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Opinion | Massive national forest project needs a closer look at impacts, alternatives
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Buried under the snow, the Upper Peninsula’s Ottawa National Forest seems peaceful now. But if the US Forest Service gets its way, the eastern end of the Ottawa will be the site of a massive timber sale.
The proposed Silver Branch Vegetation Management Project is the largest of a series of sales being planned for the Ottawa. This massive logging project would encompass 127,828 acres (200 square miles) of national forest land, which is more than 10 times the area of the City of Marquette. This amounts to over 1/8 of the entire 1 million-acre Ottawa!
The project would clear-cut 25,000 acres and select-cut another 70,000 acres, including a proposed addition to the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness with broad support from UP residents and beyond. The project also shares a significant border with the existing wilderness area, a deep canyon that draws visitors from across the UP, the state and beyond. This project would have “an estimated 30-year implementation time frame for vegetation management, and longer for some resources” with soil recovery “potentially extending an additional 25 years beyond that.”
This project appears to violate the Ottawa’s own Forest Plan in a number of ways. The Forest Plan designates lands as “suitable” for timber harvest in part based on their ability to support commercial timber harvest without “irreversible resource damage to soils, productivity, or watershed conditions”. Lands that are not capable of sustainably producing commercial volumes of timber or that are needed for recreation or preservation of old-growth and wilderness are designated as “not suitable for timber production”. Yet the Forest Service proposes to cut roughly 30,000 acres currently designated as “not suitable”. This despite the fact that the National Forest Management Act regulations (36 CFR 219, Subpart A) clearly state that “No timber harvest for the purposes of timber production may occur on lands not suited for timber production.”
The Forest Plan designates 256,000 acres as “remote habitat” for the benefit of sensitive or federally listed species including gray wolf, American marten, northern goshawk, and red-shouldered hawk. Within this area road density is not supposed to exceed 1 mile of road per square mile of National Forest land. The proposed Silver Branch project includes more than 50,000 acres of this Remote Habitat Area (RHA). Yet the draft Environmental Assessment (EA) fails to even mention the RHA. And by presenting only two alternatives for this project (the “No Action” alternative and an “Action” alternative) instead of a “reasonable range” of alternatives, the Forest Service appears to violate the National Environmental Policy Act.
As currently written, the draft EA proposes to log 2,009 acres of old-growth forest. This is in direct violation of the Forest Plan, which states that timber harvest should not be conducted in classified old growth stands except in certain narrowly defined situations such as when there is a threat to human life or property or when an area no longer retains old-growth characteristics. Since the draft EA was produced, the Forest Service has said that these old-growth stands were slated for logging by mistake, and won’t be included in the final EA. But the fact that they made it this far into the planning process is more evidence that the Forest Service must take a more careful look at this project, by completing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
If implemented in its current form, this massive, decades-long project would have a major long-term impact on the eastern Ottawa and surrounding lands as well. The Forest Service’s “finding of no significant impact” for this project is unjustified. An EA cannot adequately assess this project’s cumulative, long-term impacts. The Forest Service must produce an EIS to accurately evaluate its impacts on the adjacent Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness, surrounding state and private lands, and the long-term health of the Ottawa.
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