Senior attorney for SELC says Forest Service missed mark
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series covering the Nantahala, Pisgah Forest Managment Plan.
When it comes to protecting national forests, the Southern Environmental Law Center holds that as one of its top priorities.
According to the center’s website, the center advocates for the U.S. Forest Service to end crude timber targets for ranger districts, create a clear policy that bans logging of old-growth forests, and to emphasize carbon storage as a Forest Service goal.
SELC’s senior attorney and leader of SELC’s National Forests and Parks Program, Sam Evans, said when it comes to those three topics, the forest service struck out in it’s final revised Nantahala, Pisgah Forest Management Plan.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, in developing the plan, forest resource specialists worked with representatives of state and local government, Tribes, interest groups and the public to consider alternative approaches to managing the forests that offered different ways to make progress towards multiple goals and be sensitive to special places. The forest service said the final plan balances the tradeoffs among the multiple uses of national forests including recreation, timber, water, wilderness and wildlife habitat. The plan is now in a 60 day objection period.
To start off, Evans said there were some good things in the plan, mostly referencing the recreational additions.
“There is a lot to like in the plan, especially for people with recreational interests,” Evans said. “One big change from the draft to the final was the recognition of how important it is to meet recreational demand and how important that is for local economies. Also, how important it is to incentivize good stewardship on the forest. That is something that really wasn’t present in the draft and is pretty prominent in the final version, which is a big deal.”
Another good thing in the plan, according to Evans, is that in the plan, the forest service shows that they understand whatthe restoration needs for the forests are, but doesn’t contain any plan on how to move forward to meet those needs.
“They do a really good job, using the best available science to describe what our forests ought to look like in the future,” Evans said. “I think my main problem with the plan is that hte plan itself doesn’t contain any components that will actually move us towards those desired conditions in the future. It basically leaves every important decision to the future, to the project level. It bakes in a lot of conflict.”
In the final plan, 100,000 acres in the national forests are lumped in with land that Evans said is suitable for timber production. One big decision that the U.S. Forest Service has to decide what part of the forests will be scheduled for timber production. When the forest service assigns acres to the suitable base, it schedules them for timber production. The forest service isn’t allowed to put acres in the suitable base unless it intends to regenerate them, which means they will be scheduled for rotational logging. Other parts of the forests that aren’t part of that suitable base, will go into other management areas, which Evans said include backcountry, ecological interest areas, special interest areas, recommended wilderness and a handful of others.
“The forest is about one million acres,” Evans said. “About 10 percent of it, 100,000 acres, we know are areas with high ecological values that are unloaded, exceptional water quality, contain rare habitats, and are exemplary for us. There’s old growth that we know about and mapped, but about 100,000 acres of that land has been lumped into the suitable base. So, the forest service has put it in with the stuff that it intends to log indiscriminately. That sets us up for some pretty profound conflict in the future. We are in a worse place now than we were a month ago.”
With those three topics that Evans said the forest service struck out on, he said the service started out well by designating an Old Growth Network, but there are quite a few acres of the old growth that are intended to be regenerated, or placed into the suitable timber base.
“Most of those areas of old growth that were placed into the Old Growth Network were areas that weren’t going to be logged anyway,” Evans said. “Basically the forest service is saying these areas that we were going to leave alone for other reasons, they can be old growth in the future and that’s no problem. There are quite a few acres of old growth that we know about, including acres of old growth that the forest service has already designated as existing and part of the Old Growth Network that are now intended to be regenerated.”
With crude timber targets, Evans said it is more of a national issue, but the way it plays out locally is that a portion of forests that are being logged for purposes of producing forest products, is targeted and assigned to regional and local forests and are expected to keep up with the targets.
“The targets actually come from the local level,” Evans said. “So, the Nantahala, Pisgah will take it’s forest plan and say, ‘We said we were going to do up to 3,000 acres of this type of rotational even age timber harvest, but we are going to report that to region,” but region is going to report that to Washington office and that sort of maximum of what they are expect to do is going to get changed into what they must do. That is what gets turned into a target and is fed back down. That creates a problem when what they say they can do is an overestimate. If they were being honest about what they were going to encounter in the suitable base, they would have to be more realistic about what they can get done. So, the target is going to be much higher than they can realistically get done with the land allocation that they have. I do want to be clear that the forest service could be doing the levels of timber harvest that they say they want to do in a way that didn’t create any of these problems. There is a lot of consensus on what the forest service says they should be doing and where it should be doing it and if they would operate within that social license, then they could complete that level of timber harvest without creating any problems. They basically declined doing that.”
So why would the forest service blatantly decline? Is it about money from timber harvesting? Evans said it is much more complicated than that.
“It says very clearly in the plan that timber production, crop style, growing trees to sell them, is not the primary purpose of what it is doing,” Evans said. “The primary purpose, according to the forest service, is balancing age classes. What it means by that is it wants to have a certain amount of young forest, which is recently logged, and it wants to do enough of that to where it benefits the wildlife species that are associated with those young forest habitats. The problem is that if it were trying to create those young forest habitats in the patch sizes and distributions and places that they ought to be in the forest, it wouldn’t be able to afford that. What it is going to do instead, is log the similar productive forests that grow the bigger and more valuable trees and that is the wrong place to do that work if you are trying to be ecologically appropriate. I think the forest service feels like that is the only way to afford anything at all. They are always looking for opportunities to cut trees that will pay their way out of the forest, because they are not funded well. They have other reasons than economics for cutting trees, but the economics becomes where and how they are cutting trees.”
Evans said carbon storage is another strike for many of the same reasons.
“If the forest service were restoring ecological integrity, working in the systems that need to be worked in and letting the more moist productive forests that have been overlogged in the past, letting them recover, it would be creating habitats and storing carbon at the same time and doing better on both counts,” Evans said. “But when it logs in the wrong systems, when it continues to regenerate these moist productive systems that aren’t supposed to have that kind of disturbance levels in them, it degrades ecological integrity and it’s missing out on an opportunity to store carbon. We have asked them to think about the implications of what they are doing here, and what they told us is that it is just a drop in the bucket. They said their contributions to carbon storage is insignificant on a global scale. That is really frustrating, because the national forest system in a whole is a very big bucket. The forest service is the manager for the single largest carbon stock in the United States. They have a responsibility to treat it that way. The end result, if they were trying to do a better job managing carbon, is that they would also be doing a better job managing ecological integrity.”
The SELC is an affiliate organization with the Nantahala, Pisgah Forest Partnership. Evans said he took part in the meeting that Chattooga Conservancy executive director Nicole Hayler said the partnership had with the forest service last week to discuss the plan.
Evans said the meeting was a chance for him to voice his disappointment in the plan to the forest service.
“This meeting was also a chance for me to reflect and talk with my colleagues in the group that did get things that they asked for and congratulate them,” Evans said. “I think we have supported each other in the partnership, and I expect that we will continue to support each other. The central insight the partnership provided to the forest service is that we can accomplish more for both economic, recreational and ecological values all at the same time, if we do it smart and if we protect ecological values as we go. The disappointing thing for me, and what I shared with the group is that the forest service took pieces that they wanted to and left out things that mattered to my organization. I can’t speak for the partnership and I don’t know how the group is going to want to go forward in the objection period, but I find it hard to see a way forward without objections. I think the forest service missed the mark pretty badly and they need to hear that from the people they are accountable to.”
- By Christopher Lugo