Owl Recovery Plan Re-examined

On March 31, the Department of Interior announced its intention to seek a remand of the spotted owl recovery plan and critical habitat designation. They are asking for 30 days to work with the plaintiffs to pursue negotiations. After which they will file a report with the court stating to what extent the parties have reached a settlement on the remand.

The agency’s decision is based on a December 15, 2008 inspector general report that a former Interior Department official “took actions that potentially jeopardized the decisional process” of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in the spotted owl recovery plan. The official left the department in April 2007, eleven months prior to issuance of the recovery plan and 16 months prior to publication of the critical habitat revisions.

The Carpenters Industrial Council, AFRC, Swanson Group, Rough and Ready Lumber Company, Perpetua Forests and Seneca Jones Timber Company filed the underlying lawsuit against the FWS alleging they failed to use best available science in designating critical habitat in fire-prone areas east of the Cascades, violated the ESA by designating areas which do not qualify as critical habitat, did not properly assess the true economic impact, and abused its discretion by arbitrarily failing to exclude O & C lands. The Seattle Audubon Society and other environmental organizations intervened as both plaintiffs and defendants, bringing in the issue of the recovery plan, which was not the subject of the original lawsuit.

Although environmentalists have been quick to characterize the remand as fatal to implementation of the BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revisions, neither the BLM nor FWS have characterized it in this way. /Ann Forest Burns

Obama Signs Omnibus Lands Bill

On March 25, the House of Representatives approved the public lands, water and natural resources omnibus bill by a vote of 285-140 and President Obama signed the bill into law on March 30. The bill adds more than two million acres of public lands as wilderness, establishes three new national park units, a new national monument, three new national conservation areas, more than 1,000 miles of national wild and scenic rivers and four new national trails.

In Oregon, the bill designates a large amount of new wilderness including an additional 128,000 acres to the Mt. Hood Wilderness, the 13,700 acre Copper Salmon Wilderness on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, the 23,000-acre Soda Mountain Wilderness in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, nearly 31,000 acres in the badlands just east of Bend, and 8,600 acres overlooking the John Day Wild and Scenic River.

In California 70,000 acres were added as wilderness in the Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, and in Idaho 517,000 acres of wilderness were created in the Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands.

The bill contains prior legislation from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and former Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) known as the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, which calls for federal land managers to identify and fund ecological treatments on national forest and BLM lands on parcels of at least 50,000 acres that need active restoration. Also included is Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) Watershed Restoration and Enhancement Agreements Act which gives the agencies permanent authorization to enter into cooperative agreements to benefit resources within watersheds on forest lands. /Tom Partin

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AFRC Newsletter: 4/9/09