FSEEE has been working to obtain both public and congressional support for the designation of Wassen Creek as a new Wilderness Area.

Wassen Creek is the largest roadless area in federal ownership in Oregon’s coast range. The Creek’s very pure, cold water is important for endangered salmon runs and its spotted owl habitat is the most productive in the region, a crucial element of the owl’s continued survival.

This year, we organized a grassroots campaign to highlight Wassen Creek. FSEEE has taken dozens of folks down to Wassen Creek, and hosted events around the state to introduce people to this special area. And we have more trips planned for next spring.

We also asked you, our members, to contact your congressional representatives to save Wassen Creek. Your calls and letters definitely had an impact on Congressman Peter DeFazio, (D-OR), a senior member of what we anticipate will be a powerful pro-environment majority in both houses of Congress next year. He sits on the House Natural Resources Committee and the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

On October 21, 2008, we took Peter and his staff on a successful expedition into Wassen Creek.

Congressman Peter DeFazio is triumphant after an arduous hike to the elusive Devil’s Staircase at Wassen Creek. Forest Magazine File Photo.

Our cross-country bushwhack (about 8 miles round-trip) was led by spotted owl surveyor Chris McCafferty, accompanied by Dr. Eric Forsman, a Forest Service wildlife biologist. Peter and Chris combined their GPS skills to bring us to Wassen Creek’s remote Devil’s Staircase—a series of majestic waterfalls.

Along the way we saw an Oregon red-legged frog, Pacific giant salamander, lots of mushrooms, and much evidence of Wassen Creek’s large herd of elk.

Peter’s visit to the site, combined with your calls and letters, have made big difference. He has now pledged to help protect Wassen Creek as a Wilderness Area!

Cattle grazing on National Forests wreaks havoc on the environment. Cattle erode stream banks, displacing native fish and other water creatures. Cows also cause water temperatures to increase by trampling shade plants and creating wider, more shallow stream beds, forcing out species that require colder water to survive. And cattle spread invasive species that reduce or eliminate native vegetation.

On the Fremont-Winema National Forest in Oregon, the forest plan requires cattle to be excluded from streamside areas if they harm sensitive species habitat. An investigation revealed that cattle grazing was harming the Oregon spotted frog, a creature that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found was threatened with extinction. The frog was not added to the list of federally protected species, however, due to a lack of funding.

Without official federal protection for the frog, the Forest Service gave in to pressure by the cattle grazing permit holders and ignored the findings of the Fish and Wildlife Service that the frog population was rapidly declining.

On March 11, 2008, FSEEE filed suit in federal court to force the Forest Service to follow its own management plan and exclude cattle from sensitive streamside areas.

In response to our case, the Forest Service agreed to build a new 4-mile fence to keep cows out of the sensitive area. The fence was completed August 2, 2008.

FSEEE staff visited the site several times to ensure that the fence was constructed properly. We will continue to monitor the enforcement of the fence lines as well as seek a court ruling that the Forest Service should reduce the number of cows on the grazing allotment.

Throughout 2008, FSEEE prepared and submitted detailed comments on 29 National Forest projects. We put the Forest Service on notice that we have investigated their actions, found violations of the law, and that we’ll enlist the help of the courts if the changes outlined in our comments are not implemented.

Here’s a list of the projects we commented on this year:

• The Big Border Grazing Allotment on Washington’s Colville National Forest.

• The Empire Grazing Allotment on Montana’s Helena National Forest.

• The Santiam Pass Off-Highway Vehicle Plan on Oregon’s Willamette National Forest.

• The Western Oregon Plan Revision.

• The Scotty-Damon timber project on Oregon’s Malheur National Forest.

• The Dad’s Creek timber project on Oregon’s Malheur National Forest.

• The Kidder-Shackleford Grazing Allotments on California’s Klamath National Forest.

• Twelve different oil leases on the Texas National Grasslands.

• Abandoned mine clean-ups on California’s Six Rivers National Forest.

• Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases on Colorado’s Roan Plateau.

• Six different grazing allotments on Idaho’s Caribou-Targhee National Forest.

• The Colorado Roadless Rule Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

• The Idaho Roadless Rule Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

As always, please feel free to call, write or email for more details about any of these projects.

National Forests are the cornerstones of efforts to connect fragmented habitat and restore wildlands in the United States. We will soon emerge from the conservation wilderness, so to speak, of eight years of the Bush Administration. Hopefully, President-elect Obama will work with a Congress with a stronger conservation agenda.

Even with a pro-environment President, we need to be equipped with vision for future management of National Forests that is informed by practical, on-the-ground knowledge.

FSEEE has strong ties with Forest Service employees who are performing the forest planning functions as well as the employees doing the day-to-day work. And we enjoy support from within the Forest Service at all ranks. In addition, our membership includes conservation-minded agency personnel and we have a long history protecting forests through support of Forest Service whistleblowers. These connections place FSEEE is in a unique position to cultivate the knowledge and relationships necessary for future forest protection successes.

To help formulate this vision for the future of our public forests, FSEEE’s Policy Analyst, James Johnston, has embarked on an ambitious review of every National Forest in the country. This summer he traveled to 41 National Forests and grasslands in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. Back in the office to organize his findings, he’ll resume his travels to more National Forests in January.

James met with more than 400 Forest Service employees, talking with them about the challenges the agency is facing, including fire management, budgets, outsourcing, consolidation of function, travel management planning, thinning projects, the roadless rule and more. He also met with dozens of FSEEE members, hundreds of other citizens, and local conservation groups to get their input.

James investigated construction of roads and a pipeline in the East Willow Roadless Area of the Grand Mesa National Forest. Photo © James Johnston.

FSEEE has been closely monitoring the timber sale programs of National Forests in northern California, including the Six Rivers, Mendocino, Klamath and Shasta-Trinity National Forests. These forests, managed under the Northwest Forest Plan, comprise the southern extent of the range of the northern spotted owl, whose population continues to decline precipitously as a result of habitat loss. All of these forests’ timber sale programs received a 30% boost in funding from the Bush administration to get the cut out in 2007.

One of the most environmentally destructive timber sales being planned by these forests was the Little Doe–Low Gulch timber sale on the Six Rivers National Forest. The Forest Service’s “preferred alternative” included 500 acres of clear-cut logging in old-growth forest, prime spotted owl habitat. On January 5, 2007, FSEEE filed an administrative appeal which argued, among other things, that the Forest Service had failed to perform surveys for owls and didn’t know how many owl breeding pairs would be affected by logging.

In their Record of Decision released September 5, 2007, the Forest Service dropped all clear-cutting from the project.

In January, FSEEE won a big victory for the north woods by challenging the Forest Service’s decision to let large mining companies search for valuable minerals in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. The mining could have negatively impacted the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The Superior National Forest lies atop the Duluth Complex, a large reservoir of copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, and titanium. Development of the area hasn’t been feasible until recently due to technological and economic issues. But new technology and very high commodity prices mean that the resource can be effectively exploited—and the Forest Service is trying to authorize dozens of new mining operations.

This type of hard rock mining can create enormous environmental impacts, including miles-long tailing ponds of toxic pollution. The Forest Service, however, did not conduct any environmental analysis of the long-term impacts of allowing mineral exploration in this world-class public wilderness area.

FSEEE filed an appeal stating that the Forest Service needed to prepare a broad scale environmental analysis of the long-term impacts of mining. The Forest Service initially denied our claim, asserting that we had no right to appeal decisions when no environmental analysis was involved. Then on January 3, 2007, they abruptly withdrew plans for the toxic mineral exploration and initiated the environmental analysis that FSEEE requested.

Livestock grazing on National Forests, perhaps even more than logging and roadbuilding, has profoundly altered native ecosystems. Amazingly, the practice of allowing private ranchers to run cattle at little or no cost on public lands has almost entirely avoided environmental scrutiny.

Since the late 1990s, the Forest Service has been exempt from preparing environmental analyses of grazing allotments. Hundreds of thousands of acres of range are open to cattle, with no consideration for impacts to soil, streams or other wildlife. To make matters worse, in 2004 Congress passed a rider on an appropriations bill that allowed cattle grazing plans to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis.

The Forest Service is not exempt, however, from following the requirements of the Endangered Species Act, which protects endangered species like the bull trout and the gray wolf from the impacts of grazing allotments.

The Forest Service is currently in the process of reauthorizing hundreds of permits to graze cattle on National Forests all over the country. FSEEE filed an appeal challenging grazing that runs afoul of other laws that Congress has passed, including grazing in Congressionally designated wilderness.

In addition to challenging grazing in public forests on a national level, FSEEE has been busy this year challenging individual grazing allotments. Specifically, we filed comments on three different grazing allotments on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, one allotment on the Helena National Forest, one allotment on the Malheur National Forest, one appeal of an allotment on the Wallowa- Whitman National Forest, one appeal on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, one appeal on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, and six appeals on the Marble Mountain Wilderness of the Klamath National Forest.

In response, so far the Forest Service has withdrawn the grazing permit for the Kidder allotment on the Klamath National Forest. And we expect to hear similar results on many of the other appeals we filed. FSEEE will continue to work to ensure that your National Forests are not used for private grazing at the expense of native wildlife.

For almost 100 years the fate of federal forests has been inextricably tied to local county government budgets. Under a 1907 law, from each dollar paid by timber companies for national forest timber, the local county where the logging occurs receives 25 cents. In Pacific Coast states, especially Oregon, the money added up fast. County governments became the most significant political force behind maintaining unsustainable logging levels on federal lands.

With the increased protection granted to ancient forests for wildlife and water quality protection in the early 1990s, county governments faced a potentially calamitous budget crisis. Congress, with FSEEE’s support, has stepped in with a series of spending bills to maintain county revenues near their historic levels. The 7-year Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act was the most important of these bills. But it expired last year, leaving counties in the lurch once again.

FSEEE staff worked with members of Congress to have the law renewed. And FSEEE members helped clinch the deal by calling their senators and representatives. As a result, Congress has extended that law for one additional year.

There are also positive signs that a multi-year measure that more equitably distributes federal payments among counties will gain passage this year. FSEEE supports both measures as important to the protection of federal forests, especially irreplaceable ancient forests. We will continue working to ensure that ancient forests are not threatened by county governments that cannot tax federal land.

Fulfilling our mission to forge an ecological value system for the Forest Service has meant aggressive litigation and advocacy in recent years—often on behalf of Forest Service whistleblowers. We remain committed to doing what is necessary to protect the old-growth forests, roadless areas, and pristine streams and rivers that are the hallmarks of the national forest system.

At the same time, FSEEE has launched an innovative new program that attempts to build partnerships between activists, agency leaders and traditionally hostile interest groups like the timber industry. We hope to fulfill our organization’s mission through collaboration, not just conflict.

FSEEE has a long history working on the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon. The Malheur is big—about 1.7 million acres. Its diverse and beautiful scenery is typical of the inner-Columbia basin and includes high desert grasslands, sage and juniper, old growth ponderosa pines, alpine lakes and jagged mountain peaks.

The Malheur is a flagship forest, one of those forests that the Forest Service looks to provide the bulk of timber and grazing range for a region, and whose methods are copied throughout the country. For decades, the Malheur has come through, cutting hundreds of thousands of acres of old- growth ponderosa pine and providing range for thousands of cattle. On that front, last year FSEEE stopped the Malheur’s High Roberts timber sale and saved old growth.

As part of our new collaborative program, we invited a group of diverse stakeholders on the Malheur, including agency personnel, conservationists, rural community leaders, mill owners, ranchers and county commissioners to meet and try and establish some common ground about the future of land management in the area. After several positive conversations we formed a group that would work together to implement land management projects that all sides can agree on.

Our first project is working with the Forest Service on restoration forestry in the Dad’s Creek watershed. Dad’s Creek was the site of some of the first logging in the area, where tens of thousands of acres were clear-cut by railroad logging methods in the 1920s. The soils and streams were severely damaged and the widely spaced low elevation old-growth ponderosa pine forest has been replaced by a dense forest of much younger pines and firs.

The Forest Service is currently working on an environmental assessment of this project, and project implementation, overseen by our collaborative group, is slated to begin by the end of this year. Income from the sale of some of the commercially merchantable small diameter timber that will result from this sale will be used for stream restoration and road closure projects.

Your support has allowed us to: (1) Build bridges between conservationists and traditionally hostile stakeholders that can be leveraged into future collaboration on difficult environmental challenges, including grazing, and climate change driven forest disturbance; (2) Create models for collaborative resource management that work and that can be used on other forests; and (3) Create visibility for conservation opportunities among Forest Service employees and recruiting new members and supporters.

Over the next several years, FSEEE will continue this outreach to a broad spectrum of stakeholders. We will recruit participants to a collaborative working group, and work closely with Forest Service staff to identify land management projects—such as small diameter thinning—that can achieve ecological objectives while producing wood products for local industry. We will build support for these sorts of projects in stakeholder meetings and sponsor educational forums, create educational materials and publicize collaborative work. Our goal is for the Malheur National Forest to become a flagship forest for the land ethic that will change the way the Forest Service conducts business in the 21st Century.