Barry Wynsma responds to Mike Petersen's essay

Thank you for your opinion piece Mike. You have done a good job of disclosing your stance on Forest Service management. It shows the many flaws in your line of thinking. It is also a reason why I have chosen to write a series of articles for Evergreen focused on the need for reforming environmental law implementation procedures and policies. I will attempt to briefly respond to those points you make that I feel qualified to answer. I hope Dr. Bonnicksen and others will also provide responses.

No, we are not through with fire scare stories. Fires continue to burn near and through communities, destroying personal property, infrastructure such as municipal watersheds and power lines. They are also burning up valuable forest products that could be utilized by people. Your assumption that weather is the main component of driving large fires misses the point that heavy fuel loads increase the severity of fires. [Click here to read more]

Here in the Panhandle of Idaho I have walked through timber stands that contain up to 100 tons of dead standing and down trees per acre. When those fuels are eventually consumed by fire, the impacts to soils and watersheds will be severe. This may be a natural process, but most people will still consider the impacts from sediment delivery into streams and changing the landscape from forested to long-lasting brush fields as a significant impact.

Concerning your excerpt on how people want their forests managed: "How do people want their public forests managed? According to the Oregon Forests Values and Beliefs Study, commissioned by the Oregon Department of Forestry at the height of the recent recession and published in June 2010: "Oregonians want timber harvesting to remain an important part of Oregon's economy, but only if harvesting is done in a sustainable manner. This means balancing economic, environmental and recreational interests -- having a healthy harvest each year while maintaining all that they value about the forests." Every collaborative forest group I am involved in shares this same philosophy."
We already have laws that cover this concern. They include the Organic Act of 1897: "No national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States..."
And the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960: "it is the policy of the Congress that the national forests are established and shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes. The purposes of this Act are declared to be supplemental to, but not in derogation of, the purposes for which the national forests were established as set forth in the Act of June 4, 1897 (16 U.S.C. 475)." (i.e. the Organic Act)

So I ask you Mike, what's new with this philosophy? The Forest Service has been managing the national forests to comply with these laws for decades.

Another excerpt from your letter: "But, on some sites, such as those at lower elevations and near communities, there has been a substantial fuel buildup, due to fire-suppression and logged stands growing up with thickets of trees."

Thickets of trees following logging sounds like sustainable forestry to me Mike. I also think the substantial fuel buildup is from another hardly mentioned cause, that being a lack of active management due to environmental organizations such as The Lands Council and others that have caused the timber sale program in Region 1 to decline from 694 million board feet in 1990 down to just under 297 million board feet in 2009 (43% of the volume offered 19 years ago), while forests continue to grow, die and accumulate forest fuels.

http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/forest_range/timber_reports/forest_r1/r1_ptsar/r1_ptsar_fy2009_qtr4.pdf

Continuing with Mikes' letter: "Given this, most groups, including ours, support some human intervention, especially in drier sites near communities."

The Organic Act and Multiple Use Sustained Yield Acts don't restrict timber harvests to places where "some human intervention" is desirable, yet this appears to be where Mike and his group draw the line before they drop their support.

Continuing with Mikes' letter: "Some say that collaboration is an avenue to getting work done on the ground. Others, like frequent Evergreen contributor Barry Wynsma, don't care for public input."

You need to reread my meeting notes comments Mike. I said I support public input, but I don't believe non-agency people should be actually writing portions of NEPA documents or acting as decision makers for Forest Service projects. There is no legal authority for collaborative groups to make project decisions. Those authorities are delegated from the Secretary of Agriculture down to the Chief, Regional Foresters, Forest Supervisors and District Rangers, based on the size and types of projects. The purpose of collaborative groups is to try to achieve as much consensus among diverse stakeholder groups as is possible for supporting Forest Service projects. Due to the diverse nature of these stakeholder groups, 100% agreement is not expected. It may be welcomed, but it's not expected.

Continuing with Mikes' letter: "This attitude among current and former Forest Service staff is a challenge for collaboration, because it sends a "Don't tell us how to do our job" signal when it is painfully obvious the agency is unable to do its job."

Yes Mike, it's painfully obvious to me also that the Forest Service is unable to do its job of meeting the objectives of the Organic Act and the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, but I blame you, your organization and others just like it due to your abuse of environmental law implementation procedures and policies.

Continuing with Mikes' letter: "Wynsma is an old school forester who helped oversee the massive clearcutting and road building on the Idaho Panhandle that took place until our nation's environmental laws stopped it (for the most part)."

I may be old Mike, but I'm not that old. I graduated from Michigan Tech University in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Forestry, Wildlife Ecology Option (which means I was about 32 course credits shy of having a second degree in Wildlife Biology). I was schooled in the principals of forest ecology, ecosystem management and wildlife habitat management. Forestry and wildlife management go hand in hand, because wildlife have vegetative requirements that are best manipulated by foresters. Most of the people I worked with in the Forest Service have similar educations and a lot of them have much higher levels of education in the fields of forest ecology, fire ecology, silviculture, wildlife biology, fish biology, soil science, hydrology, botany and geology. So for the past 20-plus years me and my peers within the Forest Service would have liked to have implemented more projects than we have, but it's been people like you and organizations like The Lands Council that have hampered the advancement of the principles of ecosystem management.

Maybe that makes me an "old school forester", but I considered myself being a new-age forester, given my background in promoting the treatment of small diameter timber stands and utilization of small trees and biomass for the past 23 years.

So are you an "old school environmental extremist", or a modern day environmental collaborator? A quick search of the web resulted in my finding that way back in your days of youthful exuberance; you were a proud member of the Earth First! organization. Most people would call that a radical extremist group, seeing they encouraged individual members to be activists in the pursuit of destroying public and private property associated with timber sales, such as tree spiking, tree sitting, chaining themselves to trees, gates, bridges, buildings and sabotaging logging equipment and motorized trails. It appears you were also arrested for some illegal activity associated with Earth First. I'm not sure if you have mellowed over the years. I suspect you are an Earth Firster at heart still, only you have grown more sophisticated over the years in your tactics. Instead of using hammers and nails, you now use lawyers and sympathetic judges in the district and circuit courts to find weaknesses in our environmental laws that allow you to essentially monkey wrench Forest Service projects long before they have a chance to be implemented.

I think that your definition of collaboration would be called something else by people living in timber dependent communities. I think what you call collaboration those people would call extortion or hostage-taking, in that you and The Lands Council sit in those collaborative groups with your modern day hammer and nails, and they know that it's either "your way or the highway to court", causing communities to lose their forest product infrastructure and economic stability. That is what I think is wrong with collaborative groups, and even if everybody in the room can agree on a project, there are other environmental groups just like yours waiting to file lawsuits against collaboratively assembled projects. A recent example of that would be the collaborative project on the Flathead National Forest that is currently being litigated by environmental groups that chose not to participate in the collaborative.
I suppose I have taken up enough space for now, but I may continue providing my comments through future articles I intend to write about the need to reform environmental law implementation procedures and policies.

In closing, I think that perhaps it's time for a Tree Party movement to Occupy our National Forests, take back our forests from extreme environmentalists and give them back to our taxpayer paid and trained professional land managers. We only need to take a walk in our national forests to see how little our forests, roads, trails and campgrounds have been maintained over the past two decades thanks to environmental obstructionists. It's time to let our Congressional representatives and presidential hopefuls know we want reforms in our environmental laws.

Barry Wynsma,
U.S. Forest Service (Retired)