In denying the request to halt the project as the lawsuit plays out, Christensen found that the alliance and council waited too long to file its lawsuit. Citing issues finding legal counsel, the lawsuit and request to temporarily halt the project came after logging and other activities had begun. But the delay “undercut their claim of imminent harm,” the judge ruled.
“Being experienced environmental litigants, plaintiffs should have known of the project and its impending timeline in the spring,” Christensen wrote. “Ground operations began in late June and early July. Although Plaintiffs could have filed suit when Helena Hunters did in mid-March, they waited three months to file and then another two months to seek emergency relief. The delay of even a few months – significant months in terms of project implementation – is a significant delay in the life of a timber sale operation.”
Christensen further found that the alliance and council did not fully allege harm to grizzly bears if the project proceeds during trial.
“Plaintiffs do not assert that grizzly bears or their habitat are likely to be irreparably harmed if the project is allowed to continue during the pendency of this litigation,” the judge wrote. “Nor can the court find evidence of irreparable harm to the species, given that the Ten Mile Project is located in a grizzly bear linkage zone (which is critical to the species survival in the long term) but the project’s impacts are alleged to cause only short term.”
I don’t know if you have been following the 1619 Project. It is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The terms “original sin” have been used. But to my mind, there is one more fundamental underlying sin that pre-dates slavery. If one has to be “original,” this one would be it. That is the theft of land and mistreatment of Native peoples.
What can we do about this history? One idea is to return some current public lands, usually Forest Service or BLM, to the original owners. In my view, this idea is compelling from a justice perspective. Certainly there are a host of details that could be puzzled over, debated, and negotiated. Some might include ideas about 1) how much, 2) where, 3) who decides, 4) what commitments to current uses and access, 5) should lands be selected based on treaty status or other criteria (sacred sites or ?), 6) what kind of a transition period. In the same way that companies and states can commit to zero carbon by 2050, which will require a major social and technological transformation with environmental goals, could we perhaps set the same target for repatriation of public lands for justice goals? Say “Repatriate by (20)38”? There is an argument to be made that under our current non-Native management, the private sector spends much money on debating, communicating and litigating with others about public lands management, and those same funds could potentially instead be spent on purchases, easement and incentives on private land. Each group could then determine exactly which uses or protections it wanted. Perhaps less fighting over conservation, and more conservation.
Here’s an article in High Country News from August of this year It tells the story of some Oregon Tribes’ efforts to get public land returned (including trying to buy the Elliott State Forest).
Conservation groups, critical of Lone Creek’s forestry practices, staunchly opposed its involvement and accused the partnership of wanting to privatize the forest. Conservationists in turn were called out for their failure to work with tribal nations: “Your organization has mobilized opposition to the sale, with little to no engagement with the Tribes who would have, once again, become the stewards of this land,” a consortium of racial justice groups, including NAACP Portland, wrote in an open letter to the Sierra Club, Cascadia Wildlands and four other conservation organizations. “We also note the many ways in which environmental groups in Oregon remain predominantly white, and work from a place of white privilege; this situation is a very clear example of the lack of racial justice analysis applied to what is a complicated situation.” Then-Sierra Club Oregon Chapter Director Erica Stock responded, “As an environmental conservation community, we must do more to proactively reach out to Tribal Nations and rebuild trust.”
Ultimately, the sale was dropped by the state after intense public outcry, but tensions between conservation groups and tribes remain.
“The conservation movement began as a way for settlers to justify the seizure of Indigenous lands under the pretext that Native peoples didn’t know how to manage them,” says Shawn Fleek, Northern Arapaho, who is director of narrative strategy for OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon. “If modern conservation groups don’t begin their analysis in this history and struggle to address these harms, it becomes more likely they will repeat them.”
Meanwhile Andy Kerr, who worked for two decades at Oregon Natural Resource Council (now Oregon Wild), still objects to public lands becoming tribal lands. “The Democrats who supported this legislation came down on the side of Native Americans and, in this case, against nature,” Kerr wrote in a December 2018 post on his website.
While “Native Americans” should get some form of compensation, Kerr argued that “such compensation should not come at the cost of losing federal public lands of benefit to all Americans.” Both Runte and Kerr see money as an adequate substitute despite treaty law, since “in the society that won out in that struggle for a continent, the most common way to right wrongs is by money being transferred to the aggrieved parties from the parties that unjustly benefited.” Kerr continues: “The currency of compensation by the United States to Native American tribes ought to be the currency of dollars, not that of the irreplaceable and precious public lands that belong to all of us.”
But it’s not a matter of money, says Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota, of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “It’s ironic they don’t recognize they’ve had the public benefit of lands for on the order of 165 years of using someone’s land that was guaranteed to them, and used those lands to their own benefit. It’s about time, after 165 years, that they live up to the treaty.”
For folks interested in Alaska, here is an HCN WaPo op-ed critique on the Natural Resources Management Act of 2019 with the tagline “A nation of laws cannot exist on stolen land.”
The Tongass National Forest is being managed under a 2016 amendment to its 2008 forest plan that addresses the Forest’s transition away from old-growth timber harvesting. The amendment accelerated the transition in the plan from 32 years to 16 years, but there has been continuing controversy over how long that process should take. Here’s the latest in an extended article from E&E News:
A new complication in the debate over the young-growth transition comes from Catherine Mater, a forest products engineer from Oregon who recently completed an inventory of 43 areas within the Tongass under a contract with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. There’s enough young growth coming online to provide around 55 million board feet of timber annually for decades, she said, or more than double the total timber volume the service reported cut there in fiscal 2018. Mater found 138,760 acres of young growth — between 55 and 80 years old — suitable for harvest. All of it was within 800 feet of Forest Service roads and away from steep slopes and other environmentally sensitive areas.
Of course there’s still pushback from the “timber companies and industry-friendly politicians, who want more thinning and bigger clear cuts.”
What caught my attention though was these comments from the Tongass spokeswoman:
Forest Service managers stand by their estimates that the young-growth transition won’t be complete before 2033, Fenster said. “If, once the analysis is complete, it shows the projections in the forest plan were not valid, then the Forest Service would have to consider alternatives to incorporating new information into the forest plan estimates,” Fenster said.
The projected volume of young growth was a fundamental assumption in the 2016 amendment, so I don’t think the Forest has the option of ignoring how it could affect the decisions it made in the forest plan.
The State of Wyoming has been feeding elk during the winter at several locations on the Bridger-Teton National Forest for decades. Environmental plaintiffs challenged a 2016 decision to authorize the continued use of the Alkali Creek Feedground, and the court remanded the decision because of NEPA violations, as described here.
Rather than appealing or spending years studying the feedground’s impacts to address the judge’s concerns, the Forest Service and Wyoming wildlife managers came up with a plan that will allow emergency elk feeding on a smaller area for five years and then end the operation by 2024 (with a possible extension). That plan is now being “scoped” and is open for public comment. The scoping letter is attached to this article.
This is an example of how litigation may lead to a better decision (after the appropriate public review process). It appears to have made the State take a closer look at whether it really needed this feedground. However, plaintiffs don’t appear to have been involved in the new proposal yet. It’s also interesting that the original decision was based on an EIS/ROD, which the court found to be inadequate, but this is being proposed as a categorical exclusion (so maybe the Forest has an idea that they are not going to be challenged on it?).
Conservationists worry that the popularity of recreational mountain biking and e-bikes in public lands leads to unsafe conditions for humans, as well as for bears and other wildlife.
The article begins with an account of a mtn. biker killed by a grizzly:
Mr. Treat, an avid mountain biker, was zipping along at about 25 miles an hour through dense forest near Glacier National Park in the middle of a summer afternoon when he collided with a large male grizzly bear.
And mentions efforts to stop two ultramarathons in the Flathead National Forest.
Vast tracts of public land in the West have become favorite haunts of a growing number of mountain bikers, exploring wild areas for recreation. The Trump administration recently allowed e-bikes, or electric bikes, to be used on some trails under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department where bicycles are allowed.
The increasing popularity of trail biking has brought to the fore some of the inherent conflicts in the uses of public land — natural regions or playgrounds. And while the growth of tourism may help local businesses, the forays into deeper parts of the forests by more and more people are encroaching on wildlife.
Mechanized mountain bikes and e-bikes, especially at higher speeds, are incompatible with hiking, hunting, and bird and wildlife watching, some argue. Safety is also a concern. Some mountain bikers revel at bombing down trails at 20 or 30 miles per hour on single-track trails that hikers also frequent.
And biologists like Dr. Servheen who have spent decades studying grizzlies offer reminders about protecting the bears and other wildlife that unwittingly share their territory with more people and more mechanized vehicles.
In its report on Mr. Treat’s fatal accident, the interagency committee concluded: “The bear apparently had no time to move to avoid the collision. At a speed of 20-25 miles per hour, there were only one-to-two seconds between rounding the curve, the victim seeing the bear in the trail and impacting the bear.”
Angel Peak Scenic Area BLM Campground: Does this place need a food truck?From Kitty Benzar:
SENIOR AND DISABLED PASSHOLDERS MAY LOSE THEIR CAMPSITE DISCOUNT
Proposal would start with National Parks, then be expanded to BLM and other agencies
WSNFC has been alerted to a potential policy change that would create “blackout periods” during which federal Senior passes would not be honored for the long-standing 50% discount on their campsites during peak visitation seasons.
Starting with a proposed pilot program in selected National Parks, the plan would expand to include all the National Parks as well as campgrounds operated by the BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service. Seniors are outraged by the proposed change, which would renege on the promise that was made to them when they qualified for and obtained their lifetime pass. The proposal so far does not specifically include holders of Access (permanent disability) passes, but since they receive the same benefit it’s likely the change would apply to them as well.
The change has been recommended by the Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee (aka the “Made In America” committee) in a letter presented to the Secretary of the Interior at a meeting in Washington on September 24. The members of the Made In America Committee – (scroll down at that link for the list) – are all executives of commercial interests like park concessionaires, private campground operators, and equipment manufacturers.
Nobody represents campers or rv owners. Why is the DOI letting themselves be led by these profit seeking corporations?
This would be a massive change to current Department of the Interior campground management practices, without any input from the public or even from Congress!
The key recommendation in the letter (please read it for yourself) is:
“Confirmation of current practices that 50% senior discounts offered to campers over the age of 62 (established by the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act) apply only to base campsite fees, and introduction of new senior fee blackout periods during peak season periods;”
The blackout periods are part of a much larger proposal to convert nearly all federal campgrounds from agency management to private for-profit operation by commercial concessionaires. Those commercial operators don’t want to have to honor the promises made to passholders if it would cut into their prime-season profits. Unlike the National Park Service and other federal land agencies they are not “public service” providers, they are businesses operated for the benefit of their owners and shareholders.
In 2010 when the Forest Service, which uses concessionaires to operate the vast majority of its campgrounds, made the same proposal they were beaten back by a massive outpouring of public opposition from Senior and Disabled Americans. But unlike the Forest Service, which is under the Department of Agriculture, Interior agencies like NPS and BLM don’t use concessionaires to nearly the same extent. Some highly developed RV-park campgrounds in National Parks are under private management but the basic, affordable family campgrounds (and all of BLM’s campgrounds) are operated directly by the agencies. This proposal would extend concessionaire management, and hence commercialization and privatization, to those more basic campgrounds. It would encourage concessionaires to add “amenities” like wifi, stores, and food trucks – which would of course force camping rates to skyrocket.
And during the most popular seasons there would be no discounts for Seniors or the Disabled!
The Advisory Committee is recommending that this be implemented by December 1, 2019 at selected pilot campgrounds. They do not intend to go to the public – or to Congress – for any kind of feedback or comment.”
Note from Sharon: 1. Interesting that the FS managed to dodge this bullet in 2010. 2. Most FACA committees I’ve been involved with have a variety of stakeholders, that’s the whole point. This one seems to cover interests from Aa to Ab. 3. While Kitty focuses on the Senior Pass, check out the letter for other ideas – perhaps better for the industry than the campers.
Folks, I’m looking into USFS partnerships with states, counties, NGOs, etc. For now, I’m focusing on roads. For example, Gila County, Arizona, maintains ~500 miles of roads, mostly unpaved, on the Tonto NF. Are you aware of any other road-maintenance partnerships? Reply here or to me directly at [email protected]. — Steve Wilent
“To effectively mitigate climate change, we must stop burning carbon for fuel and greatly increase forest protection. If we take ambitious steps to protect vastly more of our forests from industrial logging, we can avoid emissions while also actively absorbing large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and storing it back on land in the forest where it belongs.”
This is a carbon-central viewpoint that we’ve debated here over the years.
“To understand the full role of forests in the global carbon cycle, it is critical to consider both the amount of carbon stored in forest products and the amount of carbon that is saved when wood is used in place of more carbon-intensive materials, such as steel and concrete (i.e., substitution).”
From https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/OIA_RecEconomy_FINAL_Single.pdfGroceries?
We mentioned the group Great Old Broads for Wilderness earlier this week. I belong, instead, to Humble Dames Supporting Thoughtful Dialogue. If there were such a group, and there were a founder, it would definitely be Dr. Patty Limerick, a historian at the University of Colorado, who has had a variety of experience with natural resource conflicts. In one piece, she discusses the similarities between the extractive and recreation economies. When I reread this recently, I also thought of some of the divisions within the recreation economy, including OHVs and now mountain bikes, and even the Upton Sinclair quote “It is hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.“ But of course it’s not just the salary, people prefer recreating on/without motors, people prefer having a full woodpile and/or propane tank when winter weather sets in. When you are telling them they shouldn’t do what they prefer, you are substituting your judgment for their own. And one can reasonably ask “by what authority?”.
We are putting these assertions out for public contemplation partly because, by rattling conventional wisdom, they carry intrinsic interest, and mostly because we believe that this approach can deliver genuine benefits. Westerners have, after all, invested decades in an experiment of conceiving of extraction and recreation as activities usually pitted against each other. The results of this experiment have not been uniformly positive. A different experiment, raising the possibility that these two “opposites” are actually more connected than they seem, might deliver better results and might even hold out the promise of reconfiguring a relationship of rivalry into a something closer to collaboration.
We aim this report at a worthy, ambitious, and decidedly eccentric goal: persuading leaders and participants in Western extractive economies and in Western recreational economies to move toward a level of self-awareness that will position them to put less effort into stereotyping and simplifying each other, and to invest more effort in acknowledging their kinship and in considering alliances and common ground.
For justifiable reasons, enthusiasts for outdoor recreation have seen extractive industry primarily as a force for disturbance of their treasured landscapes. For less justifiable reasons, they have also been tempted to see outdoor recreation as an innocent enterprise, with earnest affection for nature serving as a buffer protecting landscapes and wildlife from any undesirable impact. On the other side, practitioners in extractive industries, when going defensive, have a way of advancing a hard-headed utilitiarianism, trivializing the cultural, emotional, and spiritual power of recreation. We would like this report to open the door to a more forthright and evidence-based discussion, scouring out the self-righteousness and assumptions of superiority that clog the channels of conversation between groups who have more in common than they might think. We hope that opening up these channels will reveal options and alternatives that current habits of thought have foreclosed.
Limerick’s Twelve Zones of Kinship between the Economies of Extraction and Recreation
1) Both economies have demonstrated the capacity to create substantial and consequential environmental disturbances.
2) Both economies are firmly embedded in capitalism and shaped by the drive for profit.
3) Both economies supply essential employment for the region, and both economies have multiplier effects in stimulating other economic activities and also in enhancing tax revenues.
4) Jobs in both economies can be dangerous and unevenly rewarded, and the workers are often invisible to the beneficiaries of their work.
5) People participating in and benefiting from both economies can be oblivious to their impacts, and thereby prey to the temptation to leave the dilemmas, to which they have contributed, for someone else to clean up in the future.
6) Since people in both economies see themselves as innocents, they are correspondingly puzzled and defensive when criticized. They can be equally inclined to grumpiness, defensiveness, and resentment of regulation. Both treasure an ideal of freedom, constrained only by their own will and choice.
7) Both economies are strikingly successful in finding uses, which early generations missed, for remote, difficult Western terrain.
8) Both economies are very dependent on a transportation infrastructure for which they rarely pay, with both relying heavily on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles.
9) Both economies involve “externalities” that are often omitted from calculations of their costs and benefits.
10) Both economies play a big role in the allocation of water and in the honest reckoning with, or the denial, of Western water scarcity.
11) Both economies are historically intertwined. Profits made from extractive economies can position leading figures in industry to be people of leisure who enthusiastically take part in
outdoor recreation and who support the preservation of natural landscapes.
12) Many of the stories, literature, oral history, and folklore of the West demonstrate that hundreds of Westerners have been well aware of the intertwined and interconnected trajectories of extraction and recreation. While seeming to rattle and unsettle established thinking about the region, this report actually reaffirms and ratifies what many Westerners, in the past and the present, figured out for themselves.
Perhaps these are uniquely Coloradan perspective? How doe these ideas sound to other Westerners?
The author’s Jeep on a road off Mosquito Pass threatened with closure.Note from Sharon: as always, different perspectives are welcome in the comments.
Coloradans are blessed with an abundance of public lands in our state, and we enjoy engaging in numerous forms of recreation in our National Forests. From hiking and camping to hunting, fishing, rock climbing, and off-roading, one thing common to all forms of recreation is that they typically involve traveling on Forest Service roads to get there.
While most people give little thought to the roads they travel and consider them an immutable fact of the landscape, few would guess that their very existence is one of the most controversial
arenas of environmental politics. Now we are in the midst of a public process that could have profound implications for every user of public lands in south central Colorado.
On September 19, 2019 the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Pike San Isabel (PSI) National Forest Travel Management Analysis was released, commencing a 45 day comment period that runs until November 4. This document represents the culmination of a long and contentious process that will decide whether or not to close hundreds of miles of roads to the public or leave them open for future generations to enjoy.
In 2005, the US Forest Service adopted a new Travel Management Rule which overturned decades of management practice for Forest Service roads. Under the new rule, only routes specifically designated on official Motor Vehicle Use Maps (MVUMs) would be open to motorized travel by cars, four-wheel-drives, ATVs, dirt bikes, etc. Previously routes had been presumed open unless designated and signed as closed. The new rule was devastating to motorized recreation in National Forests, with some forests closing upwards of 90% of existing routes in the process of implementing it. Between 2007 and 2010, the Pike San Isabel National Forest completed its initial round of route designation and published MVUMs for its six ranger districts.
In 2011, five environmental groups including the Wilderness Society, Quiet Use Coalition, Wild Earth Guardians, Rocky Mountain Wild, and Great Old Broads for Wilderness filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service alleging that the PSI improperly added 500 miles of motorized routes to the MVUMs without conducting a proper environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Many of these routes pre-dated the 1984 Forest Plan or were lawfully created during the time when the Forest was managed as open to cross country travel, and were grandfathered in without specific analysis. If the Plaintiffs’ challenge was upheld, it could have called into question every other travel plan that similarly grandfathered routes.
Motorized advocacy groups including the Colorado OHV Coalition, Trails Preservation Alliance, and Blue Ribbon Coalition intervened in the lawsuit in order to defend off-road vehicle trails that had long been enjoyed by their members. In 2015 the lawsuit ended in a settlement agreement where the Forest Service agreed to conduct a new travel management process and environmental analysis for every motorized route in the PSI. After a scoping period in 2016 and three years of internal analysis, the Forest Service published the DEIS in September. It includes five alternatives labeled A – E, which would close between 3% and 50% of all existing motorized routes in the PSI. The final plan adopted by the Forest Service will be a combination of these alternatives in a modified Alternative C (the Preferred Alternative), with changes made in response to public comments.
While motorized off-highway recreation will be hit hardest by any route closures, every user group will potentially be impacted by them. For example Alternative E would close over 50% of
all motorized routes in the PSI, including numerous major thoroughfares, campgrounds, and hiking trailheads. It would close the only roads accessing all three main trailheads of the Lost
Creek Wilderness as well as those to several popular 14er trailheads. While that is unlikely to happen, the future of where people will be allowed to drive to camp, hike, or engage in off-
highway recreation all depends on the outcome of this process. While Alternative C is fairly reasonable from a motorized perspective, there are still a number of popular 4×4 trails which would be closed and whose loss will be a painful blow to the off-roading community. These include Twin Cones Road above Kenosha Pass and a number of scenic mining roads around Alma and Fairplay, as well as numerous spur roads used for dispersed camping.
The biggest flashpoint will be the roads in Wildcat Canyon (aka “the Gulches”) along the South Platte River north of Lake George. Most of these roads were temporarily closed after the
Hayman Fire in 2002 and underwent a bitterly contested travel management process in 2004. That process ended in the Forest Service agreeing to reopen them in principle but attempting to
turn over management responsibility to the affected counties. Teller County obtained easements and reopened its portion of the roads to the public by 2009. After two of its easement applications were lost by the Forest Service, Park County abandoned the effort to reopen its half of the Gulches trail system and those roads remain closed and in limbo. It will be up to the Forest Service to decide their final status in this process, with motorized users calling for them to be reopened and environmental groups demanding they be permanently closed in order to avoid environmental impacts to the Platte River.
Ultimately, this travel management process will be a bitter clash between those with diametrically opposed views of acceptable uses of public lands. Motorized users trying to defend the limited access they have now against further closures will face off against those who refuse to tolerate any level of motorized access to National Forests and who want almost all Federal lands managed as Wilderness. Forest Service officials are left with the unenviable task of striking some kind of balance between these two positions. The final outcome will almost inevitably be challenged in court, continuing the cycle of endless litigation that has characterized travel planning under the Travel Management Rule since its adoption.
If there is an area of the Pike San Isabel National Forest you care about, you may submit a comment before November 4 on the project website here. There will also be public meetings held in Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Salida the week of October 8 – 11. Participation in the comment period is vital to ensure your voice is heard and the areas you love remain open in the future.
Patrick McKay is a Colorado native from the South Denver area who enjoys Jeeping, hiking, camping, and skiing in the Rocky Mountains. He is a former attorney currently working as a software developer and is passionate about preserving access to public lands for all forms of recreation.
