Understanding the Forest Plan
The Forest Plan is scary: four volumes with nearly 1000 pages of dense analysis and legalese. but in all that paper, there's just a few pages--about a dozen--that are the most important to folks who want to know how it's going to protect Superior National Forest. here's how to find them, and understand what they mean.
How to read the information?
Start with the introductions If you have a forestry or ecology background, you might be able to flip through the books and look for a specific piece of information. But for most people, it's hard to understand what you're reading. The Forest Service did a good job of organizing the maps and data explaining what they mean. Each section has an introduction to what it's talking about. Start with the introductions to make sense of what you're reading!
Ask questions (and write them down): When the Forest Service collects so much information, it's easy to forget about things and leave gaps in the analysis. It's also tempting to leave parts of a plan non-specific to make it flexible in the future. Flexibility can be bad when it means a specific impact the plan has on the environment is not studied. If you have a question that's not answered while reading the plan, you may realize that it's important to think about what they're NOT saying. Sierra Club staff or Forest Service staff can answer most questions.
What's the difference between the books?
Forest Plan Revision Final EIS, Volume 1: this biggest book is where the Forest Service determines what are the environmental consequences of its plans. They write up different alternative plans (A through G) and then feed the rules from those alternatives into a computer. The computer has a formula that reports how each alternative would affect the forest in the future. Those reports in the EIS show how each alternative A-G would affect dozens of different criteria. The criteria and reports are listed in Chapter 3.
EIS, Volume 2: this book has the appendices that explain how they analyzed information.
EIS, Volume 3: this book has all the public comments on the draft plans, and Forest Service responses to them. Reading this is a good lesson in how the government uses public comments.
Land and Resource Management Plan (one for each national forest): this book is where the Forest Service says what they're actually going to do. They choose one of the alternatives in the EIS, and explain how management will happen on each different area of the forest.
A computer figures all this out?
Yes. The Forest Service gathered info on each stand2 of woods in the National Forest, as small as one acre, and entered it into a computer. The computer then analyzed how each alternative would affect the forest by summarizing how it would affect all those stands of timber.
Here's an example. Say the Forest Service develops alternatives that call for logging different amounts of timber for paper or lumber mills, 50 million board feet per year, or 100 million, or 200 million.1 The computer looks at all the trees old enough to cut down on federal land, and calculates how many acres of national forest would need to be logged to meet each goal. It reports how many of those acres are important wildlife habitat, what kind of trees are there, and what would be left after the logging.
Next lesson: how does the Forest Plan determine what land is logged in timber sales?
1 Timber is also measured in cubic feet and cords. For purposes of protecting the environment, it is best to think about how many ACRES of forest are affected.
2 Stand=an area of forest with same tree species and time passed since last major fire, windstorm or clear-cut