Subject: SW Biodiversity Alert #18
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Southwest Biodiversity Alert #18
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southwest center for biological
diversity
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ksuckling@sw-center.org
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http://www.envirolink.org/orgs/sw-center
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1.
Albuquerque Journal Warns of FBI/Congressional Investigation
Into Forest
Service Arson
2. Coronado National Forest Shreds Salvage Documents
- Charges
to be Filed
3. New York Times Stories on Forest Health
and Fire in West -
Grazing Finally Blamed
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1. ALBUQUERQUE
JOURNAL CALLS FOR FBI/CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION
INTO FOREST SERVICE
ARSON
Gila National Forest employees are under investigation by the
U.S.
Inspector General for starting arson fires in 1995. A
separate
investigation ordered by the Inspector General at the request of
the
Southwest Center, is looking into charges that the Gila
National
Forest allowed the Eagle Peak Roadless Area to burn in order
to
salvage log it, bungled the fire investigation, and engineered
an
illegal alteration of the Mexican spotted owl Recovery Plan to
allow
salvage logging of roadless areas.
The following editorial appeared in
the Albuquerque Journal on
May 7, 1996:
ARSON REPORTS TAINT U.S.
FOREST SERVICE
Federal firefighters are shifting their main emphasis from
the
devastating Dome Fire in the Jemez Mountains to the big Hondo Fires
as
New Mexico continues to reel under the early onslaught of what
threatens to
be the worst fire season ever. Dry conditions in the
wake of wet years, and
decades for fire suppression, make the forests
of the Southwest wildfire
habitats waiting to go.
But, even
as the firefighters deploy against the big fires, both
apparently
accidentally started by humans, it is disclosed that the
U.S. Department of
Agriculture's Inspector General's Office for four
months has been
investigating allegations that federal Forest
Service employees might be to
blame for arson fires on the Gila
National
Forest.
Now, the thought of Forest
Service employees
setting forest fires is unthinkable. But, if there is
credible
evidence it might have happened, its should be investigated by
law
enforcement - the FBI, for instance - not the in-house
Agriculture
Department Inspector General's Office. More importantly, if
Forest
Service employees are suspected of arson, it is a law
enforcement
question -and not a "personnel matter," as asserted by Gila
Forest
supervisor Abel
Camerena.
"If there is wrongdoing,
it's being done
by individuals and not the agency," asserted Milo Larson,
acting
regional forester for New Mexico and Arizona. "We want justice to
be
done here, because it's too important to what we do and stand
for."
That's true - but suggesting
that dealing with forest fire setting
Forest Service employees is a
"personnel matter" sends and entirely
different
message.
If Larson doesn't choose
to make Gila National
Forest officials more forthright in disclosing what is
going on, New
Mexico's elected officials in Congress should enter the
discussion.
With Northern New
Mexico going up in flames and thousand of brave
men and women risking their
lives to protect the forest and private
property, the stewards of the forests
owe the public they serve
absolute candor in disclosing wrongdoings by their
peers.
If the Forest Service isn't
playing straight with the public
on what's going on, Congress should move
quickly to make changes. How
can the public trust the Forest Service
on complex matters like
endangered species habitat analysis and
sustained-yield levels of
timber cutting when at a hint of internal
wrongdoing, the agency
circles its wagons in a public-be-damned
silence?
Environmentalists have
long accused Forest Service officials
of bending the truth in catering to
commercial interests in the
multiple-use concept for national forests. The
official silence about
the arson investigation lends a little credence to
such accusations.
People can help
the fight against New
Mexico's threatening summer of fire. They can be
careful in the use
of fire in or near forest areas. They can also help in
demanding that
Forest Service officials be more candid about alleged federal
arson
in the Forest. Barring rain, Mother Nature has programmed a
long,
hot summer for New Mexico's forests. The U.S. Forest Service in
New
Mexico should face a long, hot summer of its own until there is a
full
public explanation of just what is going on with reports of
Forest Service
arsonists.
2. CORONADO NATIONAL FOREST SHREDS SALVAGE COURT
DOCUMENTS -
CHARGES TO BE FILED
The Southwest Center informed the U.S.
Forest Service today that it
will file charges against Coronado National
Forest employees who
shredded a critical document to prevent it from being
used in recent
Southwest Center lawsuit to stop the Rustler Salvage Timber
Sale in
the Chiricahua Mountains.
The salvage timber sale is entirely
within a Spotted owl core area
which was deleted by the Forest Service after
the sale was planned.
It is also within the home range of a nesting pair
Northern
goshawks. The Southwest Center argued in court, that since the
sale
is in pine-oak and mixed-conifer habitats (which are protected by
the
Mexican spotted owl recovery plan), the Salvage Rider requires
the Forest
Service to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and
prepare an
Environmental Assessment.
The Forest Service won the case by scrupulously removing every
reference to
the habitat type from the public record. First it sent the
Southwest
Center bogus documents when we requested the post-fire
vegetation plan, then
it insisted that the vegetation plan did not
exist even though it is listed
in the administrative record. Finally
it succeeding in having the
Southwest Center's own vegetation transects
stricken from the court
record.
Unfortunately for the
Coronado, the Southwest Center has
appealed the decision, and it has obtained
a copy of the supposedly
non-existent vegetation plan. The plan states
exactly what the
the Center's declarations demonstrate: the habitat type is
pine-oak
and mixed-conifer. The new evidence will be used in the
appeal.
The Center will also be filing charges against the Forest
Service for
suppressing critical evidence.
3. NEW YORK TIMES
STORIES ON FOREST HEALTH AND FIRE IN WEST -
GRAZING FINALLY BLAMED
The
New York Times printed three stories on Southwest forest
fires and their
implications for forest health in the inland west on
April 30th, March 7th
and March 11th. The first story had lots of
fire scare stories, but did
not discuss the causes of the fire "threat."
The second story was all Forest
Service rhetoric: a century of fire
suppression has led to extremely dense
ponderosa pine forests which
now threaten local communities and a nuclear
research lab with
apocalyptic fires. A Forest Service spokesman said that
pre-Euorpean
ponderosa pine forests had only 8 to 10 trees per acre (!)
while
today's the forests are choked with "doghair thickets" with
(yikes)
"hundreds" of trees per acre.
The third story brandished a
terrible headline, but after complaints
about the first two stories, the
author did include a lot of good
information, including the huge influence of
overgrazing on forest
health. Exerpts from the third story:
IN
SICK, CROWDED PONDEROSA FORESTS OF WEST, SEEDS OF INFERNOS
LIE OMINOUSLY IN
WAIT
[George Johnson, New York Times, May 11, 1996]
"It is no
coincidence that this devastating fire firestorm occurred in
these densely
wooded mountains, where Mr. Peterson and his
rangers are overseeing more than
100,000 acres of sick pines.
Forestry experts believe the seeds of these conflagarations
have been laid
over many years. By removing the grasses that
compete with pine seedlings,
grazing has caused many pines to
sprout into dense but illnourished thickets,
which are tinder for
fierce fires. And fire suppression, by interfering with
nature's cycle
of burning and renewal, has created a buildup of combustible
material;
the fire that inevitably catches is all the
fiercer..."
"Throughout the
Western United States, Ponderosa forests,
which stretch from northern Mexico
to southern Canada, have
undergone a dangerous transition. Where there once
might have
been 30 to 80 tall ponderosas per acre - sometimes even fewer
-
there are now hundreds and often thousands. When fire
strikes...the
result is no longer the mild cleasing fires that nipped
the
base of the Ponderosas, clearing out the underbrush and weeding
out
the weeker trees..."
"A series of
biological studies over the last decade has
awakened foresters to the
problem, which extends throughout the
West. Beginning in the 1880's with the
coming of the railroad, the
large-scale grazing of million of cattle and
sheep removed muc of
the grass that carried alonfg the healthy fires - and
that competed
with the pine seedlings. Grazing, followed by the United
States
Forest Service's decades long policy of putting out forest fires,
has
let the Ponderosa pines get the upper
hand..
" 'If you wanted to design
a way to destroy Ponderosa
forests, you couldn't come up with a better plan,'
said Dr. Wallace
Covington, a professor at Northern Arizona University's
School of
Forestry. 'Of course, none of it was
intentional.'
The Forest Service
now says it has got religion on the issue
of fire suppression, and it is
using the recent fires to drive home its
new credo: the woods need to be
cleared with widespead, carefully
controlled burns. 'It's like somebody
turned on a light,' Mr. Peterson
said. Where the Forest Service used to burn
a few hundred acres at a
time, it is now burning thousands'....Prescribed
burns are not
without risk. There is always the danger that one will
get out of
hand, as happened in 1993 in the Jemez District, killing a
firefighter.
And some planned fires can have the opposite of the effect
intended,
sparing the doghair thickets and killing the old-growth Ponderosas
that
foresters want to
save...."
"Some effects of (tree)
overcrowding are more subtle,
though no less worisome to eoclogists. Studies
have shown that
chemicals called terpenes in the pine needles - that is what
gives
them their piney smell - interfere with bacteria that convert
nitrogen
in dead wood into a form that plants can use. The thick carpet
of
pine neeles also traps rainwater - which is already being retarded
by
the continuous canopy of forest - keeping it from penetrating into
the
ground. What little trickles down must find its way through the
increasingly
thick network of tree roots.
'In a
very real sense, we are seeing the desertification of
pine forests,' Dr.
Covington said. All over the Southwest, springs are
slowly running dry,' he
said..."
"But treating millions of
acres of Ponderosa forests would
require a public works project of huge
proportions. 'The public
might not stand for it,' Mr. Peterson, the Jemez
ranger, said. 'People
believe this is what forests are supposed to look
like.'
Environmentalists become
suspicious when the Forest
Service starts planning more large-scale
operations in public woodlands.
Kieran Suckling, executive director of the
Southwest
Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, said the Forest
Service
was trying to divert attention from the major cause of the
sick
forests: logging and the removal of the fire-carrying grasses
by
cattle grazing. 'The primary cause of fire suppression is not the
guys
in yellow jackets, it's the cows,' he said. But many ecologists
doubt
that grazing is as big a problem as it used to
be.
Mr. Suckling also says the
Forest Service bolsters its cause
by selectively quoting from historical
records, in which early explorers
describe the Ponderosa forests as "open and
parklike."
To counter this impression, he has unearthed old reports that
speak
of dark forests "black with timber." But historical accounts
are
notoriously subjective. In higher elevations, dense forests with
a mix
of pines, firs and spruces have always been the norm, biologists
say, and
occasional crown fires in these regions are actually
considered
natural.
Scientists
today are reminded that even today's wildfires are
not all bad. (The editors
must have intervened here since this sentence
does not go anywhere.) When
flames sweeping down from St. Peter's Dome
and surrounding mountains hit
sparser pinyon-juniper forests on the
Bandelier monument's lower mesa tops,
the frlames slowed and cooled into
the heathier fires ecologists like to
see.
But it is only a matter of
time before the pinyon-juniper
forests become as crowded and volitile as the
stands of Ponderosas
above them, Dr. Covington said. The same factors - fire
suppression and
grazing - are causing the density of these trees to increase.
'Fifty
years from now we will see crown fires of biblical proportions,'
he
said.'
(end)