June-July 97

ROADLESS AREAS / SLAPPSUITS AND CLOSURES IN IDAHO

PEGGY SUE MCRAE owes a logging company $90,000 for sitting in a road. The good news is that no logging trucks will be rolling along the road this winter. Last fall saw a series of ups and downs for citizens fighting the contentious Cove/Mallard timber sales in central Idaho. Activists have been using various tools to try to stop 200 cutting units and 145 miles of road from desecrating this unspoiled gem of roadless area. From lawsuits to letters to educational roadshows to sitting in logging roads, activists have succeeded in slowing down the sales significantly. The nine sales were scheduled to be completed in 1997, but only about 15% of the logging and road-building has been completed.

For their troubles, a dozen activists who protested the sales in 1993 now owe big bucks to the company building the roads in Cove/Mallard. Last November an Idaho County jury decided that the activists collectively owed Highland Enterprises $1.2 million in punitive fines and compensatory damages from monetary losses that the protests caused.

It is unlikely that Highland will see the money; the activists are all dirt poor. But the point was to send a chilling message to activists: if you protest, you pay. That is the goal of this type of lawsuit, called a SLAPPsuit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). It's a favorite tool of polluting industries to try to silence citizens who fight back.

However, activists received a victory for a different issue-the right to be in a closed area of the national forests. Closing contentious logging areas to the public has been a common practice by the Forest Service. Every year, activists have been shut out of logging areas by a Federal closure order once they begin protesting. The Forest Service says that closures protect public safety; activists say closures keep out witnesses. Fines up to $250 and three months in jail have been levied on activists found guilty of this misdemeanor.

1997 may be different. Recently, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Lodge, in two separate cases, overruled convictions on activists found guilty of being in a closed area in 1995 protests. Lodge ruled that the Forest Service failed to follow any standard or criteria in issuing permits to enter closed areas. Instead, permits were arbitrarily denied based on the viewpoint and affiliation of the applicant.

Other good news is that the Idaho Sporting Congress (ISC), in litigation over the Cove/Mallard sales since 1991, has succeeded in halting the sales until at least June 15, 1997. ISC bargained an agreement between the Forest Service, the logging company, and the road-building company to refrain from activities while a hearing on the case is awaited. The hearing will occur in April.

Activists poring over documents obtained through F0IA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, as well as observing what loggers and road-builders have actually done in the woods, have found blatant violations of several environmental laws, the Forest Plan, and the timber sale contracts. These discoveries form the basis of the lawsuit which requires that the sales be halted until the Forest Service does a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS).

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that if significant changes have occurred either in the project itself or in the affected environment, a supplemental analysis is required. That is the case with the Cove/Mallard sales. Sale units and roads have been changed since the original Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In addition, water quality has significantly changed: when the EIS was written in 1990, water quality was high in streams that provided endangered salmon habitat. Four years later, they were degraded enough by sediment to be listed as Water Quality Limited Segments of Concern by the State of Idaho. This could have been avoided; road-building and logging proceeded for three years before the Forest Service bothered to begin a monitoring program to see if road-building and logging were affecting watersheds. They only began such a program because they were forced to by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Under the Endangered Species Act, the Forest Service is required to consult with NMFS regarding the impact of the sales on endangered Chinook salmon. However, the result of the consultation process was a watered-down, vague list of requirements for the Forest Service. The essence of the consultation is whether or not logging activities in the tributaries of the Salmon River will affect salmon habitat in the river. One of the requirements by NMFS is to determine baseline conditions for the river. The Forest Service wiggled itself out of doing actual monitoring; instead, it only has to rely on inaccurate and vague estimates of baseline conditions.

Cove/Mallard isn't the only roadless area under the chainsaw. Three hours northeast of Boise lies the Deadwood Roadless Area, an old growth Ponderosa Pine forest. Two years ago, the Boise National Forest conducted a "landscape analysis," which mapped areas in the Deadwood River drainage that were determined to be most susceptible to disease, insects, and wildfire. In early 1996, the Deadwood Environmental Assessment was issued under the infamous "Salvage Rider."

When ISC biologist Stephen Davis was repeatedly refused access to the project files for the sale (which by law must be available to the public) he took a hike to Deadwood, and found the true intent of the Forest Service: though promoted as a "salvage" sale, the only trees marked to be cut were the huge green (or live) old growth ponderosa pine. In fact, all the areas determined to be susceptible to disease, insects, and wildfire in the "landscape analysis" were now outside of the proposed logging areas. Further, none of the marked trees showed any signs of insects or disease, as confirmed by Dr. Arthur Partridge, forest pathologist for the University of Idaho.

Pressure from the public forced the Forest Service to withdraw Deadwood as a Salvage Rider sale and reclassify it as a green sale. However, last fall, activists discovered that the Forest Service spent $460,000 to mark 86,000 trees to be logged, and cut 41 helicopter landing pads. All this was done before the new environmental analysis was completed, a brazen violation of NEPA.

Marking healthy old growth to be cut is nothing new. Last summer, two ISC attorneys took a hike into the French Creek roadless area to document a salvage timber sale for litigation purposes. They had to walk partly on a road closed to traffic due to the logging operation. The environmental analysis and sale contract stipulated that only dead trees (burned from the wildfires of 1994) were to be removed. What the attorneys found was shocking: unburned, living, old growth trees were being cut, clearly a violation of the Salvage Rider, which required that only dead and imminently dead trees are to be cut.

While documenting this, they were arrested by a Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer for trespassing on the closed road, and their film and notes were confiscated. When ISC hit the press with this bizarre story, the Forest Service issued their own press release stating that the trees were actually dead from insect attack; they just looked green because the chlorophyll needs time to leave the needles. However, none of the trees showed any sign of the alleged insect infestation.

The fact that the Forest Service so blatantly lies and fails to follow environmental laws gives activists ammunition. Information gleaned from the FOIA documents goes to the woods with monitoring teams. Activists see if what the Forest Service says on paper matches what is actually happening on the ground.

The disregard for the well-being of endangered, threatened, and sensitive species of wildlife and fish also gives rise to rage and resistance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the summer of 1996 with the famous "Jack Squat" blockade on the Jack Creek road in Cove/Mallard. With each new day's dawn, the work of the previous night graced the hated road: log cabins, giant ditches and trenches, culverts ripped out of the ground, and miles of huge slash piles.

The fire of rage and resistance will continue this summer, hopefully spreading to other roadless areas under siege. When agencies refuse to obey the law, or when the judges side with the timber industry, the only thing left is rage and resistance.

Come to Idaho this summer!


WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Write to top agency officials and tell them how you feel about logging in roadless areas:

·The Honorable Dan Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture, USDA, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250

·Mike Dombeck, Chief, US Forest Service, P. O. Box 96090, Washington, DC 20090


For More Information:

·Cove/Mallard Coalition, P.O. Box 896B, Moscow, ID 83843, (208) 882-9755, cove@moscow.com

·Idaho Sporting Congress, P.O. Box 1136, Boise, ID 83701, (208) 336-7222, iscsdd@rmci.net

·Northern Rockies Preservation Project, P.O. Box 625, Boise, ID 83701, (208) 345-8077 (ph and fax)

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