Future of national forests at center of debate

WASHINGTON — By year's end, the Obama administration will announce a new plan to manage the nation's 155 national forests for the next 15 to 20 years.

At stake is the future of 193 million acres that are the nation's single largest source of drinking water and are home to more than 15,000 species of plants and wildlife. The forests also attract more than 170 million Americans each year to hike, camp, hunt, fish, boat or whitewater raft, ride horses, ski, and drive snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles. Visitors spend an estimated $13 billion per year in communities surrounding the national forests, supporting more than 224,000 jobs.

Nearly 3 million Americans have forest-related jobs in fields ranging from forest management to outdoor recreation to the forest products industry, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Timber companies, mining companies, oil and gas developers and ranchers are taking a keen interest in the new forest plan as they seek to ensure that they will be able to continue to have access to public land for logging, mining and grazing cattle. In 2010, about 2 billion board feet of timber was harvested from national forests, down from about 12 billion in 1980.

Environmentalists say the initial proposal does not go far enough to protect wildlife and drinking water.

Stuck in the middle is the Forest Service, which is in the process of writing the new federal rule to guide management of its lands, which also include 20 National Grasslands. The final rule is expected in November.

"We believe this is one of the most important conservation policies the Obama administration will undertake," said Jamie R. Clark, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during the Clinton administration and executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife. "This is land that belongs to all of us as Americans."

The national forests have been operating under a 1982 Reagan administration rule that environmentalists say has not proved strong enough to protect the watershed that carries drinking water to 124 million Americans. About three-quarters of the forest watersheds are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be "impaired," meaning that federal water quality standards are not being met.

The Forest Service unveiled a new proposed rule in February, opening it up for a public comment period that lasted through mid-May. During that time, more than 300,000 individuals, groups, tribes and state and local governments weighed in on the plan. Forest Service officials will take those comments into consideration as they draw up a final rule and environmental impact statement.

So far, neither environmentalists nor business interests are happy with the first draft of the new forest rule.

Environmentalists applauded the initial plan for its ambitious goals, which include increased protections for water resources and watersheds, stronger requirements to provide habitat for diverse animal and plant species, and a plan to address the impact of climate change for the first time.

But the administration undermines those goals by giving too much power to individual forest managers to decide how — or even if — to protect wildlife and water, conservation groups say.

"The standards for implementation are so fuzzy that we wonder whether the goals will ever be reached," Clark said.

At the same time, the timber, cattle and sheep industries complain that the proposed forest rule's protections for wildlife are too broad because they require the Forest Service to "maintain viable populations of species of conservation concern."

"There is no scientific consensus on what level of any given species is 'viable' or how it is to be 'maintained,' " said Dustin Van Liew, who is executive director of Public Lands Council, which represents ranchers, and director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "The viability standard will be impossible for the agency to meet. There will be a litigation feeding frenzy by the radical environmental groups bent on ending grazing and other multiple uses on federal lands."

The two sides mirror a split in Congress, where lawmakers have sent dueling letters to Vilsack calling for him to heed their calls for changes in the final forest rule.

A letter organized by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and signed by 59 House members asks Vilsack to start over.

"Please do not lose this opportunity to produce a planning rule that is truly simple, understandable, flexible and (defensible) in court," the letter said.

A letter by Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and signed by 66 members of Congress, urges Vilsack to go further to protect water.

"The course set by these sweeping new rules will determine the future of our national forests for generations to come," Kind's letter said. "It is essential that we get this right."