As a 33-year veteran of the Forest Service, my last 23 years included the job of implementing a district small salvage sale, smallwood and biomass utilization program along with personal use forest products permits.

One of the most frustrating parts of my job involved the effort it would take to make easily accessible dead trees available to small-scale loggers and commercial firewood cutters.

While easily accessible dead trees are available for people to cut up and take home for personal use firewood and other forest products, such as fence post material, when the invisible line is crossed to let people take those same dead trees for resale to either a local sawmill or to somebody that needs firewood but can't cut it themselves, commercial sales of this material suddenly become subject to the environmental analysis process, and as is currently the case only in the Northern Region of the Forest Service, required to be subject to the appeals process.

The reason for this current process is that over the years, extreme environmental groups have successfully used the courts to interpret our environmental laws so as to cause even the most benign forest management activities to be subject to public notice, comment and appeal procedures (see for example: http://www.fs.fed.us/emc/applit/includes/chiefs_letter_102005.pdf), which are the current rules the Northern Region is following, in spite of a 2009 Supreme Court case called Summers versus Earth Island that returned categorically excluded projects back to not being subject to notice, comment and appeal procedures. It's a long story all in itself folks that spans over a decade of court cases).

I don't believe our environmental laws were intended to throw all common sense out the window, but with the extreme environmentalist agenda of stopping timber harvest activities on National Forests, common sense forest management has been eliminated. In its place, we have procedures that have caused taxpayers to be ripped off by having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to pay for personnel and equipment needed to conduct excessive environmental reviews and defending projects in court. These procedures have had the added effect of causing a loss of revenues the taxpayers could receive from the commercial sale of forest products.

The best way for me to illustrate how ridiculous Forest Service environmental analysis and appeals procedures are, is to tell the sad story of "The Single Tree Salvage".

This story begins with two people in a local community. Person No.1 has found a blown down tree lying next to a forest road. He has a personal use firewood permit to salvage it and use it to heat his family's home with. Let's say this tree contains one cord of firewood (about 500 board feet of wood). This person paid five dollars for this tree to the U.S. taxpayers ($5 per cord typically charged for firewood permits).

Because this person's permit is for personal use, not to be resold, the Forest Service does not have to conduct an environmental analysis on the effects of removing this tree from the forest. The activity is also not subject to an appeal process.

The firewood cutter starts his saw and by the end of the day he has stacked one cord of firewood in his woodshed.

Next comes Person No. 2. He finds a similar blown down tree next to the same forest road just a couple hundred yards away from the first person's tree. Person No.2 decides he would like to remove the tree and rather than cut it up for personal use firewood, decides he'd rather take a few 16 foot long lengths of the tree to the local sawmill and sell it to them for about $150. He knows he needs to get a commercial salvage permit from the Forest Service, so he goes to the local district office to inquire about what it would take to obtain a permit.

What Person No. 2 finds out is that the current charge the taxpayers want from him for a cords-worth of sawlogs is around $50 (about 10 times more money for the taxpayers).

What No. 2 also finds out is that he will have to wait approximately one year to obtain his permit, because the Forest Service will have to schedule the "project" into its annual planning process, conduct an environmental analysis and provide the public an opportunity to comment on and appeal the project if they wish.

"WHAT!?" cries Person 2. "Why do I have to wait an entire year to remove that tree while I just saw somebody else cut and remove a tree just like mine yesterday?"

The District Forest Products Program Manager [that would be me] answers. "Let me try to explain to you the process I am required to follow in order to make that tree available to you for commercial use".

And so the forester's tale begins:

First, given the reduced workforce available on the District for conducting analysis, I have to get this project listed on our annual program of work and get in line for our specialists to have time to conduct their analysis. I see that this project is about No.12 on the current list of other projects, and seeing it only involves one tree, it rates pretty low on the priority list. Our specialists should find time for this in about 8 months.

Next, I need to get this single tree salvage project listed on our public Quarterly Schedule of Proposed Actions (nicknamed the SOPA list) so that our interested publics can express a desire to provide comments on this project. We can get this done while we're waiting for our specialists to find time to conduct the analysis.

I also need to mail out a "scoping letter" to about 60 people on our NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] mailing list that have requested to be involved in projects such as yours. I will also have to publish this scoping letter in our local Newspaper of Record in order to gather additional comments on salvaging this tree. It will take about 30 days to gather comments, but we can do this while we wait for our specialists to find time to conduct the analysis on salvaging the tree.

After our 8 month wait is over and our specialists have become available to analyze the single tree salvage project, we finally have our wildlife biologist, fisheries biologist, soil scientist, botanist and archeologist out visiting the blown down tree to determine what effects on the environment could possibly result from extracting the few logs from the forest to the roadside. Reports are written within a few days after their field visits.

Fortunately, they determined that there would be no adverse impacts to the environment, no extraordinary circumstances to prevent allowing the removal of the tree. If, for example, our wildlife biologist had determined the activity may adversely affect our local grizzly bear population, we would likely have had to spend an additional 6 months or more in consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in order to get concurrence (a biological opinion) on the determination.

With the specialist analysis and reports completed, I would then be able to write the Decision Memo, which currently requires about 14 pages, and then get our District Ranger to authorize the project.

With the Decision Memo signed, I will then have to publish the decision in our local paper and mail out copies of the letter of decision to all people that provided comments on the project. This publication also starts the required 45-day appeal period in order to give any people who commented an opportunity to appeal the single tree salvage.

If the project isn't appealed, we may sell you the tree five days after the end of the appeal period.

If the project is appealed however, it will require another 45 days to either try to resolve the appeal with the appellants, or have the project reviewed and approved by our Appeal Reviewing Officer, located in the Regional Office in Missoula, Montana.

So Person No. 2 replies: "I'll buy a personal use firewood permit instead".

Although this is the actual process required to salvage a single tree commercially, Forest Service District Offices have to forego the opportunity to sell small amounts of forest products for commercial use. These small-scale commercial sales could result in a ten-fold return to the U.S. taxpayer compared to personal use collection rates. It is just too inefficient to conduct simple salvage projects. It amounts to lost income to the U.S. taxpayers and lost jobs for small-scale forest products workers.

If the people reading this story are as frustrated as I am about the excessive costs of conducting environmental analysis and implementation of the appeals process thanks to extreme environmentalist sabotage of the process, I have the following suggestion:

First, if you live within the jurisdiction of the Northern Region (includes all of Montana, northern Idaho and portions of North Dakota), contact Regional Forester Leslie Weldon in Missoula MT and ask her to allow categorically excluded projects to follow the current nationally approved procedures that do not require notice, comment and appeals.

Next, contact your President, Congressmen, and the Chief of the Forest Service and suggest they do the following:

• Require the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management create a robust list of activities that would be categorically excluded from doing Environmental Assessments or Environmental Impact Statements. These categories should be based on a review of the types of past projects that had been completed using an Environmental Assessment [EA] that included a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact). Projects such as these normally include a routine list of project implementation design criteria/mitigation measures that eliminated adverse environmental impacts, and these design criteria could be included in the Categorical Exclusions.

• Make all Categorically Excluded projects not subject to notice, comment and appeal.

• Require appeal bonds for all EAs; apply a fee equal to 10% of the value of the project, win or lose, the government keeps the money.

• Restrict the use of Environmental Impact Statements [EISs] to only highway projects, dam construction, and other major federal actions. Define the major actions exclusively so there is nothing for courts to interpret. Timber sales should not be in the list.

• Eliminate the Equal Access to Justice Act. I see some Congressmen are trying to restrict this program so that environmental groups having more than $7 million in assets could not qualify for taxpayer refunds of court costs, but that doesn't keep smaller groups from tapping into taxpayer funds. All environmental groups should lose access to these funds.

• Eliminate the requirements of analyzing cumulative effects and responding to public comments. Cumulative effects and public comments should only be "considered". Environmental groups usually demand that federal agencies analyze cumulative effects as far back as the ice-age and as far into the future and as globally to be an impossible and needless task. The comments sent in to agencies often contain 40 to 60 pages or more of demands and having to respond to these comments individually require the expenditure of large amounts of taxpayer money.

• Allow the Forest Service expanded use of the Section 7 Endangered Species Act Counterpart Consultation process in order to reduce the workload of US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and shorten timelines for consultation. Forest Service biologists are just as good as USFWS biologists, and contrary to environmentalist's contention that they answer to the timber industry; they are dedicated to maintaining fish and wildlife populations.

• Replace the use of "best science" with "peer reviewed science". Just like arguing over which brand of pickup truck is the "best", using the term "best science" automatically results in disputes about which science agency specialists should use for their project analysis.

Note: If you enjoyed reading this and would like to hear more of my thoughts about Forest Service management issues, please make a generous contribution to the Evergreen Foundation. If you didn't enjoy reading this, give an even greater donation so that Evergreen can hire some real writers and get rid of me! Also, if there is a particular topic you would like me to address, please write editor@evergreenmagazine.com with your suggestion. That's all for now, Barry