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Outdoors
Smoky Mountain News
‘A lot of mistakes’ Objections level strong criticism against forest plan BY HOLLY KAYS OUTDOORS EDITOR The 60-day objection period for the Pisgah-Nantahala Forest Management Plan is now over, and while there’s not yet an official tally of how many people are contesting the final plan, it’s safe to say it’s a high number. I Heart Pisgah, a coalition of more than 150 organizations supporting increased protections for the forest, has record of more than 14,000 objections filed against the plan. That figure reflects only the objections that I Heart Pisgah and coordinating organizations helped submit, so the true total is even higher. The U.S. Forest Service has until April 1 to post the objections to its website — until then, the total number is not available. This extraordinary number of objections comes toward the end of an extraordinarily long process to plan the future of the 1.04 million acres contained in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forest. The Forest Service first started reaching out to stakeholders in 2012, and after a decade of public meetings, arguments, negotiations and exhaustive rounds of public comment, the final plan was released in January. While the draft released in February 2020 earned praise from a wide range of interest groups, many of which sparred vigorously throughout the planning process, the final plan met a chilly reception from many of those same groups — particularly from those focused on preserving wilderness and old growth. The objections reflect that. While a complete record of objections was not available as of press time, The Smoky Mountain News reached out to a diverse set of companies, nonprofits and coalitions that have participated in the planning process for years. Overwhelmingly, the longest, most strongly worded objections came from the pro-preser-
vation side of the aisle — in fact, 100 organizations and businesses endorsed a report card from the Center for Biological Diversity that gives the plan an F. “The plan is, in a word, a disappointment,” reads a 179-page objection from the Southern Environmental Law Center, submitted on behalf of The Wilderness Society, MountainTrue, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. “At this stage of the process, we never imagined there would be so much left to do. It takes a lot of mistakes to get something so wrong. The lengthy objection below is a function of the plan’s failure to take its legal obligations seriously, along with its lack of credible analysis.” However, core to the SELC’s criticism — and to that of various other objections SMN obtained — is the ways in which the Forest Service declined to incorporate solutions from the Nantahala Pisgah Forest Partnership, a group of more than 20 organizations spanning interests ranging from logging to wilderness that spent years hammering out a proposal that the diverse interests represented within the partnership could get behind. “The Partnership has collaborated with the Forest Service for nearly a decade on this management plan,” said a statement from Ashleigh Sherman of Darby Communications on behalf of the Partnership. “However, the Partnership was disappointed to see a number of their proposals excluded from the latest draft.”
A stunning view stretches out in the Craggy Forest Scenic Area. Steven McBride photo approach might require the forest to meet certain requirements for controlling invasive species or protecting water quality before moving from base-level Tier 1 logging objectives up to higher-order Tier 2 harvest goals. The final plan keeps the tiers but doesn’t link them between interests. That is, under the proposed plan the Forest Service can move to Tier 2 logging goals, for example, without worrying about whether Tier 1 objectives have been met for water quality or invasive species control. “The agency’s approach fails to meet the purpose and need of the plan, as well as stated desired conditions and objectives … Our Partnership members and affiliates stretched well beyond their comfort zone, and farther than they may have otherwise been able to in
MISSING TRIGGERS One such proposal relates to the Tier 1 and Tier 2 objectives contained in the final plan. The tiered approach was the Partnership’s attempt to broker consensus between groups with opposing priorities for forest management. For example, the
A biker pedals the Staire Creek Trail. Steven McBride photo
order to balance all stakeholder needs to the fullest extent possible,” reads the Partnerships objection. By failing to tie the tiers, it says, the Forest Service destroyed that balance. In a February interview, Lead Planner Michelle Aldridge said that the Forest Service defines Tier 1 goals as what the Forest Service can do with its current staff and resources, while Tier 2 goals will require outside resources such as grants to accomplish. “Think about it,” she said. “If road maintenance money arrived tomorrow, but we hadn’t yet completed all of our plan activities for non-native invasives, we’re not going to pause on our road maintenance until we get our non-native invasive work done. If we have the opportunity to do more, we’re going to do those things, whether that’s more fish passages or sustainable trails or whatever the case may be.” The SELC included this quote in its objection, along with a sharp reply. “This response misses the point entirely,” the SELC objection said. “Road maintenance needs are not exacerbated by treating nonnative invasive species, improving fish passage, or building sustainable trails. But some plan objectives are in direct tension with other resource protection obligations … Triggers are an adaptive management strategy to show that the forests are capable of mitigating harm before moving to ‘stretch goals.’” Roadbuilding and timber harvest are very much connected. According to SELC’s objection, the plan puts 610,434 acres of the forest in management areas considered suitable for timber harvest. Half of these are currently inaccessible, meaning that extracting timber would require building new roads.
OLD GROWTH PROTECTIONS The Forest Service’s solution for old growth forest was also a target of criticism for many objectors. The plan establishes a 265,000-acre old growth network, but many of those acres do not contain old growth trees, and some acreage known to contain such trees is not included in the network. In its objection, the Partnership also pointed out that the plan did not incorporate its suggestion of a cap-and-trade approach to the network, which would have allowed the Forest Service to trade lower-quality patches for higher-quality ones as they were spotted during projects. “The plan authorizes cutting over 44,000 acres of existing designated old-growth,” I Heart Pisgah claims in its objection. “Over a quarter-million acres of old growth is placed in logging-priority designations. Twenty percent of the highest-priority logging lands contain known, inventoried old-growth forests.” The objection claims these shortcomings are due to inaccurate models for old growth and natural disturbances that are built on “misleading assumptions” and “fundamentally flawed.” “The Forest Service has tweaked model inputs so that the models
