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It
Won’t Happen Without You!
By Tom Troxel,
Executive Secretary
Black Hills Regional
Multiple Use Coalition
Throughout the past months, several new initiatives and rulemakings have
been proposed to help better manage our public forest lands and
watersheds in the face of catastrophic wildfire, insects, and disease.
As we all know,
the Forest Service and BLM are mired by a straightjacket of procedural
red tape, keeping them from being effective in their jobs as caretakers
of the land. These latest proposals, part of the Healthy Forests
Initiative, are designed to restore some common sense to the process,
enabling the Forest Service and BLM to move more sensibly, efficiently,
and decisively in implementing projects and plans that will protect our
homes, communities, and the forest’s natural resources.
But here’s
the trick: IT WON’T HAPPEN WITHOUT YOUR HELP. The Forest Service
and BLM are currently accepting public input on the Healthy Forests
Initiative, and without your support, they may be forced to abandon or
water-down the proposals under the pressure of nationally organized
special interest groups who oppose sound multiple-use forest management. I
know you’ve heard the call before, I know you’re tired of writing
comment letters, I know you’re sick of fighting what seems to be a
losing battle,
BUT THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT. We can win, but only if we all summon
up the blood, and shout ‘YES’ right now!
You have two
options:
1. Go to:
http://capwiz.com/landsense/issues/alert/?alertid=1157026&type=CU,
which makes commenting very, very easy. Read through the info,
click ‘take action now’, fill in your name and address, and send it
-- it will automatically send comments on all five proposals (if you
choose), consuming a maximum of three minutes of your time.
2. Write your
own letter. There are currently five proposals in the Federal
Register; ‘categorical exclusions’ (CE’s) for reduction of
hazardous wildfire fuels, CE’s for small timber sales, revisions to
the Forest Service forest planning regulations, revisions to the Forest
Service administrative appeals process, and revisions to the BLM appeals
process:
v Hazardous fuels CE:
due 1/15/03, mail comments with attention to: HFI Content Analysis Team
at healthyforests@fs.fed.us.
v BLM appeals: due
2/14/03, mail comments with attention to: Director, Office of Hearings
& Appeals, DOI at WOComment@blm.gov.
v Forest Service
appeals: due 2/18/03, mail comments with attention to: Appeal Rule
Content Analysis Team at 215appeals@fs.fed.us.
v Forest Service
planning regulations: due 3/6/03, mail comments with attention to: USDA
FS Planning Rule CAT at planning_rule@fs.fed.us.
v Small timber sale
CE: due 3/10/03, mail comments with attention to: Limited Timber Harvest
- USDA FS CAT at limitedtimber@fs.fed.us
Here’s a
little more info on the proposals if you’re interested in writing your
own letter:
CATEGORICAL
EXCLUSIONS: CEs are a designation the Forest Service and BLM
can make for small projects having zero environmental impact, exempting
the projects from the years of work that NEPA requires them to do. They
are not, as some have said, a ‘new’ concept that does anything like
‘cut the public out of the process’. Basically, CEs are the
Agency’s ONLY way of moving quickly on projects like squashing small
insect or disease outbreaks before they get big, cleaning up damage to
trees from heavy storms or wind, salvaging burnt timber, and a new
category, cleaning up hazardous fuels. The CE for small timber
sales was taken away by a zealous Judge in a 1999 Illinois court case.
The previous White House Administration was not interested in helping
the Forest Service out by reinstating them, so our new Administration is
finally taking up the cause and returning this valuable tool to the
hands of forest managers.
APPEALS:
The appeals processes for the Forest Service and BLM are fraught with
opportunities for organized special interests to monkey-wrench perfectly
sound and justifiable forest projects. The fear of appeals and
litigation has lead the Forest Service, for example, to spend 40% of its
time and money “bulletproofing” projects against such challenges,
often without success. What’s worse about these frivolous appeals
is that many of them succeed on the basis of paperwork or procedural
errors -- NOT
because something bad would have happened to the environment as a result
of a proposed project. For this reason, the new proposal would
prevent people and groups from filing last-minute, shotgun-type appeals. Those
wishing to file an appeal will have had to participated in the public
input process from the start, and would not be allowed to file an appeal
on an issue they had not raised in a prior comment letter. This
gives the Forest Service and BLM the opportunity to address people’s
concerns before the project is
finalized; right now, they don’t always have that opportunity.
PLANNING
REGULATIONS: Each National Forest has what’s called a Forest
Plan; these are the ‘programmatic’ documents the Forest Service uses
to set goals and objectives for their particular forest over the next 10
to 15 years. Forest planning decisions affect EVERYONE -- not just
recreationists or
grazers or timber -- everyone, because forest plans are the point at
which the Forest Service decides what balance of multiple uses they
think is appropriate for their forest. Right now, the planning
regulations are a maze of ambiguous and conflicting requirements -- a
process full of holes into which lawsuits can easily be inserted to
eliminate your rights to the benefits that public lands can provide. The
proposed revision of the Planning Regulations clarifies the wishy-washy
concepts, sets clear goals for the Forest Service to meet, and empowers
the Forest Service to return active multiple-use management to our
public landscape through ambitious goal-setting.
(Posted By: Tom Troxel | 22 March
2003 | 11:00PM)
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