Federal Judge Strikes Down Forest Management Plan

A fight between North Carolina High Country conservation and tourism officials and the United States Forest Service over the Forest Management Plan for the Globe Basin just southwest of Blowing Rock will, more than likely, be decided not by one person reflecting the decision of the Forest Service, but by a federal judge 3,000 mile away from the confrontation.
On Friday, March 30 Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of a Federal District Court in San Francisco overturned government rules for management of the country’s 155 national forests, saying that the federal Forest Service violated the basic laws ensuring the forest ecosystems have environmental safeguards.
Her action was accompanied by an injunction forbidding the forest service from using the rule to make decisions about the national forests and grasslands, which cover 8 percent of the country.
The highlight of her decision, especially to those in the High Country who oppose the management plan for the Globe Valley, was the ruling by Judge Hamilton that the Forest Service had violated federal laws when it changed the rules forest managers must follow when making decisions, and do so without consulting the public or considering environmental impact.
In 2005 the rules governing the operation of national forest lands were cut back by federal officials, especially requirements for environmental reviews and safeguards for wildlife, and limited public participation in the development of management plans for individual forests, including those in Western North Carolina.
Judge Hamilton told a New York Times reporter that she could not determine if the rules were environmentally benign, as the Forest Service argued, or if endangered species would be unaffected, because no studies had been done.
“The agency was required to undertake some type of consultation, informal or otherwise, prior to making a conclusive determination that there would be no effect,” she wrote in her decision to issue the injunction and ruling against the Forest Service. She sent the management plans back to the Agriculture Department, the parent agency of the Forest Service, to be redone, this time in consultation with the public and with the federal agencies that protect wildlife.
“Basically, the importance of this decision is that the federal agencies had been trying to take all mandatory environmental protections out of the forest planning process and this decision puts them back in,” said Tim Preso, an attorney who argued the case for the environmental group Earthjustice.
One of the crucial questions in the case was whether, simply by setting rules for its actions, a federal agency was triggering the same requirements for study and consultation that are usually set in motion by specific actions, l ike authorizing a timber harvest, as in the case of the Globe Valley.
In his argument Preso said that these management rules should be seen as an action.
Judge Hamilton agreed, saying that “the trigger” for the consultations that the federal government failed to make was not that the rule changes were “likely to have adverse effect, but simply that the rule may affect listed species or critical habitat.”
The cuts in the revision of the 2005 regulations included the elimination of a requirement that forest managers ensure that no fish or wildlife species with habitat in their forest become threatened or endangered. That, and the cut back in the public’s opportunity to have input and comment at the initial development of the management plan, were key elements in the debate here in North Carolina, the third being the impact such harvesting would have on the tourism industry, the number one economic engine in the mountains of western North Carolina.
High Country residents and conservation groups also fear and oppose the use of chemicals on the forest floor to control unwanted growth and the loss of old-growth forest resources that have significant historical and environmental value to the ecosystem, especially in the fragile Globe basin.