Ruling puts timber sales in limbo

A recent court decision focused on an isolated North Idaho river drainage is having ripple effects across the West.

Environmentalist groups are buzzing with excitement about the so-called Iron Honey decision, saying the Aug. 13 ruling sets a new gold standard for protecting public lands. Barry Rosenberg, director of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance, one of the four groups that filed the lawsuit, called it “the most far-reaching and comprehensive decision we have ever seen. Most of the conservationists in the country are aware of this ruling. It has the potential to change things everywhere in the Northwest.”

U.S. Forest Service has put on hold most of its major projects in the Idaho Panhandle in the wake of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. The court found the Forest Service had insufficiently analyzed the impact of logging that would be used to pay for restoration work. Forest supervisors across the region also have been meeting to discuss how the decision could change fundamental land management policies.

“This decision at best will certainly delay some of the projects and at worst it will have a significant effect,” said Dave O’Brien, spokesman for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests.

By derailing the Iron Honey Project, the environmental groups have squandered a chance to help fix a forest that has been ransacked by a century of unscrupulous mining and logging, O’Brien said. The agency hoped to use the project to showcase its growing commitment to restoring damaged forests. The Iron and Honey creeks are located about 20 miles northeast of Coeur d’Alene.

The project called for logging about 1,400 acres within the 21,000-acre drainage. The timber sale would help pay for the restoration work, which mainly consists of removing 76 miles of old roads and replanting the forest with its traditional stock of larch and white pine. Years of logging have damaged fish spawning habitat in all but two of the 14 streams in the project area, according to the Forest Service. Ultimately, agency staff said, the work would have resulted in clearer streams for bull and cutthroat trout, forests that are better able to withstand disease and fire and headwaters capable of supplying clean drinking water for generations.

The Forest Service believes the work will speed up nature’s own healing process. Many environmental groups contend the cure is worse than the problem. The best way to fix a forest is to leave it alone, said Jeff Juel, executive director of The Ecology Center in Missoula.

“We have to put the chain saw down and figure out how we can manage without damaging the land so much,” he said. “There’s plenty of activities that can be done without commercial logging. That’s not what public lands are about.”

The Ecology Center was one of the plaintiffs in the case, along with The Lands Council, the Kootenai Environmental Alliance and the Idaho Sporting Congress. The groups fought the Iron Honey project from the beginning, claiming it was nothing more than a timber sale in disguise and that the work would only add to the watershed’s malaise.

The groups said the proposal broke a variety of national environmental laws, as well as the Forest Service’s own management plans. Their lawsuit alleged the agency used flawed models to predict the outcome of the project and fed these models with stale data. The agency also failed to analyze the cumulative impacts of years of previous logging projects. Such an investigation is required under federal law.

“The fact is they didn’t have any data,” said Karen Lindholdt, an attorney for the Spokane-based Lands Council. Lindholdt argued the original case before U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge.

“What the Forest Service does instead of analyzing cumulative impacts is provide a list of past projects. They don’t analyze. A mere listing doesn’t cut it,” she said. “This is really forcing them to have science support their decisions.”

In reversing Lodge’s decision in favor of the Forest Service, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted the agency “failed to take its required ‘hard look’ with respect to prior timber harvests and the impact on the Westslope Cutthroat Trout,” according to the 26-page opinion written by Judge Ronald Gould. “What was done here is inadequate.”

Gould also wrote, “The Forest Service did not walk, much less test, the land in the activity area.”

The Forest Service still is evaluating how it will respond to the decision, O’Brien said. The agency could ask for a full court review, or take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. For now, it’s certain that a higher threshold of scrutiny will be required for any work in the forest.

“We already have our chief talking about analysis paralysis,” O’Brien said. “This adds additional review.”

The environmental analysis for the Iron Honey Project took six years to complete and the report is stored on eight compact discs, O’Brien noted.

The project would have supplied about 17 million board feet of timber, which is just under a third of the entire harvest for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. Losing this amount of timber won’t be a knockout punch to the region’s sawmills – nowadays, national forests supply only nine out of every 100 trees cut in North Idaho, according to a 2002 Forest Service report. But the bigger picture is troubling, said Jim Riley, executive director of the Intermountain Forest Association, of Coeur d’Alene. The Forest Service is doing a better job managing the forests, but the lawsuits keep coming and the red tape only seems to be growing.

Lawsuits filed by environmental groups have already succeeded in shutting down much of the logging on federal land, Riley said. The 9th Circuit decision makes it “arguably impossible” for the Forest Service to do any work in the woods, Riley said. “This is really an extreme ruling. It was extremists that brought the lawsuit.”

The Iron Honey Project was a chance for the Forest Service to show off the most modern forestry practices available, Riley said. “The agency has come a long ways. It was attempting to conduct a state-of-the-art restoration activity. … If this project remains stopped, it’s going to hurt the forest ecology over time. The consequences on the forest are pretty large.”

Timber harvests help fund the Forest Service budget. With less being cut, the agency will have less money, which means potentially fewer staff scientists on hand to conduct the rigorous analysis required by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court decision, said Sherri Lionberger, with the agency’s Coeur d’Alene Ranger District. The agency also will have less money to pay for replanting white pine, fixing bad roads and reducing the danger of wildfire.

“It filters down,” Lionberger said.

The lawsuit was not filed to gut the Forest Service or to revolutionize how the agency manages land, said Mike Petersen, executive director of The Lands Council. The purpose was to bring accountability to the agency and to force it to follow long-established national laws.

“It looks like they’re going to have to follow their own laws and plans,” Petersen said. “We’re really hoping this will be a wake-up call.”