The WildLaw Letter
For Members and Friends May 2003
As you will read in elsewhere in this newsletter, WildLaw is standing up for our public forests in ways that are strong and unique. When the Administration announced plans to emasculate literally every regulation dealing with the National Forests, everyone was appalled and shocked at the sweeping nature of the changes. At the same time, the Forest Service released the drafts of new management plans for National Forests in five southern states; these plans fit with the new proposed regulations in that they remove many protections for these public lands.
But while many of the large national groups still have not developed plans for how to challenge these regulatory changes, WildLaw began preparing even before the changes were announced. Every attorney in WildLaw was assigned specific tasks to research the law, review the new plans, and prepare appeal and litigation documents. We even hired our former staff attorney Leigh Haynie as a consultant to help us in these tasks, because Leigh is the master of reviewing voluminous agency documents and picking them to pieces.
This month, WildLaw is holding a retreat for our attorneys specifically, and then we are meeting with SAFC and our other clients to prepare our plans even further. We have done so much good work on these issues thus far that groups from all over the nation signed onto our comments (44 pages long, single-spaced) sent to the Forest Service on the new regulations for National Forest planning. We already have the complaint drafted to sue over the new planning regulations; even though, those new regulations are not set to come out until December.
Ray has met with Under Secretary of Agriculture Mark Rey and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth to present to them working examples from Alabama of how the existing regulations work and address every issue they claim requires their new regulations. Mr. Rey is interested in these alternatives and is coming to Alabama in September to see how good restoration can be done under the existing regulations. At the same time, Ray made it clear to them that, while we are willing to talk ahead of time to avoid the confrontation that will come with these new regulations, WildLaw is fully prepared to litigate over them all the way. If the lawsuits must be filed, we will not compromise them weakly and are prepared to do what it takes to beat the Administration.
To meet the great challenges and opportunities before us now, WildLaw has hired a number of new staff. In our Montgomery headquarters, we recently welcomed Shelia Stalnaker, Melinda "Lynndi" Maddox and Joe Turnham. Alyx Perry has joined our Asheville, North Carolina office as our new coordinator for our sustainable forests program.
Shelia is our Alabama Office Legal Assistant. She has worked in a number of law firms and has great experience in the workings of environmental law cases. Hopefully, Shelia will keep Ray organized and caught-up on his case work.
Working as our new staff attorney, Lynndi is an experienced practitioner from L.A. (Lower Alabama), who has joined WildLaw to further her career of controversy and commitment to making Alabama a better place. She is involved in cases dealing with protection of endangered species, assistance to community groups with local environmental problems, and prosecuting polluters and government agencies that do not follow the laws
Joe Turnham is WildLaw's new Director of Development, helping us with fund raising, donor relations and membership. Joe is the founder of the Alabama League of Environmental Action Voters (AlaLEAVs), the state's LCV chapter. One of Alabama's foremost environmental leaders in his own right, Joe brings a wealth of unique and dynamic experience to WildLaw.
Alyx Perry is an accomplished organizer and has a wealth of experience working with private landowners on both forestry and agricultural issues. She formerly worked on organizing a sustainable forestry campaign on a local level for the Western North Carolina Alliance, and she has researched and written extensive reports on sustainable forestry techniques and resources. Alyx will work extensively in helping coordinate and develop the Southern Forests Network.
In a challenge to the Administration's continued assault on the public's lands, WildLaw and Wild South and eight other groups filed suit in federal court to stop 27 national forest timber sales from Texas to Virginia.
The lawsuit is the fourth case filed since 1996 with the same claims about the Forest Service''s lack of required wildlife surveys. In February of 1999, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that the Forest Service must conduct these wildlife surveys for "management indicator species" as well as "proposed, threatened, endangered, and sensitive species," in order to meet requirements imposed by Congress and regulations to maintain viable wildlife populations. In 2001, the Clinton Administration withdrew 91 timber sales throughout the South in order to settle a nearly identical case filed by the same groups.
Joining Wild South as plaintiffs are the John Muir Project, Sierra Club, Friends of Mississippi Public Land, Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, Virginia Forest Watch, Ouachita Watch League, Forest Conservation Council and Texas Committee on Natural Resources. The case is filed in Atlanta where the Southern Regional Forest Service headquarters denied the groups administrative relief.
In her last case as a WildLaw Staff Attorney, Leigh Haynie won a huge victory for the National Forests in the North Woods. This case stopped the 1,150-acre Rolling Thunder timber sale on the Ottawa National Forest in Michigan.
The Court held, "For projects to be properly approved under the National Environmental Policy Act, they must be preceded by or accompanied by an Environmental Impact Statement that analyzes the impacts of the action on various resources within the forest. In this case, there was no scientific or other assessment under either the National Forest Management Act or the National Environmental Policy Act of permitting selection logging at the current levels, much less the additional acreage approved in the Rolling Thunder project. In the absence of the appropriate statutorily-mandated analysis, the approval of the Rolling Thunder project was arbitrary and capricious."
Northwoods Wilderness Recovery v. United States Forest Serv., 323 F.3d 405 (6th Cir. 2003).
As part of the Administration's plan to gut the regulations on the National Forests, the Forest Service held a large meeting of scientists, industry people, environmentalists and government personnel outside Washington, DC in February. Attendance at this "Diversity Workshop" was by invitation only, and WildLaw's Ray Vaughan was one of only a small handful of grassroots conservationists invited. In fact, WildLaw was the only environmental or conservation organization to give a presentation at this two-day workshop.
The basic premise of the workshop was to get buy-in on which of two options the agency would pick to gut current regulations on maintaining wildlife on the National Forests. Ray's presentation was on how the current regulations can work and how the National Forests in Alabama are now doing great restoration work under the current rules. This presentation changed the whole dynamic of the meeting from a debate over two bad options for weakening protections for the forests into a debate on why we need to weaken the regulations at all. Everyone starting talking about "the WildLaw option" of keeping the regulations and about how we should find good restoration projects that work and figure out how to make such programs work elsewhere. Numerous Forest Service people thanked us for coming forward and changing the course of the meeting, as even most of them do not support these changes in the rules However, the key agency people pushing the new rules were caught off-guard by this change in the debate, and how they will react when the final proposal comes out is yet to be seen..
In March, Ray debated Under Secretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, who is in charge of the Forest Service, at a panel at the University of Virginia School of Law. Under Secretary Rey, who is the key architect of the Administration's proposed sweeping changes to all regulations governing the National Forests, gave a clam, well-scripted talk on how all they are doing is "streamlining" the regulations and making the rules so that "gridlock" is prevented. Ray showed how the regulatory changes are really a sweeping power grab designed at keeping scientists and citizens out of the decision-making process on public lands. A transcript of the debate is available on WildLaw's web site.
In other places this Winter and Spring, Ray was a panelist at the University of Florida School of Law's annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. Ray was also a keynote speaker at the annual University of Oregon School of Law's Public Interest Environmental Law Conference.
WildLaw is pleased to announce a CD-ROM that contains a complete Primer on National Forest protection law and practice. Designed for grassroots activists and attorneys who deal with National Forest issues, the Primer contains basic background materials, how-to information, all laws and regulations dealing with the National Forests, and EVERY published case that deals with the Forest Service in any way (all summarized and categorized). This is more than 1,000 cases, all in Word format. Key scientific and economic documents (in Word or PDF formats) and template comments, appeals and litigation documents (in Word or WordPerfect) are also included. The CD-ROM is self-starting and self-contained; it requires no software installation (other than browser plugins for Word and Acrobat, if you do not already have those).
This CD-ROM Primer is the work of WildLaw's Florida Staff Attorney Brett Paben. Copies are free for all grassroots groups and attorneys who work on National Forest issues. Donations to support this work are gratefully accepted, though. Testing shows it works well with Windows XP, ME and 98, but it is not fully operation on Macs yet.
WildLaw has been granted affiliate member status in the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition. While WildLaw has worked for years with most of the member organizations of SAFC (such as Wild Alabama, Georgia Forest Watch, SABP, Virginia Forest Watch, Appalachian Voices and more), WildLaw was not itself a member of SAFC. Now, we are a proud member, working with SAFC and its other member groups on plans to challenge the new management plans coming out for southern National Forests. Also, in his role as a representative for Appalachian Voices, WildLaw Staff Attorney Steve Novak has been recently selected as the new head of the board of SAFC.
Five of the National Forests in the Southern Appalachians (Alabama, Georgia, the Sumter in South Carolina, the Jefferson in Virginia, and the Cherokee in Tennessee) released in April their new 10-15 year management plans. Since SELC's legal role will be limited in what, if any, plans they can challenge, WildLaw is now also working with SAFC and many of its member groups to develop challenges to the new National Forest planning regulations and to all of the new management plans coming out in 2003 on the National Forests of the Southern Appalachians. If these plans are not made better, they will adversely direct the management of these forests for the next 15 years or more.
As candidly told to Ray by a key regional Forest Service person, "You will not like what you see in the new plan." The new plans for these forests are not being developed by the local forest staffs and are not being designed to meet local needs for sound management. These "one size fits all" plans are being dictated by the agency's Regional Office in Atlanta using the "get the cut out" directives from the National Office. Ray has spoken to a number of Forest Service personnel who do a good job, and every one of them has stated that these new plans will be a disaster for the forests.
WildLaw has developed a web page so that people can learn about these new plans and help make them better. The comment period for the new draft plans runs through July 3. The web page is www.wildlaw.org/plans.html.
Despite years of being on the endangered species list and all the public and media attention paid to it, the Florida Panther has been missing a key resource for its survival and recovery - critical habitat. Under the Endangered Species Act, nearly every listed species is supposed to have critical habitat designated for it. Critical habitat is needed to provide places that will not be degraded for use in maintaining the species and then increasing its population.
However, the federal government is the master of evading legal requirements. The vast majority of species listed under the ESA have never had critical habitat designated for them, and the Panther is one of the most prominent examples of this dereliction of duty. Getting the support of the scientists who know the panther the best, WildLaw's staff attorney Brett Paben filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat for the Panther. The FWS refused in a curt paragraph. Now, we are preparing a lawsuit to force the agency to begin the process of doing this legally and scientifically required job for one of the nation's most critically imperilled mammals.
All the great work we do is your great work, because we cannot do these things without your generous support. We wish to thank all our supporters: