Durbin, Kathie
National Wildlife, v34, n1, p36(10)
Dec-Jan, 1995
ABSTRACT: The federal government is facing opposition from local residents
on the issue of ecosystem management in the Columbia River Basin. At the
heart of the conflict is the refusal of the residents to abandon the
Basin's land.
When the federal government decided to spend millions on ecosystem management of the West's vast Interior Columbia Basin, strong-willed local residents made it clear they care passionately about the region's future. But that doesn't mean they agree on what to do about it.
In the wilds of Central Idaho this year, activists took to the barricades for the third summer in a row to protest logging of a national-forest roadless area known as Cove-Mallard. Over time, the Nez Perce National Forest plans to build 145 miles of logging roads and carve more than 200 clear-cuts in this rugged country wedged between two wilderness areas - country still so wild that 85 wolf sightings have been reported there over the past five years.
In northeast Washington's Okanogan County, timber workers subjected environmentalists and federal and state officials to threats and intimidation last year following wise-use organizing and two Militia-of-Montana recruiting trips to the scenic rural county. Since the Oklahoma City bombing, the rhetoric has cooled, but tensions still simmer.
In Eastern Oregon's Grant County, the president of the local stockgrowers' association warned last spring that he would bring trespassing charges against self-appointed "cow cops" if the new, volunteer range monitors set foot on the same public land the stockgrowers lease for cattle grazing. Despite the threats, as of this writing, the cow cops have had no direct confrontations with ranchers out on the range, where patrols have been on the lookout for downed fences, illegal irrigation diversions and trespassing cows.
In Idaho's Lemhi County, Sheriff Brett Barsalou openly defied U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigators who came to collect evidence at a remote ranch in March after one of 15 gray wolves the agency had introduced into Central Idaho wilderness was shot and killed.
Throughout the Intermountain West, controversy is flaring over a temporary logging law that bypasses the nation's environmental laws. Pushed through Congress by western Republicans and signed by President Clinton, the so-called salvage rider allows wholesale cutting of healthy as well as diseased and dead trees with minimal environmental review until October 1996. Some activists are threatening direct action in the woods to halt logging now that their access to the courts is blocked.
Welcome to the interior Columbia River Basin, where the Clinton administration has been attempting to sort out this tangle of land-management conflicts through "ecosystem management." The concept - management of public lands with the goals of protecting and restoring entire communities of living things while still allowing some resource extraction where appropriate - seems simple enough. But no one has ever tried to apply it to such a vast and politically divided region. We're talking big: The Basin sprawls over parts of seven states, 100 counties and 19 Indian reservations where streams and rivers flow into the Columbia east of the Cascades and west of the Rockies - in all, more than 3.2 million square miles.
This is land steeped in the lore of great Indian leaders such as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the journals of trappers and explorers, and the gritty survival tales of the settlers who came after them. Because it is a harsh land, it drew the hardiest white pioneers - those willing to endure its hot, dry summers and freezing, snowbound winters. When these newcomers first arrived, they found open forests dominated by enormous ponderosa pines, rivers packed with salmon, a mosaic of bunchgrasses and sagebrush covering the arid intermountain reaches and nutrient-rich crust protecting the soil. For 150 years, those resources sustained loggers, ranchers, farmers, miners and fishermen. Until now.
These days, old-growth pines are nearly gone; wild salmon are barely holding on; sagebrush and exotic invader grasses dominate the range; and the soil's protective crust is trampled and broken. "The resources are running out," says resource specialist Rick Brown of NWF's Western Natural Resource Center in Portland, Oregon. "We all need to face up to that and seek real solutions before the damage is irreparable."
President Clinton announced the $31-million ecosystem-management project in the summer of 1993, along with his plan for the future of old-growth forests west of the Cascade Range inhabited by the northern spotted owl. At the time, his administration faced the likelihood of new lawsuits over salmon, bull trout, water quality and old-growth-forest habitat in the Interior Columbia Basin on the east side of the Cascades. Not wanting to repeat the owl forests' history of protracted litigation, he directed the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to launch a process that would describe the condition of the Basin's lands and waters and chart a science-based course for their future management.
But ecosystem management has itself become a hot-button issue, especially since conservative Republicans won control of key congressional committees overseeing federal lands last November. In July, the House voted to cut off nearly all funding for the project at the end of the 1995 fiscal year, leaving just enough to complete the scientific assessments. In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee added back enough money to allow the team to finish writing environmental-impact statements covering future management of the Basin. But as of this writing, the project's fate and implementation remain uncertain.
Halted or not, the project is yielding a rich legacy of sheer knowledge. The government has spent several million dollars gathering data on forest and range health, the condition of rivers and streams, the status of fish and wildlife populations, and social and economic trends. But the question of what to do with all that information remains unanswered. Wrote Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber in a July 24 letter to Washington Senator Slade Gorton: "To eliminate funding for the Columbia Basin Project at this time would be to turn away from science because we fear where it will lead us."
Many environmentalists doubt a process directed by the Forest Service will produce meaningful change. "It's my feeling the decisions are already made," says Barry Rosenberg of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council in Spokane, Washington. "You have the same agency that brought us the problem that's all of a sudden going to get some moral integrity and do right by the forests?"
Skepticism abounds on the other side as well. Ted Ferrioli, a timber-industry lobbyist in Eastern Oregon's Malheur County, says the ecosystem planners are giving more attention to wild critters than to people. "What is it that needs to be sustained out there?" he asks. "You have three million people living in this basin, and they have every intention of staying."
Still, there are those who hold out hope that the process may yet produce something worthwhile. "I don't necessarily expect this process to provide a lot of definitive answers," says NWF's Brown. "But I am hopeful it can help inform the debate about what will be needed - ecologically, socially and economically - for people to live sustainably with this land."
What is obvious, according to scores of recent scientific studies, is that change in the Basin is long overdue:
Yet for the people who live here, such findings - and the question of what to do about them - are a source of deep conflict. Some residents want to save what's left of the wild country and restore what has been overgrazed and overlogged. Others think the resources can withstand still more use. Many resent the very notion that scientists are taking stock of their problems. And a vocal few are openly hostile to the federal government, which manages nearly two-thirds of the Basin.
Dozens of counties in the Basin now have ordinances staling that federal agencies may not violate local "custom and culture." Last year, legislatures in Oregon, Idaho and Montana passed nonbinding resolutions declaring state sovereignty over federal lands. Beginning in summer 1994, militia organizing that centered in Idaho and western Montana triggered wild rumors that United Nations helicopters had the backcountry under surveillance, and that plots were afoot to disarm law-abiding citizens.
In Okanogan County, paranoia blossomed after a wise-use group formed to oppose creation of a U.S.-Canada North Cascades park championed by a coalition of environmental groups. Wise-use provocateur Chuck Cushman warned that the plan was a plot to deprive landowners of their property rights. When Geraldine Payton, a longtime activist from remote Chesaw, Washington, asked to present information on the park to the county commission, she ended up fielding questions from 150 hostile citizens. "This was clearly a roomful of very frightened people," she said. "They're afraid they'll lose everything."
All this conflict belies the fact that demographically, the Basin is a tamer place than it once was. It's still one of the nation's most sparsely populated regions: More than 60 percent of its 3.3 million residents live in rural areas or towns of less than 10,000. But since the late 1980s, the Basin's states have been among the fastest-growing in the nation. Between 1990 and 1992, Montana gained twice as many people as it had over the entire previous decade - and Idaho gained nearly as many. The evidence is in the suburban sprawl that surrounds Boise and Bend, Missoula and Kalispell, gobbling up farmland and obstructing spectacular mountain views.
As resource extraction becomes a smaller piece of the region's economy, longtime residents are having a hard time adjusting. Says Forest Service economist Amy Horne, "The jobs are going to disappear regardless of what the Forest Service and BLM do." Yet many people refuse to believe that growth will continue. "They say, 'That's not going to happen.' They want the Basin to stay the way it is."
Though development is eating away at the natural bounty of the Basin, its wild heart still beats. A few wild sockeye salmon still swim 900 miles from the Pacific each year, hurdling eight major dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, to spawn high in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. The once wide-ranging bull trout hangs on in the pristine, cold headwaters of mountain streams. In the heavily timbered wilds of northern Idaho and western Montana, gray wolves are making a comeback. Grizzlies wander from Yellowstone National Park into adjacent Targhee National Forest.
To help save the region's wild places, and to shore up a tourist economy based on wilderness recreation, Montanan Mike Bader peddles his vision of permanent protection for the wild lands of the Northern Rockies. Founder of the Missoula-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Bader is the visionary behind the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. Introduced in Congress last year, the bill would extend protection to more than 20 million acres of public land in five states, protecting habitat for the gray wolf, the grizzly and several other threatened and endangered species. Conservation biologists say that outside Alaska, only the Northern Rockies bioregion still supports a web of life that includes large predators at the top of the food chain.
"So much of our economy is based on the big wild," Bader says. "Outfitters, people who move here, even ranchers care about wilderness." With local growth pressures intensifying, he says, "I think people are really worried we're going to become like every-place else." But his proposal faces formidable hurdles. "We are excited by the notion of protecting wilderness areas," says Rich Day, director of NWF's Northern Rockies Natural Resource Center in Missoula. "But we're concerned about the political viability of this plan. As a critical first step, we'd like to see the Basin ecosystem process move ahead."
And Bader's vision attracts little support from the region's elected officials, who want more resource extraction from public lands, not less. They have come together this year in the campaign to increase logging under the guise of speeding salvage of "dead and dying" forests. The controversial waiver that exempts logging of diseased and "associated" trees from environmental laws was tacked onto a congressional spending-reduction bill President Clinton signed into law in July.
No region of the country will be more affected by this "logging without laws" rider than the Interior Columbia Basin. Although the region has been hard-hit by insects, drought and wildfire, timber-industry ad campaigns and pronouncements by Western politicians have created an exaggerated impression of a region cloaked in "dead and dying" trees.
Although salvage logging has always been part of the federal timber-sale program, the timber industry began pushing hard for accelerated and expanded salvage sales after 1993, when the federal government instituted temporary rules protecting old-growth ponderosa pine in national forests. The timber industry has taken out huge ads in regional newspapers warning of an imminent forest-health "crisis" if diseased and dead trees are not removed. Its zeal to manage these forests has found a receptive audience in the Forest Service. But the agency has hurt its own credibility by including healthy large green trees in so-called forest-health salvage sales of dead trees, and by damaging streams and soils during past fire-salvage operations.
What's more, a growing chorus of scientists insist there is no forest-health emergency - that insect outbreaks and fires are part of nature's cycle in the forests of the Intermountain West, and that they actually play a positive role in correcting decades of human mismanagement. "Salvage is likely to delay recovery," says James Karr, a University of Washington forest ecologist. "The magnitude of delay increases with the insensitivity of the salvage operation." Arthur Partridge, a University of Idaho forestry professor who has studied insects and tree diseases in the Basin for 30 years, denies that there is an insect-infestation "crisis." His own extensive surveys over the past four years show "the lowest levels of disease and insect activity in 28 years," he told two congressional committees in March.
For now, the scientists' words seem to be falling on deaf ears. And many observers say that if widespread salvage logging does occur, it will render the ecosystem plan moot. Says Tonia Wolf, a Bend, Oregon, environmental activist who has monitored the planning process from the beginning: "They'll end up analyzing a situation that no longer exists."
If the government doesn't adopt an ecosystem approach to managing its lands, one thing seems certain: The Interior Columbia River Basin is in for years of pitched battles over the fate of a vast domain that is also a national treasure, with no resolution in sight.
RELATED ARTICLE: Wildlife at Risk
From Columbian sharp-tailed grouse that need grassland, to Canada lynx that do best in lodgepole pine, to northern goshawks that thrive in mature forest such as old-growth ponderosa pine, many of the species in the Interior Columbia Basin are at risk from habitat loss and degradation. These three are among 538 animal species listed as "sensitive" by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and all three are candidates for listing for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Sensitive species include some of the 265 Basin species that fall in the federal categories of proposed, candidate, threatened or endangered.
RELATED ARTICLE: Active On Two Fronts
Working to ensure that environmental protections are priorities of federal ecosystem management of the Interior Columbia Basin, two NWF resource centers are active members of coalition efforts: the Columbia River Bioregion Campaign for eastern Oregon and Washington, and the Northern Rockies Campaign for the rest of the Basin. For more information, write or call:
Copyright © 1995 National Wildlife Federation