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Environmental News,
Opinion, and Art
December 2006
 Stumps:
Supervisor
Bull’s Monument To Bush Forest PolicyDave Bull Transfered In From D.C. To Implement Healthy Forest Sham Policies By Larry Campbell EAST FORK BITTERROOT, Mont. -- Bitterroot National Forest (BNF) Supervisor Dave Bull transferred here from his Washington D.C. ‘legislative liaison’ job shortly after the Bush administration’s Healthy Forest Act legislation passed Congress. Direct from the Beltway, Supervisor Bull dutifully delivered Bush-forest policy to the Bitterroot with the Middle East Fork (MEF) project, the first “Healthy Forest” timber sale in Montana. The notorious hallmarks of Bush style administration are being mimicked locally by Supervisor Bull. Heavy handed top-down national politics hides behind a facade of local collaboration. Preying on fear is the favored tactic to garner public support for bad policy. Science that does not support the chosen program is suppressed or censored. Misinformation abounds. Manufactured consent and repressed dissent are choreographed within agency staff as well as within the local community. Media events are staged. Civil rights are abridged. Local politicians and corporate chain newspaper editors take the stage enflaming polarization with largely uninformed rhetoric. Fear lights the fuse; hate provides the fire works. This is not a responsible approach to community or forest health. The charade about meaningfully taking public input was first unmasked when Supervisor Bull marked the trees in one of the three alternatives at the very time he offered all three alternatives for public review and comment in the draft EIS. FOB field monitoring discovered this pre-decisional tree marking. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed Supervisor Bull had irretrievably spent over $208,000 prejudicing one alternative, while officially pretending he was considering public input on all three alternatives. Bull wasted taxpayer money while he made a mockery of genuine public process. At a presumably public press conference attended by select, supportive members of the local public and politicians and staged in a federal public building, Bull’s theater production featured armed and flak-jacketed federal guards used for suggestive effect (conservationists must be terrorists) while barring three peaceful, senior, local conservationists from the release of a key public document, the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Ironically, one of the barred conservationists was 84 year old Stewart ‘Brandy’ Brandborg, son of former Bitterroot Forest supervisor Guy ‘Brandy” Brandborg. Brandy was turned back in the hall where his father’s picture hangs in honor. Ignorance is no accident in some cases; suppression and censorship of best available science is a prominent theme. For one of several major examples, the EIS disappears and/or misrepresents the professional work of the 14 year veteran BNF soil scientist. His conclusion about the MEF soils situation was: “I can no longer say the proposed actions are legal regarding NFMA and other pertinent laws and FS policies. I am very disappointed that all my hard work has been erroneously reinterpreted, rewritten and changed far from what I wrote and intended by the editor(s) who weren't even on the ground doing soils investigations in this project area!” In one quick scene, over twenty of his soils reports were purged from the project file until FOB made an issue of the attempt. The FS soils scientist himself quietly disappeared off stage after going through the inner agency dissent-repression buzz-saw. Get the cut out or get cut out. Bull signed the Record of Decision on the Middle East Fork (MEF) timber sale in March, 2006. Friends of the Bitterroot along with The Ecology Center and the Native Forest Network (now combined into the Wildwest Institute) promptly brought suit in Federal District Court. We filed for a preliminary injunction, asking for a hold on commercial logging until the lawsuit can be heard. We argued that once the large trees are logged, causing the predicted increase in fire danger and damage to soils, watershed, and wildlife, any later victory in court based on the merits of our case would be essentially meaningless and the opportunity would be missed to avoid the certain harm. A preliminary injunction was denied. Logging on the MEF timber sale has begun; one of three contracts has been awarded. This occurred during the week an emergency stay granted by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lapsed without our request for an extension. This, of course, is very unfortunate. However, the primary legal case will receive a hearing (finally) in Missoula Federal District court in early-December. The substantial forest protection issues we are pointing out are not insignificant. They can not be adequately described in sound-bites. In the local public arena, our ecological position and its scientific support, let alone the actual conditions on the ground as documented in the EIS, have largely been ignored. The ‘local’ corporate chain newspapers have had a heyday screening news, misleading public opinion and stirring conflict. The MEF looks like the world’s first immaculate timber sale based on reading corporate newspapers or hearing elected officials. Uninformed political posturing in combination with corporate chain press editorial pandering has demonstrated willingness to log-at-all-costs. Some people apparently don’t think they need to know the costs, financial or ecological. I haven’t heard or read anything from any public official acknowledging any one of the several serious environmental costs that are inevitable, even predicted in the EIS, with the MEF commercial timber sale. This is short-sighted denial. Ecological costs stay with the land and last a long time; day in and day out they tax and impoverish the whole living system and all inhabitants. While the costs to the forest are unseen, suppressed and externalized, both financially and mentally, the taxpayer-subsidy benefits for the timber industry are spotlighted. We often hear that the FS wants to cut the big trees to help cover the expense of other non-commercial “Healthy Forest” work. This is another big myth. Unimpeachable expert on Forest Service voodoo economics, Bob Wolfe, wrote to Supervisor Bull concerning the MEF timber sale, “When you lay out expected receipts and costs, this would bring into focus that costs will far exceed receipts. It would be clear that timber sales would not fund your healthy forest goal. You say that selling timber, even at a loss, provides you with funds to partly offset the cost of doing Healthy Forest work on lands adjacent to the logged area. I don’t think this is true on the Bitterroot or other Region 1 Forests. Your first responsibility is to restore the sale area after logging. You won’t have enough KV Funds to do that job on the land just logged. I can’t see how you can fund any part of the off-sale acres you desire to treat under the Healthy Forest Act.” The issues of our case are both procedural (legal public process) and substantive (legal environmental, real-world limits). The legally required public process was fatally marred by: false ‘collaboration’; pre-decisional tree-marking biasing a pre-selected alternative; selective public exclusion from key public meetings; and a legally required Environmental Impact Statement, EIS, replete with disinformation and serious omissions. The primary issues of substance in the forest include: *introduction of substantial amounts of additional sediment into fisheries streams already seriously impaired and legally protected from further degradation; * inevitable and officially predicted additional soil damage in an area with existing severe soil damage at a landscape level; and * failure to protect remaining old-growth habitat and dependent species in an area already severely depleted in old growth. These existing conditions and inevitable impacts are revealed to anyone who reads the Forest Service’s Environmental Impact Statement. The Project Area straddles the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, a popular recreation area that has been impacted by more than seventy square miles of intensive timber harvest since 1940, representing approximately half of the project analysis area. To accommodate this high level of industrial logging, the watershed includes 1,482 miles of roads (3.6 miles/sq.mi.), contributing approximately 150 tons of sediment per year to streams. Because of these unnatural conditions, the East Fork of the Bitterroot is officially classified as an impaired stream under the Clean Water Act, prohibiting further degradation. According to the FEIS the predicted increase in sedimentation from log hauling could be as high as 58 tons/year under wet conditions. A legacy of soil damage from past harvest activities persists today in the form of compaction and displacement, with much of the approved logging planned in subwatersheds that cumulatively exceed the fifteen percent threshold for detrimentally damaged soils established to prevent irreversible losses in soil productivity. Every subwatershed but one in the entire Project Area already exceeds the 15% soil damage threshold set for individual logging units. The FS found the few small areas that are still not severely damaged and designed logging units cherry picked from a landscape of soils well over soil damage limits. Impacts to soil would be inevitable with new industrial logging and would add to, or rather subtract from a landscape already suffering from severe and extensive soil degradation. On the issue of potential loss of old-growth species habitat, the FEIS concedes that in 15 out of 25 of the third-order drainages within the MEF analysis area, there is currently not enough old-growth habitat to meet Forest Plan standards for sustaining viable populations of old growth species. The project area is already severely deficient in old growth habitat and in winter range thermal cover, both of which would be further harmed by planned industrial scale logging. The Forest Service justifies the ecological damage that will result from this timber sale by claiming that commercial logging will reduce fire danger to the MEF community. However the following two alarming sentences are buried in the two inch thick EIS document: The Forest Service EIS reports, “Generally, for logistical and economic reasons, the larger fuels are treated [read: big trees are logged] first and the treatment of smaller fuels typically follows 1-3 years later. During that time period, before treatment is complete, fire behavior severity is increased.” Conservation groups have kept the interests of the human inhabitants of the area clearly in mind right from the beginning of the project when we submitted our Community Protection and Local Economy Alternative. This alternative, analyzed in the EIS, would quickly and effectively reduce fire danger to the East Fork community as well as provide 45 jobs and a million dollar payroll. Importantly, the alternative would avoid many of the big ecological impacts and minimize the fire hazard increase that industrial scale logging brings. We attempted to get the courts to allow this effective community protection work to go ahead while barring commercial logging of the large, fire-resistant old growth trees and the ensuing increase in fire danger. We believe that the fire hazard increase caused by commercial logging should not begin, in any case, before effective community fire protection work has been completed. Supervisor Bull’s plan does not propose this reasonable and prudent course of action. Bull’s plan is to commercially log the upper slopes above homes south of the river between Dowling Gulch and Kerlee Creek. But the Plan does not call for any treatment for over a mile of community protection zone adjacent to these homes. The Plan leaves untreated BNF forest, including dense thickets of saplings within a quarter mile of shake shingle roofs, immediately below the increased fire hazard caused by commercial timber harvest. Does this not clearly show what the priorities are? This is an old fashioned, taxpayer subsidized sale of big timber unconvincingly cross-dressed as Happy Forest fire protection. Such monumental corruption and dishonesty in public process should not pass without challenge. FOB can not silently accept the serious ecological harm that would be inflicted on an area already severely damaged from past excessive logging. Fortunately there are still some laws that set limits. We will continue to insist that the Forest Service follow the laws of our land. Larry Campbell has monitored the Bitterroot National Forest for decades, much to their chagrin. |
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