Forests and People - Warnings and Actions

Thinkers Warn Us

Aldo Loepold wrote A Sand County Almanac, a book of essays about forests, wildlife, nature and their relationship and importance to people.  Even if you never spend a night in a forest it is an important book to read - maybe it is especially important if you never spend a night in a forest.  The book was published in 1947, after Leopold’s death.  It struck a note with a lot of people, it challenges us to care for the natural world.   

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962, it was a best seller that had many talking about our natural world and the abuses we were piling on nature.  Maybe, for the first time in history, people began to internalize nature’s role, the “silent spring” was beginning to happen, (some) people listened. 

 The Land Acts

The Cuyahoga River in Ohio flows north and empties into Lake Erie where Cleveland is.  Cities along its way had been emptying their sewage into the river for more than a hundred years by 1969.  The river had caught fire several times, but when the river burned in 1969 Time magazine noticed and ran an article with pictures showing the river burning, intensely.  The writing describes in stark terms how polluted the river had become, it caught the attention of America.   

The James River, one of the most important rivers in Virginia, had been famous for its bass fishing and white water floating, then came pollution.  A stretch of the river east of Richmond was described as “dead,” no fish lived and the only birds in sight were turkey vultures that could live on the floating offal. (The James Estuary Case Study, Chapter 9) 

Our national symbol, the bald eagle was on the way to extinction along with a whole raft of other wild species.

Congress Acts

Thresholds are out there, when one is crossed things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but when a threshold is crossed, change happens.  The problem is, we don’t know what the thresholds look like or when they will be crossed.  As environmental concerns piled up, people were becoming concerned, with hindsight it looks like the first “Earth Day,” April 22, 1970, was  a threshold being crossed.   Congress was acting on the side of nature: The Wilderness Act had passed in 1964, The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968, The National Environmental Policy Act was signed January 1, 1970, DDT was banned in 1972, The Clean Water Amendments passed in 1972, The Endangered Species Act in 1973, The National Forest Management Act in 1976, The Clean Air Amendments in 1977. These laws were aimed at restoring some of what we had taken from nature.  There are scores of other laws passed relating to the natural environment, but these are the most far reaching.

All of these are important, but a couple had big impacts on forests.  The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) both require public involvement in forest management decisions and that is different from the past, and important.  

The National Environmental Policy Act does some big things, it set up the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a government agency that has far reaching powers in reviewing projects and their effect on the environment. The law sets up the machinery for the government to clean-up places that are dangerously polluted, usually by past industrial practices, they are “superfund sites.”  The other thing NEPA does is require an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be prepared for any sizable project that impacts land, water or air and has federal money in it.  An EIS examines all the environmental impacts a project will create and presents alternatives to the proposed action, including a “no action” alternative.  A Draft EIS must be presented to the public for review and comment and their comments must be addressed as part of the Final Environmental Impact Statement.  It is a complex process to determine the possible effects of a project and how to mitigate the adverse effects.  Project EISs have been the subject of numerous lawsuits aimed at stopping or delaying proposed projects.  Typical projects that require Environmental Impact Statements on federal lands include:  highways, timber harvests, roads, pipelines, recreation developments, ski areas, fences, water systems, grazing systems — you get the idea, about anything that will impact anything.  An EIS is also required for strategic plans or programs such as a National Forest’s forest plan.  Environmental Impact Statements, make us think, they make us look at all sides of a proposed project or plan, they make the decisions transparent, and they are expensive, but cheaper than the pollution we thoughtlessly created before NEPA.

The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) requires each National Forest develop a “forest plan” describing how the forest will be managed.  Maps and detailed descriptions show the public what management activities will take place and where they can happen over the coming years. Typical management activities include, constructing and maintaining recreation facilities, road construction and maintenance, timber sale preparation, range improvements, stream rehabilitation, wildlife habitat and fisheries improvements and more.  A forest plan requires a budget to accomplish its projects, but Congress may or may not fund the Forest Service to do the work in the forest plans.  All kinds of environmentally beneficial projects may be in a plan, but if the annual budget Congress passes doesn’t have money to carry out the plan, the projects can’t be done.  Congress has not shown much commitment to funding based on forest plans.  It makes for complications out there in the forest.