The United States Forest Service’s most important job is balancing the many needs and uses of the 193 million acres of public land it manages. But the Trump administration is preparing to abandon the process that makes it possible, eliminating public participation from the overwhelming majority of decisions affecting our national forests. If the Forest Service has its way, visitors won’t know what’s coming until logging trucks show up at their favorite trailheads or a path for a gas pipeline is cleared below a scenic vista.

At stake is how the Forest Service complies (or doesn’t) with the National Environmental Policy Act, our nation’s most important environmental law. The law requires every government agency to look for less harmful ways of meeting its goals. To that end, agency decisions must be based on solid science and made in the sunlight of public accountability. Each federal agency has some leeway to implement the law, but the Forest Service’s newly proposed rules would instead circumvent it, creating loopholes for logging projects, road construction and even permits for pipelines and other utilities.

Public participation is important because our national forests are as vast and complex as they are beloved. There is no formula for management; cutting trees isn’t inherently good or bad. It depends, always, on the context. Just over 75 percent of national forest lands are found in the arid West, where logging practices can either exacerbate or mitigate the risk of wildfire. The remainder is split between Alaska, with its vast old-growth forests and untouched wilderness, and the extremely diverse forests of the East, where you can walk through a dozen ecosystems in a day’s hike.

Read the entire article at the New York Times

Take Action:

Let the Forest Service know what you think of their efforts to avoid environmental reviews and public input before the August 26th deadline!

Make your Comments Here

Now is the time to raise your voice, stand up for our forests, and comment before the deadline.  The more personal and specific you can be in your comments, the more weight they will carry. Below, we have provided sample comments. We recommend that you choose the ones you identify with and then modify them to express your personal concerns so that individual voices are heard and counted most effectively.

Sample Comments:

*The Forest Service should be encouraging increased public involvement, not blocking it as these proposed changes would do.

*The public often provides information and analyses in NEPA projects that supplement the Forest Service’s knowledge.  Landowners, forest users, and local governments and businesses know things about their local National Forest areas that the Forest Service cannot know, especially because the Forest Service has ever more limited personnel and resources to study conditions and plan projects. Without the public’s contributions, Forest Service projects will be based on incomplete and unsound facts and reasoning.

*The record of failed processes, where courts have found the Forest Service to have failed in its responsibilities, even when full NEPA analyses were conducted, shows very clearly that more care and more public involvement is needed, not less. The Forest Service was rebuked by federal appeals courts for decisions on both the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines for arbitrary and capricious actions.

*Use of categorical exclusions has been used to allow timbering and other harmful actions in the guise of forest improvements.  These rule changes would allow even more of that.

*The wide range of circumstances between National Forests and within individual Forests makes general conclusions about the effects required under categorical exclusions inappropriate in many cases. This violates NEPA and the courts’ rulings that the agency is to take a “hard look” at the impacts on the natural and human environment and identify all significant impacts.

*This proposal for regulatory amendments must itself be analyzed through an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

*The proposed changes will allow projects that result in higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and make national forests less able to avoid harmful impacts of climate change, however, these threats have not been addressed in this process.

Read and share: The Wild Virginia blog post on the subject.

Thank you for your support!

Contact info@wildvirginia.org with any questions.