Stephen Quirk & Alexander Reid Ross
17th April 2014
The US Forest Service is developing a new armory of aggressive and often illegal tactics to push through loss-making timber sales, as it brands forest defenders as 'eco-terrorists'. Time to dig in for the trees - and the wolves.
As the FBI and DHS levy counterinsurgency tactics against nonviolent groups like Earth First!, they compromise with paramilitaries.
The suit was filed by Portland-based grassroots biodiversity group Bark, which argued that the Collowash Watershed, the most geologically unstable region in the National Forest, is too vulnerable for "thinning."
Among the last remaining late Winter steelhead runs in the country, the Collowash is filled with mostly late-successional conifers like hemlocks, douglas firs, and cedars.
The Jazz timber sale was mapped out in 2011, scattering 30 square miles with around 100 units of "selective thins". By December last year, the FS had checked a mere four units.
Decided that no quantitative and substantive evidence existed to compel further surveys, they proceeded with a sale featuring miles of reconstructed logging roads cutting through second growth forest.
It broke the law - but is the Forest Service bothered?
After scouting and recording ground-level data for the entire area, and logging 600 hours of volunteer hours doing so, Bark isolated several illegal activities and got the sale canceled.
This week's ruling is a full reversal from last year's cancellation. Immediately after withdrawing Jazz, the Forest Service attempted to log virtually the entire north slope of Mt. Hood - including what is arguably the most well-loved part of Mt. Hood, the Horseshoe of the Zig-zag ranger district. This became the quickest defeat of any timber sale in Bark's 14-year history, and the forest supervisor was removed shortly thereafter.
The newly incoming forest supervisor, Lisa Northrup, promptly put the Jazz timber sale back on the map. Once the Jazz was up for cutting again, a Resolution Hearing was called. In front of a packed audience, Northrup began the meeting with a harsh tone, declaring (to paraphrase):
"Before we start, you should know that we've read your appeal, and we're going forward with the timber sale anyway. We disagree with your appeal, but if you want to address any of the points that you made, you're welcome to do so. It won't change our minds, but we will try to answer any questions you have ... This is not a negotiation."
Landslides - who cares about them?
She was right about one thing: climate change is non-negotiable. Mt. Hood is one of the top ten most important carbon banks in the country. It is also the source of fresh water for over a million people, and provides the habitat for endangered species that live in old growth forests.
Logging in the Jazz sale means logging in an earth flow - a geologically unstable area that is already prone to landslides and erosion, even with a healthy forest helping to root the soil.
Given that the secular trend of climate change is less temperate weather and more extremes - droughts, heavy rains, and floods - we are already guaranteed more landslides and erosion from past logging, even if we stop all harm now.
Muddy waters
The public is becoming keenly aware of the failure of public forestry, as evidenced by the reaction to the massive mudslide in Snohomish County, Washington, where a slope holding the equivalent of three million dump trucks of earth recently collapsed, killing at least 39 people.
According to the Seattle Times, logging above the slide area had gone beyond legal parameters after the state's belated attempts to regulate logging following years of timber industry resistance.
"Everything had to be argued to the nth degree if it involved leaving a stick of timber," said geologist Paul Kennard, who worked on the slope's 1997 watershed analysis. In effect, public lands management is "thinning" the forest and thickening the streams.
With the damages of climate change already coming home-summer dead zones on the Oregon coast, ocean acidification hurting local fisheries, shifting fire regimes, and increasingly rapid melt on Mt. Hood's Sandy glacier - it is high time we start valuing Mt. Hood forests as a carbon sink, as a force that stabilizes our atmosphere as well as our slopes. a connection we break at our own peril.
This means, at a minimum, that the Forest Service must immediately prohibit logging on steep slopes and earthflows - a policy Jazz has come to symbolize.
A refusal to collaborate
A brazen campaign of stonewalling commenced from that point until today. The Forest Service planning process under Northrup has environmental groups completely closed out, with FOIAed e-mails revealing that the Forest Service now see Bark as an antagonist not to be collaborated with.
Since Bark concentrates on monitoring timber sales in accordance with the strictures of the National Environmental Protection Act, its position as citizen watchdog group is a threat to the Forest Service only as long as that agency desires to log as much as possible with minimum legal or citizen oversight.
The Forest Service, which calls the National Forest "plantation land" on a 40-year cycle, recognizes neither the emergency of retaining valuable bioregions, nor the integrity of a unique bioregion.
As Bark went forward with a lawsuit against the Forest Service to stop the cutting of the Jazz, the Forest Service granted a secret logging waiver to the Canadian timber giant Interfor. The news was shocking, considering it was early Winter, well past logging season.
Bark assembled a crew overnight to get eyes in the forest, and by 9am, a sizable area had already been logged. The ground was moist and muddy-the worst possible conditions for logging. The Forest Service were playing dirty, and definitely breaking the rules.
The coin of the predators
Though a temporary injunction was granted by that afternoon, the message was clear-for the Forest Service, the gloves were off. We saw a pattern developing in other forests across the region.
- In Eastern Oregon, activists are fighting an unprecedented 18,000-acre timber sale.
- In Northern California, complaints have percolated up about the Forest Service shutting the curtains and leaving ecologists in the lurch.
- Even politicians in bed with the timber industry have totally abandoned any attempts to appear logical or abide by juridicial norms.
As part of last year's Farm Bill, Congress passed a new set of Categorical Exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act, making it much easier for the Forest Service to push timber out of critical watersheds, even if that means sediment flowing in.
On top of the Exclusion, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Rep Bill DeFazio launched a clear cutting bill against O&C lands last year that was so obscene that even the Bureau of Land Management denounced it in testimony to the House.
To stop the devastation of a large tract of old growth in Southern Oregon, Cascadia Forest Defenders set up a tree sit that is still occupied today.
In the west, the Elliot State Forest - the largest stretch of contiguous coastal old growth in the US - is again being threatened by clear cuts with a new proposal from the Oregon state government to sell the entire Elliott State Forest.
Compromise with paramilitaries - crack down on unarmed protestors
There is a line being drawn in the context of land management by the Forest Service and BLM. While the Radical Right is allowed to scare the Federal Government out of enforcing public lands regulations through armed vigilantism, those who stand in the way of illegal deforestation are denigrated as "eco-terrorists."
As the FBI and DHS levy counterinsurgency tactics against nonviolent groups like Earth First!, they compromise with paramilitaries.
That the government is more equipped to negotiate with armed militias in the service of millionaires than with lawyers and field surveyors representing tens of thousands of peaceful citizens shows their calculated tolerance for the destruction of public land.
Hence, the wealth of the commons is transferred to corporate earnings reports. As companies post millions, if not billions, of dollars in profits, the timber sale program hemorrhages millions of dollars nationally, and we lose our forests.
The return of the wolf
It is time to dig in. Last month, a wolf-track was found in Mt. Hood - the first confirmed wolf there since 1947. This wolf's return, and the promise of biodiversity that it symbolizes, is threatened not only by the Jazz timber sale, but the proposed 6,000 acres of logging on the north slope of the mountain.
The loss of the Jazz lawsuit is disheartening, but it is not the end. The howl of the wolf will not be silenced.
Stephen Quirk works with Bark and Portland Rising Tide.
Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. He is the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). This article was originally published on Counterpunch and at earthfirstjournal.org/newswire.
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