June 29, 2007 - Echo Trail Timber Sale includes areas the Club seeks to add to the BWCAW
Bush administration cripples Roadless Rule
Wild forests to be logged in Minnesota
The USDA announced on July 12, 2004 that the Bush Administration will render the roadless rule meaningless by requiring governors to petition the Forest Service to not construct roads in or otherwise develop inventoried roadless areas. The Administration also indicated that it intends to permanently exempt the national forests in Alaska from the roadless rule.
Superior National Forest has the most visited wilderness area in the eastern US, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). The Boundary Waters have made the national forests a very popular recreation destination. Traffic, business, and development have increased pressure on quiet, natural forests.
Congresswoman Betty McCollum kicked off our neighborhood walk to
gather roadless rule comments in South St. Paul. Rep. McCollum
has consistently supported protecting our national forests.
The Roadless Rule
Most of these wild forests are protected by the Roadless Areas Conservation Rule. If the roadless rule hadn’t been in effect or in legal limbo for the last three years, the Bush administration planned to offer up 26 million board feet (equivalent to logging about 4400 acres) of timber from Superior National Forest roadless areas, and planned to build 26 miles of “temporary” roads in them (http://roadless.fs.fed.us/documents/feis/data/sheets/tvp/state_1b-.htm).
But the Bush administration has proposed new rules that effectively remove that protection. The changes to the rule makes these places available for logging in 2006 unless Gov. Pawlenty petitions the Forest Service to protect them.
Here's how the new rule will work if the Bush administration ignores public opposition: First we’ll see a process to re-evaluate the roadless areas, possibly under the Governor’s forest products industry task force, or the Forest Resources Council. The Task Force proposed streamlining environmental review and increasing “fiber availability” from national forests. The Council, which now has only the Nature Conservancy representing conservation interests, developed logging plans for northern Minnesota that set no quantifiable goals for conservation or limits for logging.
The Governor will develop a consensus position, and send it to the Forest Service. The Forest Service, lobbied again by the timber industry, can then negotiate further cuts in protection. The new rule is designed to eliminate protection for most roadless areas, by introducing new layers of timber-industry influence into which areas are protected.
Forest plans abandon wild forests
Under the Bush rule, if governors don’t petition the Forest Service to protect the roadless areas, the agency will manage them under forest plans. Final plans for Superior National Forest will come out in August—and the draft plans declined protection for any wild forests. The Forest Service found thirty places qualified for wilderness additions on Superior National Forest, but decided in the draft plans that none of them were needed.
In fact they propose logging—thinning, not clearcutting—on half of the wilderness study areas. Roadbuilding for this logging, even if they’re ‘temporary’ logging roads, might eliminate most of those areas from wilderness consideration.
Logging already cutting up last possible wilderness additions
Of the wilderness study areas considered in the forest plans, logging is imminent on or surrounding two of them (not areas covered by the roadless rule). The Big Grass environmental assessment in 2002 proposed logging along the Echo Trail. We have sued the Forest Service about this timber sale, the Friends wrote an amicus brief in support, and there’s a hearing in St. Paul district court on Oct. 13. Sierra Club's Forest Watch volunteers wrote this about the project:
“Several treatment units are directly adjacent to potential wilderness areas. With so many treatment units adjacent to the BWCAW, the noise and emissions from logging operations will permeate the wilderness, diminishing the experience of solitude for visitors. Unit Hl-U3 even appears to overlap with the Agassa Potential Wilderness Area. Of greatest concern, however, are units situated in the narrow corridor between the Big lake Potential Wilderness Area and the BWCAW, and therefore, cutting in this location would reduce the wilderness character of the area.”