we killed off the mammoths and giant ground sloths, before or after the logging industry began in the Pacific Northwest around 1850. And it is sad. I’ve written a whole book arguing that ditching the “pristine wilderness” idea is empowering and liberating because it allows us to look to the future and create more nature instead of clinging to disappearing scraps of seemingly untouched land. That’s still true. But it is also reasonable to grieve for the loss of a beautiful, simple ideal.

Dad and I made a list of the reasons Schmitz Park is valuable. “It is a rare ecosystem type in the city,” I said. “And it is beautiful. And there are really big trees.” “And,” he said, “no one has ever changed it.” My first impulse was to pooh-pooh this as yet another manifestation of the counterproductive obsession with pristine wilderness. And certainly it isn’t strictly true. Some trees were taken out before it was protected, and volunteers are fiddling with it all the time, removing exotic species and planting native seedlings. But he’s right that it stands out from a sea of bungalows and coffee shops and sidewalks and docks, a green swath with big old trees. Maybe not old enough to impress Hu and maybe not pristine. But big and old, goddamn it. Big and old. A good place to let yourself mourn a little for the Eden that never was, for the early childhood you remember only hazily through photographs. A good place to feed the kid some berries. Other people may be too scared to eat them, or too respectful to touch them, but I have given up worshiping wilderness in favor of tasting it.

Emma Marris is a freelance environmental journalist based in Columbia, Missouri. Her first book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, comes out this month.
© High Country News

Wildfires, Wilderness and Safety: Dollar Lake

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Ross William Hamilton, The Oregonian
Foto sent this link in to an Oregonian article with this comment.

Nowhere is the controversy so polarized over Wilderness fires. Both Bob Zybach and I were motivated to post in the comments, seemingly squelching the folks who subscribe to the idea that wildfires are always “natural and beneficial”, despite the threats to their water supply. Also interesting is the comments from an apparent smokejumper, somewhat critical of mistakes made by fire managers. The article’s content is a bit slanted, even to my enlightened knowledge. To me, one of the conundrums is trying to find a balance between Wilderness, water quality and wildfires and firefighter safety. It seems that no matter what the Feds do in this situation, they get ample criticism. It’s unfortunate that, sometimes, firefighter safety is used as an excuse to not aggressively fight the wildfires. It’s a very fine line there.

Thanks, Foto!

Spagna on the Green Mountain Lookout: plus NTHP vs. WW

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from High Country News here.
A fire lookout in a wilderness speaks of our past
Essay – July 07, 2011 by Ana Maria Spagna

If monster mansions in Jackson, Wyo., or Sun Valley, Idaho, can boast million-dollar views, what’s a historic cabin in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness worth? From this cabin that used to be a wildfire lookout, you can see a sea of summits, glaciers, a volcano and hidden lakes mostly surrounded by uncut forests.

Green Mountain Lookout, a historic 14-by-14-foot structure built in 1933, has gone through several stages of rehabilitation, and then, after a few missteps, a reconstruction. Now, suddenly, a group called Wilderness Watch wants to tear it down.

If you want to be contrary about this issue, there are plenty of arguments against fire lookouts. There’s the premise critics start with — the mistaken idea decades ago that putting out all fires was noble and necessary. Then there’s the fact that wilderness is supposed to be untrammeled, and what’s a flammable wooden and glass house on a mountaintop if not hardcore trammeling? And to be honest — as someone who worked in the woods — I don’t feel called upon to revere the various writers and poets who were paid to sit and scribble in some of these historic lookouts.

Still, Green Mountain Lookout takes my breath away. I don’t idolize the (mostly) men who spent their summers sitting inside, but I am awed by the people who built the lookouts. Often they were Civilian Conservation Corps members or local packers or trail workers, poorly paid and outfitted. Always they were hardy and courageous, skilled and earnest, and wowed — I’m guessing now — by the luck that landed them in these unspeakably lovely places.

I make this guess, in part, because I have friends who helped rebuild Green Mountain Lookout: not just the hewing and sawing and the careful salvage of shiplap siding, but the paper-pushing, the negotiating, the hoop-hopping required to make it happen. I cannot bear to toss their good labors aside.

This is not to say that everything built must stay built. The Elwha Dam is a case in point. I’ll be there cheering when it comes down. The Green Mountain Lookout may, arguably, be doing little good, but it’s also doing no harm. It’s not, for example, dooming an entire salmon run to extinction. The lookout’s only crimes are crimes against human sensibilities.

The basis for the Wilderness Watch lawsuit lies in helicopters. Helicopters are, of course, officially forbidden in wilderness, though they are used to fight fires, for rescues and occasionally for trail construction — or in this case, lookout reconstruction — once the proper hoops have been hopped. The gray area is troublesome, sure. But is the offense of hearing a helicopter so heinous it merits a lawsuit? Is it worse than the treatment of prisoners of war (or non-war)? Or the poisoning of rivers? Or the denial of climate change? Part of what galls me in this case is the sheer waste of activist energy.

But there’s more. If every human instinct has a rusty underbelly, the downside of wilderness protection is the desire to pretend we are the first humans to arrive in a pristine land. As if Lewis and Clark did not depend on the kindness of Indians. As if modern hikers do not depend on constructed roads, cleared trails, sturdy bridges. Fooling ourselves into believing we’re first seems like a kind of re-conquering, a dangerous game that allows our egos to grow big and unwieldy, the same egos that wreaked havoc in the first place.

I don’t want to play pretend. I’d rather honor the people who came before me. I’d rather share their passion for grandeur. If I’m lucky enough to spend the night in a lookout that’s meticulously maintained by volunteers or seasonal laborers, I’d rather appreciate the roof over my head as I look out at the roofless miles, and be grateful.

Wilderness is about humility. Walk a dozen miles off a road and you’re instantly at the mercy of predators and of the elements. You can be humbled by nature, and also, I’d argue, by our own humanity.

Stand at Green Mountain Lookout and look to the southwest. You can see the scars of clear-cuts and the stretch of highway that leads to shopping malls and parking lots and paved-over wetlands. Humanity is responsible for both clear-cuts and the Wilderness Act, and even for a few lines of poetry that have transcended geography and generation.

Among the best things wilderness can do is make us realize that what we do counts. Some of it is marvelous, some of it catastrophic. Fire lookouts sit smack on the divide. Tearing down Green Mountain Lookout won’t erase that.

Ana Maria Spagna is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an op ed syndicate of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a writer in Stehekin, Washington.
A commenter provided a link to the National Trust for Historic Preservation blog here.

The National Trust views the draconian remedy of removing the Green Mountain Lookout as one that would directly contradict the Forest Service’s obligations for the stewardship of historic resources under the National Historic Preservation Act. The Department of Justice, representing the Forest Service, authored an eloquent brief highlighting the stewardship responsibilities of the Forest Service for historic sites and structures in wilderness throughout the country, spanning more than 10,000 years of human history. The Forest Service made a compelling argument that the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act are not mutually exclusive, and can indeed coexist as a set of principles that govern the agency’s management and stewardship of its historic properties.

The National Trust recently weighed in to support the Forest Service with an amicus curiae brief, together with a coalition including the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, the Darrington Historical Society, and the Forest Fire Lookout Association. In a motion requesting the court’s permission to file the amicus brief, the coalition expressed the concern that Wilderness Watch’s extreme position threatens protections for a range of other historic resources that predate wilderness designation, including Native American shrines and rock shelters, graveyards, lighthouses, pioneer cabins, as well as other fire lookouts.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation announced that the Green Mountain Lookout was named to the state’s “Most Endangered Historic Properties” list. Stay tuned, as the battle to protect this unusual historic structure continues.

Wildness and Wilderness: A Few Quotes from David Oates

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The Economist piece here begins a series of posts on the topic of “what pieces of what we do are based on a pre-climate change/non-dynamic worldview, and what must we do to develop new approaches with climate change in mind?”

The comment from Les Joslin here pointing out that Thoreau’s quote was about wildness, not wilderness, reminded me of David Oates’ book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature. Now, all who follow this blog know that I am not a wallower in deep thinking. I tend to be more interested in facts and actions than ideas. But I recognize that ideas (and words) are important, because they form a fundamental framing of the universe. If we are unaware of that framing we can talk past each other and never, ultimately, understand each other. And those misunderstandings can lead to attribution of bad intent, and rifts among us when, instead, there could be powerful surges of joint action for ourselves and the Earth.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussion. You can find more excerpts, as well as his other work, on Oates’ website here.

Eden is a myth that has ended up telling its tellers, speaking through them without their ability to see it or to imagine any other words, or worlds. But we cannot afford to let this storyline use us any more. It is time to bring it into consciousness, recognize it as a historical artifact, and move to other ground. For the immediate political gains we make in using the Eden-and-Apocalypse language are paid for with long-term defeat. Like Muir, we find we cannot live in Eden, and that however “saved” it is, it is somewhere else. We trudge in a flat and dusty world, separated and alienated (as all the nature writers declare) from a vital connection with the world. Eden can’t be saved unless we are, too. Our fates are intertwined. We must re-imagine what Eden means.

“But they have too often veered into the dead-end language of Paradise Lost. When the rhetoric of Lost Eden shows up,as it does in classics like Muir and Abbey and lots of recent environmental writing and politicking, it pretty much squelches the possibility for grounded choices, for practical spirituality. For knowing when to keep the tree and when to make it into something else. That’s the real work (in Gary Snyder’s phrase):smutting along in the world. Glorying along in it, growing roses from our dungheaps and dungheaps from our roses. This work takes passion, energy, humility and perhaps humor. Willingness to try, to get soiled; to compromise, learn, improve. (note from Sharon: sounds like collaborative adaptive management?)

But these traits we cannot find when we are loaded down with post-Edenic guilt and pessimism. These leave us in a state of environmental denial, too exhausted from crisis-overload to pay attention; or whipped up into Puritan absolutism, searching for purity in the form of fantasy wildernesses and defeatist politics. “Apathy and dogmatism” in the words of James D. Proctor’s searching analysis of the forest debate. Neither response works very well in the world we actually live in, which generally isn’t about purity but is ready to reward attentiveness bountifully.”

Note I think Oates may be referring to this book edited by Proctor.

The Anthropocene- From “The Economist”- Prophetic or Heretical?

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Here’s Anthopocene the essay.

We had an interesting conversation about this piece at work and what it means to the “protected area”- roadless or wilderness- question. What happens when “what you can’t do” in protected areas is to respond to climate change? What happens when “letting things alone” or “what used to be” are not our targets- what should our conceptual moorings be in a shifting world?

 It is one of those moments where a scientific realisation, like Copernicus grasping that the Earth goes round the sun, could fundamentally change people’s view of things far beyond science. It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly.

Thinking afresh is the easier bit. Too many natural scientists embrace the comforting assumption that nature can be studied, indeed should be studied, in isolation from the human world, with people as mere observers. Many environmentalists—especially those in the American tradition inspired by Henry David Thoreau—believe that “in wilderness is the preservation of the world”. But the wilderness, for good or ill, is increasingly irrelevant.

Almost 90% of the world’s plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role. Although farms have changed the world for millennia, the Anthropocene advent of fossil fuels, scientific breeding and, most of all, artificial nitrogen fertiliser has vastly increased agriculture’s power. The relevance of wilderness to our world has shrunk in the face of this onslaught. The sheer amount of biomass now walking around the planet in the form of humans and livestock handily outweighs that of all other large animals. The world’s ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans. Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift: the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods.
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Some will want simply to put the clock back. But returning to the way things were is neither realistic nor morally tenable. A planet that could soon be supporting as many as 10 billion human beings has to work differently from the one that held 1 billion people, mostly peasants, 200 years ago. The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 21st-century task.

More on the Green Mountain Lookout

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Here’s an opinion piece in the Everett Herald Net.

Now I will be the first to confess that I don’t know what side if any is “right” in this debate. However, there are a couple of themes that are found more widely in various discussions around the West.

First,

Defending against petty lawsuits will likely divert most of the Forest Service’s dwindling wilderness budget from the mountains to the courtroom.

and second,

We encourage Wilderness Watch to drop the lawsuit. We also encourage people to make your voices heard. Congressional representatives need to hear from the public why this lookout needs specific legislative protection from humorless people who would tear it down.

The themes that I hear are:
(1)Why this battle?: Local person to group- “Out of all the environmental issues in the world, especially given that you are not from our area, it’s not clear why you would pick this particular battle. What’s this really about? Can we talk? ”

(2) Why this tactic (litigation)?

a) If you choose litigation as a tactic, others can choose to try to get legislation (a la wolf, see Baucus quotes here). I would think that this is a necessary constitutional co-evolutionary trend, but how optimal for everyone concerned?

(b) Forest Service budgets are not going up- is its possible that other uses of FS funds (like wilderness rangers) may lead to more environmental protection than copying documents or other litigation activities? What are the environmental “opportunity costs” of choosing litigation as a tactic?

Below is the opinion piece in full.

Lookout belongs right where it is
By Leah Tyson

In response to a pending lawsuit by Wilderness Watch to force the U.S. Forest Service to take down the Green Mountain fire lookout, the Darrington Historical Society would like to explain why the lookout does, in truth, belong there.

Contrary to an opinion expressed in these pages several weeks ago by George Nickas, the executive director of the Montana-based Wilderness Watch, the fire lookout on Green Mountain is not a “new” lookout. It is not a “replica.”

It not only looks like the old lookout — it is the old lookout. We know this because the Darrington Historical Society, and many other local volunteers, participated in the restoration project, which started in the 1990s.

The lookout was carefully restored with at least 70 percent of its original materials from 1950 (when the 1933 lookout was fixed because of snow damage), and the project was originally completed onsite. The only substantially new aspect to the lookout is the foundation and catwalk, which were redesigned to meet modern safety codes. This is a standard legal requirement in historical restorations.

Unfortunately, the new foundation design failed, and engineers determined that the lookout might not survive the heavy snows of the coming winter. Faced with a difficult decision, Forest Service officials decided to save it by removing the lookout with a helicopter. With a better design for the foundation, the old lookout was hauled back up and secured to the peak.

Despite the overblown rhetoric of critics, this was not an “egregious” act. The Forest Service was caught between the dictates of the Wilderness Act on one side and, simultaneously, the National Historic Preservation Act, which required the agency to do its best to preserve the lookout because it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

The Wilderness Act is not as cut and dried as Wilderness Watch would have folks believe. It includes some administrative discretion for managing agencies. While Wilderness Watch certainly has the right to file suit, we question their judgment. The lawsuit is entirely out of proportion to the infraction of procedure they allege and to the aesthetic value that is supposedly harmed. Defending against petty lawsuits will likely divert most of the Forest Service’s dwindling wilderness budget from the mountains to the courtroom.

Very few fire lookouts remain. The Glacier Peak Wilderness is an area almost the size of Rhode Island. The 14-by-14-foot cabin on top of Green Mountain is dwarfed by the landscape, a blip on the radar, really. Staffing lookouts with volunteers has, in fact, helped preserve some fragile alpine areas.

If this lawsuit succeeds, it could create an interpretation of the rules so narrow as to force the loss of a few remaining historic lookouts across the Northwest. It could also be interpreted to prevent the repair of washed-out trails and bridges. This may seem extreme, but it is the stated intent on the Wilderness Watch website.

It is not necessarily the stated intent of the Wilderness Act, which recognizes that preserving the wilderness character of a place can include “recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation and historical use.”

The aesthetic Puritanism expressed by people who would tear down the Green Mountain lookout leads to spiritual satisfaction for a few at the exclusion of the many. We should acknowledge the reality of U.S. Navy jets running almost daily, low-altitude training sorties over the Glacier Peak Wilderness. In contrast, obsessing over tiny aesthetic complaints makes no sense.

We are not arguing for a return to the past, when fire lookouts dotted the backcountry and roads cut deep into the headwaters. We are simply calling for the maintenance of a historical icon that still has some life and lessons to pass on. For many of us, the rarity of such structures enhances appreciation of the enduring nature of wilderness.

We encourage Wilderness Watch to drop the lawsuit. We also encourage people to make your voices heard. Defending against petty lawsuits will likely divert most of the Forest Service’s dwindling wilderness budget from the mountains to the courtroom.

Defending against petty lawsuits will likely divert most of the Forest Service’s dwindling wilderness budget from the mountains to the courtroom.

More on the Green Mountain Lookout

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Haven’t had time for thoughtful responses to the last two posts yet (one of my other volunteer activities is having some difficulties), but here is another story on the Lookout in Wilderness from Joel Connelly of the Seattle PI. The story is here.

Warning: the rhetoric of this article is fairly inflammatory.

As an ultimate test, the lawsuit issue was put to Rick McGuire, a friend and North Cascades Conservation Council board member with whom I have trekked deep into the 573,000-acre Glacier Peak Wilderness.

McGuire grumbles at Forest Service use of helicopters. Still, he adds, “a lot of people like that lookout. It was there even if not in its new improved form, and it seems to be there are way more dire threats out there.”

And that makes the Green Mountain lawsuit even more puzzling.

Wilderness Watch is being represented by the Eugene-based Western Environmental Law Center. The center has taken on “dire threats,” from protecting old-growth forests marked for liquidation to exposing dioxin emissions by Columbia River pulp mills.

Why hassle Green Mountain? Green interlopers from Montana and Oregon should heed locals who love our wilderness areas — and their lookouts. Litigate elsewhere.

Loggers, Miners and Lookouts?

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This is one of those stories that makes you think there must be more to this than meets the eye.

Here’s a link to the AP story in the Seattle PI.

A Montana environmental group is suing the U.S. Forest Service over the construction of a new fire lookout in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area northeast of Seattle.

The group, Wilderness Watch, claims in the federal lawsuit that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it built the new $50,000 lookout on Green Mountain in 2009. The building replaced a lookout built in the 1930s and long used for wilderness management and as a rest stop for hikers.

Wilderness Watch says the Forest Service didn’t study the environmental consequences before building the new lookout, and the use of a helicopter and power tools in the construction also violated the act. It wants the structure removed.

“It’s supposed to be free of structures, free of motor vehicle use,” said the group’s executive director, George Nickas. “Everybody wants it their way. The hikers don’t want the loggers or the miners or the off-road vehicle folks. You can’t expect your pet use to be OK, when the Wilderness Act is designed for us to step back and let it truly be a wild place.”

The Herald newspaper of Everett reports that the lawsuit has angered hiking groups in the region. They promote the history of fire lookouts in the region and believe the buildings help people appreciate the wilderness.

Forest Service personnel declined to comment, but longtime Glacier Peak Wilderness volunteers Mike and Ruth Hardy of south King County told the newspaper that the lawsuit threatens the work of those trying to preserve the history of the iconic fire lookouts. Scott Morris, a member of the Darrington Historical Society, agreed.

“I could sympathize with Wilderness Watch if every mountain in the Glacier Peak Wilderness were somehow threatened,” Morris said. “The purist zealotry of this group is going to harm appreciation of the wilderness. Shall we not walk in the wilderness anymore?”

I don’t understand a couple of things- why rehabbing a historic fire lookout is like “the loggers or the miners or the off-road vehicle folks” and why now, given the activities already happened. And also, I guess, in the overall scheme of things, why this issue is thought to deserve attention compared to other wilderness (current and future) issues.

Here’s Wilderness Watch’s story. Here’s the Forest Service story.

Who’s at the Table and Who Decides?

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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.