The Forest Service has a multiple use mandate—to provide for favorable water flows, timber and other commodities, recreation, and wildlife habitat.
From World War II through the 1980s, most observers would agree that the National Forests gave priority to resource extraction. During the nadir of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, Congress tried to give the multiple use mandate teeth with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NMFA). The latter required forest planning and standards and guidelines to protect wildlife. The former law required an interdisciplinary approach to land planning that put range of disciplines from biology to archaeology—not just forestry—in charge of timber sale planning (and mining, grazing, etc.).
“With the outfit, the only reason, the only reason we have fish bios, archaelogists, etc. is because of that NEPA law,” a Northern Region biologist told me. “And they still don’t really let us suit up.”
“The silviculturists here are still really old school,” he said. “If a soil scientist or an ecologist doesn’t talk about it, it doesn’t get talked about.”
That’s one perspective from one forest. Other biologists I’ve talked to on other Northern Region forests feel like they’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to timber and other projects. “Oh yeah, they listen,” another Northern Region biologist told me. “I don’t feel like the odd man out, I don’t feel like we’re just mitigating impacts from roads and timber, I think the projects we’re doing, you know, they’re because of, not in spite of what wildlife says.”
This is the last rambling installment about fuel reduction thinning in northern Idaho and western Montana. The story’s ultimately about the law. NFMA requires the Forest Service “to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired non-native vertebrate species” (36 CFR §219.19). NEPA requires the FS to fully disclose impacts to these species. The information used in the NEPA process “must be of high quality. Accurate scientific analysis, expert agency comments, and public scrutiny are essential to implementing NEPA” (40 CFR §1500.1). The 9th Circuit, in the string of Northern Region lawsuits described in the 09/09/08 post, found that the Forest Service hadn’t adequately disclosed impacts to flammulated owl, black-headed woodpeckers, goshawk and other critters.
I’ve talked to more than a half dozen Northern Region biologists. Beyond the question of whether the Forest Service had actually adequately disclosed impacts (a somewhat objective question), I was interested to know whether any biologists thought that there was any real impacts to the species at issue in litigation over fuel reduction thinnings in the Northern Region.
The unequivocal answer I heard from all the biologists I talked to was no.
One Northern Region biologist has conducted extensive studies of goshawks on his forest and found “no statistical difference between occupancy rates and reproduction and harvest—or no harvest.” Pine marten, great gray owls, boreal owls and flammulated owls, “are well distributed and we expect providing a variety of successional stages will maintain those populations. I don’t see any problem with the management we’re doing there.”
“They didn’t get a lot of support from the biologist community,” the biologist who complained about old school silviculturists quoted above said of environmental litigants. “You’re talkin’ about a circumpolar critter,” he said of goshawk viability. “I mean, come on!”
“The greatest stride to turning this boat around has always been environmental litigation,” he continued. Now that the recent en banc decision has made it easier for the Forest Service to move timber sales, he said, “They’re gonna do something stupid, run too far back the other way with it.”
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