EPIC Demands NEPA on ~7,000 Acres of Forest in Mendocino National Forest
Yesterday, EPIC filed a new lawsuit to stop the Forest Service’s efforts to evade public participation and environmental review of a series of timber sales totaling around 7,000 acres on the Mendocino National Forest. While much has been made of the Trump Administration efforts to re-write federal regulations, less has been said about the insidious way that existing regulations have been misinterpreted. Here, the Mendocino National Forest is seeking to fast track a post-fire commercial logging project under the guise that it is standard “road maintenance,” thus evading NEPA’s reach.
This is the press release from EPIC:
The Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) is suing the U.S. Forest Service for approving a series of timber sales on the Mendocino National Forest that shortcut public participation and environmental review in violation of federal law. In a complaint filed Thursday, October 17, EPIC alleges that the Forest Service expedited seven timber sales, totaling up to 7,000 acres, by mislabeling the logging as a “road maintenance” project. At risk from the logging are clean water, northern spotted owls, and increased fuel conditions.
All Forest Service timber sales are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The core of NEPA is a requirement that agencies take a “hard look” at the environmental impacts of their proposed actions, typically done through an environmental impact statement or environmental analysis. The timber sales were approved using what is called a “categorical exclusion.” Categorical exclusions do not require environmental impact review or public comment.
Here, the Forest Service argues that a commercial timber sale is “road maintenance” because the logging would remove dead and live trees affected by the 2018 Ranch Fire along roads, reducing the odds that the trees may fall and block the road. A separate categorical exclusion exists for post-fire logging, although that is limited to 250 acres, as anything larger in scale is assumed to be able to produce significant impacts to the environment. All timber sales in this proposed project are larger than 250 acres. Furthermore, many of the roads proposed for logging are closed to motor vehicle use.
“The Mendocino National Forest is taking a page from Trump’s playbook,” said Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC. “Calling a timber sale ‘road maintenance’ is a stunning way to stifle public participation and ignore environmental impacts.”
Science has widely recognized that post-fire logging is especially impactful, as logging adds an additional disturbance on top of the effects of the fire. Post-fire logging often results in degraded
water quality, the spread of invasive plants, and loss of habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. It can also increase the risk of high-severity fire since logging leaves behind a buildup of slash and finer “fuels.” If allowed to use a categorical exclusion instead of an environmental impact statement, these impacts may never be adequately examined and mitigation measures to reduce harm through better project design would not be incorporated.
“This is a massive project covering thousands of acres,” asserted EPIC’s Public Land Advocate, Kimberly Baker, “the Mendocino National Forest is breaking the law to meet timber targets and benefit timber corporations at a cost to fragile post-fire watersheds and threatened species. Public safety could be achieved in a more benign manner.”
EPIC is represented by René Voss of Natural Resources Law and Matt Kenna of Public Interest Environmental Law. The case will be heard in the Northern District Court of California.
You can read EPIC’s filing here.
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Big ups 2 cleptocracy!
🕯🌳Good morning Kelley and thank you for the information it bares a closer look. 👁👁🖖🇺🇸
You’re worried about logging. What a joke. Look at all the pesticides from the pot in the Watershed.
Amen to that!!
Lying to cover up a destructive business plan is the issue here.
an accurate comparison would be a 1,000 to 1. a 1,000 gallons sprayed to combat hardwoods vs 1 gallon sprayed on weed. the majority of plastic containers found at grows are concentrated Fertilizers and 1 gallon oil containers. the 5 gallon empty fert containers are usually found full of waster oil from the gennie.
Epic chases the money, saving the environment is their cloak of BS.
how many 1,000s of gallons of herbicide do you think were sprayed on these tracts just north of Branscomb road in 2013 by HRC? the drainage dumps directly into the Pacific ocean and everyone in the Westport area drinks groundwater. and yes EPIC is just like Bay Keepers and i have little respect for their actions. but it gets old hearing uniformed people making uniformed statements about who is damaging what.
Anything to protect from more forest fires I’ve got to get rid of any dead trees and I don’t care what it has to do with this is mandatory to prevent these forest fires anymore a lot of those trees are dead already you want them to be there for next Fire season I don’t
Looks like the Forest Service is up to their old tricks! This is straight out of the pre NW Forest Plan playbook.
Would you rather see all our Redwoods burn down?
At this rate, the people are not listening to each other.
Come on Folks sit down and find a common ground of how and when these trees can be saved to THEIR betterment and PUBLIC
SAFETY!
DON’T YOU THINK!!!???
If not, our beautiful BEAUTIFUL REDWOODS, could all
be GONE, someday!!!
The forest service needs to get into enforcing the laws against unpermitted marijuana grows
And manage the forest not turn it into Lumber
By design, one of the functions of the USFS is timber sales.
Yep. But the proposed timber sales are required to be in compliance with a set of laws that are designed to protect publicly owned values, including clean air, clean water, native species in their habitat, and a carefully-defined decision-making process. NEPA defines that pricess.
They should change their name then that is not how you serve a forest to sell it as Timber. Forest management is a lot more complicated and probably should be managed without selling trees as Timber you asked for a service we serve your trees on a platter
No big picture folks here, eh? This is a drop in the bucket. Everything we eat is contaminated with plastic & pesticides. Every breath of our air has too much CO2. It gets worse every day and your 7000 acres makes no difference. If you can’t see the disaster approaching at somewhere near the speed of light….you just aren’t really paying attention.
//” If you can’t see the disaster approaching at somewhere near the speed of light….you just aren’t really paying attention.”//
~not sure if i posted the link to “Don’t Walk By Manhole Covers in California” from October 13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVWO7RP1EjM 27 mins.
From the vid:
Fires coming out of the sewer. Smoke coming out of manhole covers that are blowing hundreds of feet in the air.
34 counties were blacked out. No power, hearing explosions. Five fires started.
Since late September, 21 fires in California have not been reported.
So… it’s not actually road maintenance because… many of the roads are not open to the public? And that makes them stop being roads? Do they have some evidence that more than 250 acres of trees not adjacent to roads will be logged? Or, for that matter, evidence that any trees not adjacent to roads will be logged? Once again, it sounds like EPIC is spouting bullshit.
About 25 years ago there was a small spot fire at the base of a large power tower near Red Bluff. It was a CDF incident. The culprit???? A spotted owl had gotten fried on the power line attached to the tower where it had built it’s nest. My husband was on that engine. They found the owls body on the ground. According to environmentalists at that time this couldn’t happen, and yet it did. They forgot to tell the owl that it had to stay in the forest where it could be “protected” from humanity.
It’s NOT “Trump’s playbook”. Rich Padula started the practice in Mendocino timberlands DECADES ago. CDF stopped allowing the taking of old growth unless it was needed for roads. So he simply plotted out a snaking “roads project” in a THP so as to hit all the old growth left on his property, and exploit a loophole in California law.
Everyone in the county was ranting and raving about that malarkey for many years.
Good that EPIC isn’t going to let it sneak past us yet again, but could we lay off blaming Trump for everything, PLEASE? He is the duly-elected President of the United States of America and we are NOT victimized children.
Wait, so EPIC is truly worried about fuel for future fires, so they oppose post-fire logging? Seems that would reduce fuels…the slash and finer ‘fuels’ are somehow a bigger concern? Sorry, not buying it.