This is the first of two Public Lands Blog posts that consider the desire of the Forest Service to amend a provision of the “Eastside Screens,” standards designed to protect public forests east of the Cascade Range. Part 1 examines the history, science, and politics leading up to the adoption of the Eastside Screens and their implementation since then. Part 2 will suggest what the Forest Service could do to improve the Eastside Screens, in both the short and long term.
Figure 1. Old-growth ponderosa pines benefit from frequent wildfires that keep young trees from establishing and eventually crowding them out. If the fires are frequent enough, they are of low intensity and easily rebuffed by thick bark. Source: Leon Werdinger. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
Since 1995, the eastside public forests of Oregon and Washington have generally been managed by the Forest Service under land management provisions known as the Eastside Screens that, among other things, prevent the cutting of live trees of any species larger than 21 inches in diameter at breast height (DBH, or 4.5 feet above the ground). The Forest Service is proposing to “revise” the 21-inch rule “in light of current forest conditions and the latest scientific understanding of forest management in areas that have frequent disturbances, like wildfires.”
Many conservation organizations are quite concerned and are girding their collective loins for battle. The Forest Service insists that the changes they propose won’t undermine the intent of the Eastside Screens. Who’s right? Though I get paid to be paranoid (and being paranoid doesn’t rule out the possibility that one is actually being followed), I think objectively that it’s worth examining the most significant federal forest conservation policy outside of the Northwest Forest Plan.
The Peak of the Northwest Forest Wars
It was 1993. The imperiled northern spotted owl (along with the marbled murrelet and Pacific salmon stocks) had hit the political fan and forced the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan, which revolutionized forest management on all or parts of seventeen national forests and seven BLM districts covering 22.1 million acres within the range of the northern spotted owl (the so-called “westside forests”). However, conservationists still had major issues with logging old-growth ponderosa pine and other species on federal forestlands in Oregon and Washington not in the range of the northern spotted owl (the “eastside forests,” Map 1).
Map 1. Only the national forests in Oregon (and southeast Washington) outside the range of the northern spotted owl (parts of the Deschutes, most of the Fremont-Winema, and all of the Ochoco, Malheur, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests) are subject to the Eastside Screens. Source: USDA Forest Service.
Conservationists couldn’t wave the Endangered Species Act flag as there was no direct eastside counterpart to the spotted owl, but we did have a White House that very much didn’t want another “owl crisis” in Pacific Northwest federal forests. The ecological crisis of eastside forests was able to benefit from riding on the coattails of the political crisis raging over westside forests (which fundamentally was driven by an ecological crisis). President Clinton was convinced that his administration must solve the spotted owl crisis and could also solve the eastside forest crisis at the same time.
On March 23, 1993, just two months after President Clinton entered office and in the same month that he convened the Forest Summit in Portland that led to the Northwest Forest Plan, the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing the Oregon Natural Resources Council (now Oregon Wild) and others, filed a petition with the Pacific Northwest Regional Forester to
revise the Minimum Management Requirements (MMRs) for old growth associated species of wildlife on the “Eastside” national forests of Oregon and Washington. Like the northern spotted owl in the western reaches of Region Six, several of these animals—including the American marten, pileated woodpecker, northern goshawk, and three-toed woodpecker—are threatened by logging and related management practices that have drastically affected their habitat. MMRs established by the Region to insure their continued viability on the Eastside lack scientific credibility. Indeed, they were demonstrably faulty when adopted in 1986. In addition, several species not covered by existing MMRs are equally in need of regional direction to secure their continued existence on Forest Service lands. . .
Petitioners also request a moratorium on the logging and roading of mature and old growth forests on the Eastside.
The fuse was lit, and certain congressional leaders and members of the Forest Service bureaucracy scrambled to thwart and/or obviate the petition. However, the Clinton administration, especially Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons, did want to address eastside old-growth forest liquidation. A remarkable chain of events subsequently led to the Eastside Screens. (By the way, the petition was written by Neil Lawrence, who is still with NRDC today doing comparable good mischief on behalf of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.)
The Eastside Forests Scientific Societies Panel Report
Not wanting to rely on just agency science, conservationists (and our lawyers) needed some independent science. The late great former Democratic U.S. representative from Indiana Jim Jontz (who later came to run the Ancient Forest Alliance) was instrumental in arranging for the Committee on Agriculture of the U.S. House of Representatives (which has jurisdiction over national forest management) to ask the Wildlife Society, the American Fisheries Society, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the American Ornithologists’ Union to produce what became known as the Eastside Forests Scientific Society Panel report (Figure 2). Jontz was also instrumental in persuading the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Bullet Foundation to fund the scientific synthesis.
Figure 2. The Eastside Forests Scientific Society Panel report. Source: The Larch Company.
A fourteen-page summary of the report, which was entitled “Interim Protection for Late-Successional Forests, Fisheries, and Watersheds: National Forests East of the Cascade Crest, Oregon and Washington,” is available online. (If you want the entire 261-page report, let me know.)
The panel report, dated August 1994, included these “interim” recommendations:
1. Do not log late-successional/old-growth forests in eastern Oregon and Washington.
2. Cut no trees of any species older than 150 years or with a diameter at breast height (DBH) of 20 inches or greater.
3. Do not log or build new roads in aquatic diversity management areas (ADMAs).
4. Do not construct new roads or log within current (1) roadless regions larger than 1000 acres or (2) roadless regions that are biologically significant but smaller than 1000 acres.
5. Establish protected corridors along streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Restrict timber harvest, road construction, grazing, and cutting of fuelwood within these corridors.
6. Prohibit logging of dominant or codominant ponderosa pine from Eastside forests.
7. Prohibit timber harvest in areas prone to landslides or erosion unless it can be conclusively demonstrated by peer-reviewed scientific study that no associated soil degradation or sediment input to streams results from that harvest.
8. Prevent livestock grazing in riparian areas except under strictly defined conditions that protect those riparian areas from degradation.
9. Do not log on fragile soils until it is conclusively demonstrated by peer-reviewed scientific study that soil integrity is protected and that forest regeneration after logging is assured.
10. Establish a panel with the appropriate disciplinary breadth to develop long-term management guidelines that will protect Eastside forests from drought, fire, insects, and pathogens.
11. Establish a second panel to produce a coordinated strategy for restoring the regional landscape and its component ecosystems. Emphasize protecting the health and integrity of regional biotic elements as well as the processes on which they depend.
If only the Forest Service had adopted all of those fine recommendations!
Figure 3. Time for a nice fire to kill off some young trees starting to grow in the understory. Also time to remove the livestock grazing. (Those are people hiking.) Source: Sandy Lonsdale. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
The Eastside Forest Ecosystem Health Assessment
Not wanting to be outflanked by an upstart and out-of-state member of Congress (and wanting to influence the outcome for the worse), House Speaker Tom Foley (D-WA) and Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) sent the Forest Service a number of questions about eastside forests. While nominally responding to two of the most powerful elected officials in the nation, the Forest Service answer in fact responded to the NRDC petition and the scientific society panel eastside forest report. The research branch of the Forest Service came out with no less than thirteen “general technical reports” addressing various eastside forest conditions and management issues—all in the single month of June 1994.
If only the National Forest System branch of the Forest Service had heeded and implemented actions based on the findings of the research branch of the Forest Service!
The Interior Columbia River Basin Ecosystem Management Project
The NRDC petition also prompted responses from the White House.
In 1993, Clinton’s first year in office, the White House ordered the federal forest, wildlife, and environment agencies to come up with an equivalent to the Northwest Forest Plan for eastside forests. The Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency jointly started the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP). The scope of the project was not only the eastside forests of Oregon and Washington but also all federal lands in the Columbia Basin upstream from where the Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Range (meaning parts of Idaho and Montana as well).
After more than eighty-three thousand public comments on two draft environmental impact statements were received, and another few hundred comments were received on another draft EIS, a final environmental impact statement was released and seventy-four protest letters were received. The cluster-fornication ended not with a decision actually implementing the project but rather with adoption of the “Interior Columbia Basin Strategy,” a rather toothless document.
The ICBEMP (inexplicably pronounced “ice-bump” rather than “ick-bemp”) failed for two major reasons.
In the beginning, the ICBEMP failed because the same White House that had participated in hands-on involvement and decision making to resolve the westside (northern spotted owl) crisis didn’t want to have to engage the same way for eastside forests. The White House really wanted the bureaucracy to step up and radically change forest and land management. While the political appointees in the agencies at the top also wanted reform, the rank and file below certainly did not want to change.
The second reason the ICBEMP failed was that the EIS-and-public-comment process took so long it became a victim of some hanging chads in Florida that saw to it that President Clinton was replaced with President Bush.
If only the Forest Service had completed and implemented the ICBEMP!
Figure 4. I never tire of viewing old-growth ponderosa pine forests. Source: Sandy Lonsdale. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
The Eastside Screens
In June 1995, the Forest Service adopted the “Interim Management Direction Establishing Riparian, Ecosystem and Wildlife Standards for Timber Sales”—aka the Eastside Screens—as identical amendments to the various national forest plans. The “screens” encompass far more than the 21-inch rule, including other limitations on (and loopholes for) timber sales, as well as “interim” standards for riparian, ecosystem, and wildlife management. This amendment to the various national forest plans was just enough to avoid a wholesale legal challenge.
An Era of Collaboration
The removal of the imminent threat of the loss of old-growth trees due to protections of the Eastside Screens allowed conservationists to deescalate their litigation in the courts and escalate their collaboration in the forest. In many cases, to achieve the conservation and restoration of dry forest types common to the east side, more, rather than less, logging is desirable (more on this in Part 2 next week).
Big Timber was closing a lot of inefficient large-log mills and, if replacing them at all, was installing highly efficient small-log operations. They too could collaborate because the Eastside Screens would result in commercial logs being available as a by-product of scientifically sound ecological restoration thinning of dry forest stands that—due to fire exclusion, livestock grazing, and high-grade logging—could benefit from carefully implemented thinning projects.
Such eastside forest collaboration peaked with the introduction by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) of his proposed Oregon Eastside Forests Restoration, Old Growth Protection, and Jobs Act of 2013 (S.1301; 113th Congress) The bill came about through negotiations between conservation and timber interests. It was a bill that would have been a significant net improvement to both sides. I was one of the negotiators, and of course I believe it would have been a far greater gain for the conservation and restoration of nature than for Big Timber. However, the bill died as collateral damage from Northwest Forest War II (2013–2016), when Big Timber and a smattering of Oregon counties sought to effectively privatize the majority of BLM holdings in western Oregon.
The Unraveling of an Era
The collaboration era began to unravel with the failure of the Wyden legislation, and it is continuing to unravel. In my view, there are a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to these:
• The Trump administration is pressuring the Forest Service to up the cut.
This means selling a lot more logs, and big logs at that.
• Big Timber is feeling its oats.
Under the stump-loving Trump administration, Big Timber wants more and more logs, and not just as by-products of scientifically sound ecological restoration thinning.
• The upper echelons of the Forest Service have generally lost their souls.
The reformers pulled up from the ranks during the Clinton administration have long since retired. The Bush II administration was focused on taking out Clinton’s Northwest (westside) Forest Plan and generally didn’t pay any attention to eastside forests. The deformers pulled out from under rocks during the Trump administration are happy to see the cut go up so they can get their next promotion.
• The lower echelons of the Forest Service are increasingly happy to just follow orders and get the cut out.
In general, the quality and longevity of staff have diminished. It has been harder for the Forest Service to recruit and retain staff to live in the likes of Ukiah, Bly, Silver Lake, Enterprise, John Day, and Prairie City. Even if cities on an interstate—such as Pendleton, La Grande, and Baker City—are desirable to Forest Service employees, they are still not great shakes to their spouses who also have careers that cannot be optimized outside of large urban areas. About the time a ranger moves to town, determines where the bathrooms are, and identifies the species of trees common to their district, it’s time to make good on the spousal agreement and move out of town and up the next step in the career ladder.
• For conservationists, collaboration is a hell of a lot of work for a diminishing amount of return.
The earliest, and perhaps the easiest, projects were agreeable to both the conservation community and the timber industry, and the local Forest Service was happy to limit itself to consensus projects. However, the local agency people are feeling the pressure to up the cut and are proposing projects that are more volume-driven timber sales than ecological restoration projects where commercial volume is a by-product.
Increasingly these so-called restoration projects are driven not only by timber volume but also by obscene amounts of money in the Forest Service budget for “fuels reduction.” True ecological restoration activities can have reduced fuels as a result, but fuels reduction as a goal is not true ecological restoration.
Figure 5. The protection of riparian values is also a purpose of the Eastside Screens. Source: Sandy Lonsdale. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
Next week in Part 2 we will examine what the Forest Service is proposing to do to the Eastside Screens and also what it should do.