We've been in the National Lakeshores (USDOI/NPS) Sleeping Bear Dunes and Pictured Rocks, Lakes Michigan and Superior, Michigan, resp., the National Parks (USDOI/NPS) Shenandoah (Virginia), the National Seashores (USDOI/NPS) Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and the National Forests (USDA/FS) Ottowa, Hiawatha (Upper Peninsula, Michigan), Allegany (New York), Green Mountains (Vermont), White Mountains (New Hampshire and Maine), and Geo. Washington (Virginia), and we're not done yet.
Regular readers will know that the "host" scheme, that replaces seasonal civil service jobs, with training on a diverse array of subject matters, such as unit flora and fauna, history, access and disability, junior ranger interests (bugs and whatnot), etc., with a random selection of franchise contractors, who range from decent retired Marine NCO's, to lawnmower men, is something that we've been vexed by.
Vexed to the point of filing formal disability complaints 1. Vexed to the point of looking at how to get rid of "hosts" all together.
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth has done one better. He got rid of the Forest Service all together.
This begins with the Burnt Ridge timber sale.
The Burnt Ridge project proposed to log over 1.6 million board feet of large fire-killed trees. The suit was filed because the Hot Springs District Ranger, Del Pengilly, filed the Burnt Ridge salvage logging project as a Categorical Exclusion, meaning that no environmental assessment was required for that project, and the public was cut out of the planning process.
Before continuing to the administrative issues, a personal aside. I worked out of the Buck Meadows station in the Groveland District of the Stanislaus National Forest in 1975. I drove "The Beast" a 6x6 tanker, arriving at a fire 10 - 15 minutes after Initial Attack began, delivering 1,500 gallons to the hose line, and shuttling between siphon points and points on the line until the wet-mop concluded. I was burnt-over once that season. I frequently drove the Cherry Creek Oil Road, where CDF Helitack 404 was burned-over while performing Initial Attack on the Tuolumne Fire last year. Eva Schicke died and five other firefighters in Helitack 404 were injured on the site of the Cherry Creek Fire that burned 17,000 acres of mixed-conifer second growth forest in 1973. The substantive issues of timber, fire, and cut are not abstract to me. Snags are important to several species of birds, and cuts never, ever decrease the fine fuels available for ignition. They increase it in the form of slash. At best they reduce the heavy fuels that might sustain fire storms, which doesn't matter a damn, as fires in green forests can and do crown and generate the sustained heat to ignite heavy fuels, green or previously fire-killed, and make the non-local papers. It is a marketing scam, and to understand FS cut policy, one has to look at wood inventories and FS pricing, which is a lot of corporate welfare, and comon to both Democratic and Republican Administrations.
Now back to the administrative issues.
Earth Island Institute, Sequoia Forestkeeper, Heartwood, Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club brought suit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California to challenge the Burnt Ridge Project timber sale, arguing, inter alia, that the Forest Service was improperly limiting the public comment and appeals process required by the ARA. The substantive issues were disposed of quickly, and the Burnt Ridge timber sale itself drops out of the picture. What remains is ... interesting.
Plaintiffs Earth Island Institute, et al., present a facial challenge to the 2003 regulations promulgated by the United States Forest Service implementing the Forest Service Decision Making and Appeals Reform Act (“ARA”), Pub. L. No. 102-381, Tit. III § 332(a), 106 Stat. 1419 (1992), codified at 16 U.S.C. § 1612. Plaintiffs argue that the regulations violate the ARA by improperly exempting certain Forest Service decisions from appeal, by exempting certain Forest Service decisions that are subject to appeal from the automatic stay provision of the ARA, and by limiting the public comment and appeals process required by the ARA. ... The Forest Service disputes each of these contentions and argues that Plaintiffs lack standing and that this case is not ripe for decision.
The discussion of Plaintiff Benson's (Heartwood) standing is interesting.
At issue are the validity of eight Forest Service regulations. Earth Island et al argue that:
The court found that the Forest Service rules codified at 36 C.F.R. §§ 215.4(a) and 215.12(f) are “manifestly contrary” to the ARA, the Forest Service’s reading of Congress’s directive to provide an appeal process for decisions of the Forest Service as not including decisions signed directly by the Secretary or Undersecretary of Agriculture is not a permissible interpretation, that in the facial challenge context, the “substantive” requirement is a permissible reading of the ARA, and so on. On to the Order:
The following regulations are invalid as stated in this Order and will be severed from the Forest Service regulations: 36 C.F.R. § 215.4(a) (excluding from notice and comment procedures projects and activities that are categorically excluded from documentation in an EIS or EA); 36 C.F.R. § 215.12(f) (excluding from appeal procedures decisions that have been excluded from documentation in an EIS or EA); 36 C.F.R. § 215.20(b) (exempting from notice, comment, and appeal procedures decisions signed directly by the Secretary); 36 C.F.R. § 215.10(a) (permitting delegation of the determination that an emergency situation exists); and 36 C.F.R. § 215.18(b)(1) (providing that an appeal decision will be sent to appellants five days after the decision is rendered).
The first act of this play concludes here. The second act begins on Sept. 23, when Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth instructed regional offices that all decisions made after the July 7 ruling were subject to notice. His circular concluded:
“We must follow the law. I know it is hard on our local communities, contractors, permittees, and partners, but trying to carve out exceptions and looking for ways around the judge's order will only hurt the credibility and integrity of the agency we all love.”
This is the part that will be on the quiz. Every permit granted after July 7th, 2005, was revoked.
Over 1,500 permited activities were swept up by the collective punishment and hostage taking of Service Chief Dale Bosworth, at the instruction of Mark Rey, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Charles F. Conner, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and Mike Johanns, Secretary of Agriulture.
169 projects involving trail and campground maintenance were halted. That means pumping out pit toilets, grading roads, repairing bridges. Retail maintenance.
The defendants filed a motion to clarify and amend the July 2nd order, seeking to limit the scope of the order, and the plaintiffs filed a motion to find the Forest Service in contempt of the same order.
Since the order concerned process, not a particular geographical area, that part of the Forest Service's motion was denied. The temporal scope motion was upheld to actions taken after the July 7th docketing of the order.
Concerning the motion to find contempt, the court wrote "On balance, it seems that contempt is not warrented at this time."
And that is why, on October 20th, normal life in the National Forests was resumed.
Every cycle candidates running on platforms that don't include Uzis-4-Us take a photo-op in Fall foliage with a bird dog and a bird gun, in the (statistically vain) hope of winning some part of the orange vote. Going tent camping and talking about family camping and whether an Administration should block up the toilets because they don't like spotted owls seems oddly overlooked.
Bush cancels deer season because of spotted owl sounds fairly fetching too.
1: Hiawatha NF, Shenandoah NP, Cape Hatteras NLS
Posted by EBW at October 23, 2005 03:52 PM