Swan View Coalition, Friends of the Wild Swan and WildEarth Guardians put the Flathead National Forest on notice they will file suit over logging road impacts to bull trout.
Below is the press release with links to the Notice of Intent to File Suit and Keith Hammer's "Roads to Ruin" report providing photos and background on the failure of the Flathead NF to adequately inspect and maintain its logging roads and culverts.
Click here for the resulting KAJ-TV coverage using photos like the one above.
Click here for the resulting Daily Inter Lake news article by Patrick Reilly.
Click here to read our rebuttal to the Flathead Forest Supervisor's claim that there are no "impaired" watersheds on his Forest due to proactive management.
Click here for the resulting Missoulian news article by Perry Backus.
---------------
Failures in Road Management Place Bull Trout at Risk
Conservation Groups Send Notice of Intent to File Suit to Flathead National Forest
November 16, 2017
Contacts:
Marla Fox, WildEarth Guardians, 651-434-7737, mfox@wildearthguardians.org
Keith Hammer, Swan View Coalition, 406-755-1379, keith@swanview.org
Arlene Montgomery, Friends of the Wild Swan, 406-886-2011, arlene@wildswan.org
Kalispell, MT – Yesterday three conservation groups warned the Forest Service of their intent to file suit under the Endangered Species Act in order to protect threatened bull trout and its critical habitat. The Forest Service’s inadequate management and monitoring of logging roads on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana threatens to degrade bull trout streams by increasing the risk of culvert failure, leading to road washouts that smother streams in road sediment, destroy fish eggs and prevent young fish from growing.
The notice letter outlines the Forest Service’s failure to comply with numerous biological opinions written by the Fish and Wildlife Service during the past fifteen years. These biological opinions directed the Forest Service to remove stream-aligned culverts from closed logging roads—or, alternatively, to monitor them annually to insure they do not plug. Plugged culverts are prone to fail over time due to accumulation of dirt and debris in the small openings. A plugged culvert is likely to blow out during a rain or snowmelt event, depositing sediment into bull trout streams.
Though the Forest Service has largely failed to follow either of the Fish and Wildlife Service directives, records show it is aware that far more culverts are failing or are at high risk of failing than initially thought, and that failing roads and culverts put the bull trout and its habitat in peril.
In addition to its history of inadequate road management, the Forest Service proposed to relax culvert monitoring from annual monitoring to monitoring once every six years. Best science and a history of culvert failures on the Flathead and other national forests do not support such a move: culverts can plug and blow out in a single season if not inspected and cleaned.
Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer has spent the last couple of years requesting the Flathead’s annual culvert monitoring reports. “The Flathead has failed pretty much across the board to conduct annual culvert monitoring,” he said. “The monitoring it has done shows that up to two-thirds of the culverts inspected are at high risk of failure. Rather than dedicate the funding and staff to do the inspections and either fix or remove the culverts, the Flathead is looking to eliminate the requirement for annual inspections.”
“Our native fish require cold, clean water to spawn and rear,” said Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan. “Unmaintained culverts are like ticking time bombs in our streams; when they plug up and blow out they dump tons of sediment into spawning gravels, impacting reproduction and growth of fish. By ignoring the required monitoring the Flathead is endangering our water quality and fish habitat.”
“We hope the Fish and Wildlife Service rejects the Forest Service’s attempt to move the goal posts by abandoning annual culvert inspections,” said Marla Fox of WildEarth Guardians. “Rewarding poor performance with lower expectations would set a horrible precedent for other forests to bypass legally required protections that the Service determined necessary for bull trout survival and recovery.”
Background:
The notice letter cites to agency documents showing that agency assumptions that only 10-15% of culverts were at high risk of failing were replaced with findings of 35-40% and as high as 67% of culverts at high risk of failing. Notice, page 14.
The letter also cites to documents acknowledging 22 culverts had failed on the roads that had been inspected and that more failures were expected. Notice at 12-13.
The Forest Service is holding open houses in Kalispell and Missoula, June 20 and 22, to unveil its Draft EISs for a revised Flathead Forest Plan and grizzly bear management amendments on four other Forests.
Fish and Wildlife Service is holding a hearing in Missoula July 7 to take public comment on grizzly bear de-listing in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem that includes these five Forests!
While you have until October 3 to comment on how five National Forests, including the Flathead, propose to manage the NCDE grizzly bear, NOW is the time to start learning about it.
At either the Kalispell or Missoula open houses you'll be able to look at maps much larger than you'll find on-line and ask questions of Forest Service staff. Both are from 2 - 6 pm and don't involve formal presentations, so you can attend as long or little as you wish. The Kalispell open house is at the Forest Supervisor's Office, 650 Wolfpack Way. The Missoula open house is at the Hilton Garden Inn, 3720 N. Reserve Street.
You can read two pages about the various documents and open houses here and can download the planning documents here.
We want to keep Flathead Forest Plan Amendment 19 from Alternative A to retain the best management of roads to protect grizzly bears, bull trout and other fish and wildlife. But we want the much larger areas of recommended wilderness that are included in Alternative C, which was written in part to reflect our Citizen reVision alternative and would finally ban motorized vehicles from the old trail network in the Krause Basin Wildlife Management Area pictured above!
We'll have more specific recommendations for your comments later in the summer. But make no mistake about it, Alternatives B, C and D as currently proposed would greatly reduce the broad protection of grizzly bear habitat from what is in the current Forest Plan, pave the way for their de-listing from the federal Endangered Species Act and result in sport killing of them under Montana State hunting management!
To help right away, you can SIGN UP NOW for a ten-minute slot to speak out July 7 in Missoula against this weakening of grizzly bear management and against plans to de-list them! Swan View Coalition will be speaking first-up at the FWS hearing, which runs from 1 - 4 and from 6 - 8 pm at the Double Tree Hotel, 100 Madison Street. Simply email Jennifer Fortin-Noreus to schedule a time slot to speak. You can also submit written comments to FWS by July 22 to Jennifer_fortin-noreus@fws.gov or to Grizzly Bear Recovery Office, USFWS, University Hall, Room 309, Missoula, MT 59812.
You can learn more about the July 7 hearing here and you can email keith@swanview.org if you want suggestions for what to say or write to FWS.
Don't be intimidated by all this - we are here to help you navigate the bureaucracy and do good things for fish and wildlife! THANKS FOR YOUR HELP!
We need your help TODAY to stop Congress from attaching damaging logging riders to the pending must-pass spending bill!
Pro-logging members of Congress, including a number of western democrats, are attempting to boost logging, boost "collaboration" and weaken public environmental review of logging projects.
This is being done by attaching controversial, secretive "riders" to the upcoming must-pass Appropriations Bill!
The Forest Service supports streamling the National Environmental Policy Act to speed up logging projects, largely delegating NEPA's widespread public involvement to small groups of local collaborators. Companion authority to increase Congressional funding of private "collaborative partners" is also being sought!
In other words, Congress is trying to take another giant step behind closed doors to buy "public support" for damaging logging projects, leaving most American citizens behind!
Please call the Capitol Switchboard RIGHT NOW at 202-224-3121! They will direct your call so you can leave a message for your Senators and Representatives to not allow logging riders to be attached to the Appropriations Bill!
Or, you can find your Senators' Contact Information HERE and your U.S. House of Representative's Contact Information HERE!
Please also call the White House at 202-456-1111 to help insure President Obama does not follow the Dept. of Agriculture and Forest Service down this disasterous path!
You can read about the pending riders to the Appropriations Bill at http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060029355 .
THANK YOU for taking a few minutes to ACT TODAY!
Though burning wood to produce electricity releases more carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal, the European Union says it releases no carbon at all - a bald-face trick of accounting!
This lie may be adopted by the U.S.'s EPA if it also ignores the many decades it will take for new trees to hopefully re-store that carbon and balance out as "carbon-neutral."
In other words, Europe is massively subsidizing the burning of wood to meet its 20-20-20 climate goals while actually increasing carbon emissions - while simultaneously and falsely claiming wood burning is as "renewable" as solar and wind and has no carbon emissions.
The U.S. already supplies half of Europe's wood pellets and is staged to repeat the same lies and mistakes at home as it also looks to reduce coal consumption!
Click here for Climate Central's must-read, in-depth report written in easily understood terms!
University of Montana researcher Diana Six and others fault logging as a misguided substitute for the natural forest thinning being conducted by beetles.
In the journal Forests, Six and fellow researchers find the U of M, the Forest Service and others have failed to report failures of logging to maintain resilient trees while beetles have an innate ability to retain the most adaptive trees as they conduct nature's thinning.
They caution that misguided attempts to "do something" may simply over-log forests and point to research finding unlogged stands of both spruce and ponderosa pine have retained more live trees after beetle attacks than mechanically thinned stands.
They conclude "The manner in which policy makers have accepted beetle timber harvest treatments as a panacea for responding to bark beetle outbreaks in North American forests raises a number of red flags. . . It is perhaps no accident that the beetle treatments that have been most aggressively pushed for in the political landscape allow for logging activities that might provide revenue and jobs for the commercial timber industry. . . management should be led by science and informed by monitoring."
Click here for a summary article of Six's research in Mother Jones.
Click here for the paper by Six, Biber and Long in the journal Forests.
Facts are getting in the way of attempts to blame fires on a lack of logging and to blame a lack of logging on environmental lawsuits!
Greenwire reports Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told a U.S. House Subcommittee hearing on the matter Thursday that only 5% of Forest Service timber sales were taken to court this year, while 16% of the timber sales failed because the timber industry simply refused to buy them!
And an abundance of research shows the importance of not trying to replace or follow fire with logging: "There is substantially less high-intensity fire now than there was historically, prior to fire suppression policies, and this post-fire habitat deficit is worsened by extensive post-fire clearcutting on national forests and private lands, and by landscape-level mechanical 'thinning' designed to further suppress fire, making snag forest habitat the most endangered forest habitat type in the U.S."
However, these facts hardly sway Congress as it works alongside the Forest Service and industry to perpetuate the lie that public forests are sick and need a logging "cure!" Congress and the Forest Service are, in fact, paying collaborators that help perpetuate these lies! (See our recent newsletter and our letter to editors in this regard. Click here for more details and supporting documents showing how the Forest Service is paying collaborators.)
We need your help stopping the perverse waste of your tax dollars trying to replace ecologically beneficial backcountry forest fires with subsidized, ecologically destructive logging!
Click here to Donate Now and your contribution to our work will be doubled by Cinnabar Foundation!
Thank you!
The Washington Post has found Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) lied not once, but twice recently, greatly exaggerating how much federal logging in Montana is being held up by environmentalist lawsuits!
This well-researched disclosure is important! It shatters the underlying myth and scapegoating upon which efforts by Congress, some State Legislatures, some "conservation" groups, and industry are trying to increase logging on federal public lands, even if it means turning control or title of those lands over to the States!
Conservation groups enforcing America's bedrock environmental protection laws in court is not the problem industry allies say it is! Senator Tester and others are simply going to have to find a new myth and a new scapegoat in order to do the timber industry's bidding!
Tester last week told Montana Public Radio "Unfortunately, every logging sale in Montana right now is under litigation. Every one of them." The Washington Post finds "there are 97 timber sales under contract in Montana's national forests. Of that number, just 14 have active litigation, so about 14 percent. But only four of the sales are enjoined by a court from any logging."
When Tester was again questioned by MTPR, he suddenly became "unavailable" for the week and his staff shifted to talking timber volume, claiming "Nearly half of the awarded timber volume in Fiscal Year 2014 is currently under litigation." The Washington Post finds this to also be a lie, finding only about 10% of the timber volume under contract is halted by litigation.
The Washington Post has awarded Tester "Four Pinocchios," its worst rating for telling a "whopper" - in this case two whoppers.
Click "Read Full Article" below to read more about how such lies are the false premise upon which even some "conservation" groups are basing their collaboration with industry to increase logging on federal public lands.
(Read Full Article)
Grassroots environmental groups from across the country have issued a letter to the U.S. Senate demanding the removal of damaging public land give-away "riders" attached to the must-pass Defense Authorization Bill!
The "rider" package has far too many give-aways of public lands and resources to merit support for its very meager designations of Wilderness.
Yes, the North Fork Flathead River and Rocky Mountain Front deserve protection from oil, gas and minerals mining - but not at the expense of removing protection from Wilderness Study Areas in eastern Montana near Otter Creek and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge to benefit the coal, oil and gas industries!
Nor should these bills be packaged in the dead of night with provisions to give 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest to Sealaska Corporation for logging, nor granting National Forest land in Arizona to a foreign-owned mining company, among other horrible provisions!
Please take a quick minute TODAY to phone Senator Harry Reid (202-224-3542) and the Senators from your state (find phone numbers here).
Simply tell them you oppose the inclusion of public land provisions in the Defense Bill and want them removed!
Take action today before the Senate acts tomorrow!
Swan View Coalition is among the 47 organizations that signed the letter to the Senate, which you can read here.
Click here to read Montana Environmental Information Center's assessment of the rider's impact to eastern Montana.
Click here to read the Missoulian article about the late-night horse-trading by which Montana Senators Tester and Walsh, along with Representative Daines, made even more 11th-hour compromises to the already heavily compromised Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act - with no pubic hearings whatsoever.
Click here to read more details about the "Cost of Compromise" in the Missoula Independent!
Click here to read the 449-page Defense Bill public lands rider!
Make no mistake, these types of public land give-aways will become the norm by which big Wilderness groups get a little bit of Wilderness without telling you the true and unacceptable costs - unless you put a stop to it!
UPDATE: Click here to watch the video of Stewart Brandborg's keynote address and click here for a transcript of his concluding "call to arms!"
UPDATE: In a related matter, click here for a PDF summary of Keith Hammer's 9/12/14 presentation to the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center's Wilderness 50 Conference.
Today we mark the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, but mark your calendars for September 20 and join us in a big celebration of it at the Flathead County Fairgrounds!
Come meet and be encouraged by Stewart Brandborg (above), who worked for eight years alongside Howard Zahniser to pass the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964!
This foresighted Act initially designated 9.1 million acres of public lands as Wilderness, including the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and in the hands of hard working citizens has since brought the total to nearly 110 million acres.
But many of America's wildest public lands remain at risk of development and the "expanding settlement and growing mechanization" foreseen by the Wilderness Act.
We look forward to Brandborg's words urging all of us to keep up the good fight!
Click here for our short biography of Stewart Brandborg.
Click here for the Missoulian's more detailed accounting of Brandborg's efforts to pass the Wilderness Act.
Click here or see below for the Flathead's Wilderness 50 Celebration agenda!
(Read Full Article)
Your email to the Flathead National Forest will help stop more of these logging road landslides from trashing fish and wildlife habitat!
Please send a quick email to Shawn Boelman at sboelman@fs.fed.us and tell him you want old logging roads decommissioned to protect water quality, fish and wildlife - not simply closed and ignored.
The Flathead already has 2,000 miles of roads like this one in Sullivan Creek demoted to Maintenance Level 1 Basic Custodial Care, where they don't receive the care needed to keep their ditches and culverts from plugging and then washing the roads into your trout streams!
(Another 1,400 miles are open to public motor vehicle use and have their own costly maintenance issues).
The Flathead is accepting public comments on its draft Travel Analysis Report, which would simply abandon even more old logging roads rather than carefully decommission them to remove culverts and sediment source problems.
Click here to visit the Flathead's Travel Analysis Report web page.
Click here to read our comments on the Travel Analysis Report.
Click here to read our additional comments on the Travel Analysis Report, made in light of our discovery of slumps in the Sullivan and Quintonkin Creek roads.
Click here to read the Hungry Horse News Article about our discovery of the recent Sullivan Creek landslide.
Click here to read our press release about the Sullivan Creek landslide.
Click here for our letter to state and federal agencies urging that all old logging roads in Sullivan Creek be decommissioned.
Click here to read the Flathead's "Assessment of the Sullivan Creek Mass Failure," which claims it was nature's fault.
Click here to read our response to the Flathead's "Assessment of the Sullivan Creek Mass Failure."
Click here to read the Flathead Beacon's article about the Flathead National Forest still insisting it is an innocent bystander and intends to ignore this road as it continues to collapse, rather than promptly fixing more potential problems further up the road!
Click here to see our video of the Sullivan Creek landslide.
Page: ←123456→
