The WildLaw Letter

For Members and Friends November 1999

Kellam Warren, one of WildLaw's staff attorneys in our Southern Appalachian Office, was awarded the Rick Sutherland Fellowship Fund award from the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund. Only two such fellowships are given out nationwide.

Rick Sutherland, who served as the Legal Defense Fund's president from 1978 to 1991, saw our sense of separation from nature and the consequences of that alienation as disastrous, both for the human race and the rest of the world. He was keenly aware of the need to involve all sectors of society in the protection of our common environment.

To further this interest and to honor Rick's memory, staff and friends of Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund (then the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) created the Rick Sutherland Fellowship Fund shortly after his death in 1991. The stated purpose of the Fund is to "enable socio-economically disadvantaged lawyers with otherwise insufficient financial means to engage in public interest litigation that would benefit the environment through employment with a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organization."

The two Fellowships are available to lawyers who have graduated from law school within three years of the anticipated employment date, have significant outstanding student loans, and have obtained or accepted an offer of employment from a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organization.

This fellowship award to Kellam shows the caliber of staff WildLaw has working for you and your environment. We are all very proud of Kellam.

As part of WildLaw's program to educate people about environmental laws and issues, WildLaw announced an essay contest for 4th through 6th graders throughout the United States. Now through March 2000, students are encouraged to submit a 500-word essay on "What the Endangered Species Act Means to Me." Contest ends March 15, 2000, and the winner will be announced May 15, 2000. The winner will receive $5,000 in U.S. Savings Bonds for college, and the winning essay and four runners up will be published on WildLaw's Web site.

The next contest (for Fall 2000 - Spring 2001) will be on protecting the National forests. That essay will be entitled "Why I Want the National Forests Protected."

This contest has been featured on ENN and MSNBC and will be in an upcoming issue of Audubon magazine.

On behalf of Wild Alabama, WildLaw has been litigating for four years the land exchange program in the Bankhead National Forest. Facing a hearing before a federal judge who made lots of noises in our favor, the Forest Service and the Justice Department settled the case on our terms. No more land exchanges with coal strip miners will occur in the Bankhead until after the new land management plan is adopted and a full environmental review of the cumulative impacts of these exchanges occurs. Although not a permanent victory, this case has stopped all exchanges for the past four years and now puts a moratorium on more than 25,000 acres of the Bankhead from any future exchanges until the Forest Service fully complies with the law. This gives us all the opportunity to get the Forest Service to drop the land exchange program from the new plan and end this horribly destructive practice that took more than 2,000 acres of healthy forest lands and turned them into craters of the moon.

On behalf of Appalachian Voices and the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, WildLaw's Southern Appalachian Office appealed the Tucker Creek timber sale in the Pisgah National Forest. Wildlaw argued that: (1) the Forest Service violated NEPA when it failed to provide our clients with the full 30 day notice and comment period, and (2) the Forest Service unlawfully relied upon the categorical exclusion to avoid NEPA's legal mandate to consider the environmental impacts because reliance upon a CE is unlawful where "extraordinary circumstances" are present.

One week after WildLaw filed this appeal, District Ranger Art Rowe notified the Appeals Deciding Officer that he was withdrawing the Tucker Creek timber sale because "we recognized that categorical exclusions for timber sales were subject to appeal but we failed to realize that they also required a comment period."

While the timber sale merely proposed thinning 28 acres of white pine, the project area consisted of 992 acres of National Forest Land located at the headwaters of Tucker Creek which flows into the North Fork of the French Broad River. Absent WildLaw's successful challenge, the Pisgah Ranger District would have illegally logged this area without considering the impacts of the proposed action on sensitive species and without population surveys for either the Hellbender or French Broad Salamander.

Further, Heartwood recently won a successful lawsuit that declared illegal the timber harvest CE used for "small" projects such as this one. Thus, if the Forest Service wants to do this logging project again, it will have to conduct a full environmental review with full public participation.

Without any opposition, Republican Congressman Bob Riley and Republican Senator Jeff Sessions rushed through Congress the Dugger Mountain Wilderness bill. Now, 9,200 acres of the Talladega National Forest have been designated as the Dugger Mountain Wilderness. The state's second highest mountain, Dugger is a place rich in biological resources, wildlife and recreational opportunities. Being in the middle of the area can make one feel like being in the Blue Ridge, as the area is quite rugged and has many steep ridges and gorges with swift streams. The area is home to the endangered Blue Shiner, and it has more than 7 miles of the Pinhoti Trail, which will someday connect to the Appalachian Trail.

WildLaw's Executive Director Ray Vaughan was one of the very first environmentalists to publicly advocate making Dugger Mountain a wilderness area back in 1984. Many organizations have been working on making Dugger a wilderness, and special thanks needs to go to the Alabama Environmental Council, which spent years developing local community support for the wilderness and which sponsored scientific studies about the area.

Please write Congressman Riley and Senator Sessions and thank them for protecting Dugger, and since this wilderness bill was such a positive experience for them in the media, ask them to give wilderness designation for all the other wild and special places in Alabama's National Forests. These include Oakey Mountain, Blue Mountain, Rebecca Mountain and Mayfield Creek in the Talladega National Forest, the Sipsey Headwaters and Brushy Fork in the Bankhead, and Bear Bay in the Conecuh.

The Honorable Bob Riley, Unites States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515. The Honorable Jeff Sessions, United States Senate, 495 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510

Leigh Haynie, WildLaw staff attorney in our North Woods office in Minnesota, is preparing to file a lawsuit against the Forest Service for logging sales in the Ottawa National Forest in Michigan. Part of those projects will be logging inside the Paint River Wild and Scenic River corridor. These logging proposals cover almost 1,500 acres, and they will also overcut hardwoods in the forest in violation of the forest's management plan. Also, the projects clearly fail to comply with the National Forest Management Act in that the Forest Service has no population data or surveys to show that these projects will not adversely impact a number of unique and rare species, such as the Goshawk, the Lynx, the American Bittern, Wood Turtles, and neotropical migratory birds.

Leigh also has appealed the Ivins logging project in Minnesota on behalf of the Superior Wilderness Action Network. This proposal would log 1,205 acres, 1,044 of it through clearcutting. This project considered only one alternative and totally failed to provide for protection of rare species.

In the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina, the state Department of Transportation is propsing to build a major highway through public forest land. Biologists working for WildLaw and its clients Appalachian Voices and the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project discovered that the Forest Service had already allowed the DOT to cut trees along the preferred route in order to do detailed survey work. It just so happens that this type of commitment of resources to a proposal before the project is even proposed is illegal under federal law. In a letter to the Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General, WildLaw's Southern Appalachian Office detailed this flagrant violation of law and demanded that the OIG investigate this matter. Further, this illegal predecisional commitment biases the decision-making process to such a degree that the Forest Service has now handed us a great legal argument for stopping this road from ever being built. That fight is still to come, but if NC DOT and the Forest Service cannot comply with the law now so early in the process, it is clear that the entire process is fatally flawed.

Under the Clean Water Act, each state is supposed to conduct a "triennial review" of all its water quality standards for the entire state. Most states often take many more than three years between such reviews. Alabama is no exception, not having held a triennial review for more than five years. WildLaw sent a legal notice under the CWA stating that we would sue the EPA if the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) did not comply with the law. That notice forced EPA and ADEM to schedule the triennial review. ADEM will hold a public hearing on all the state's water quality standards on Dec. 13, 1999, and a comment period will extend until Jan. 12, 2000. If you have any concerns about Alabama's waterways, now is the time to raise them. Comments go to: ADEM Hearing Officer, Office of General Counsel, Ala. Dept. of Environmental Management, 1400 Coliseum Boulevard, Montgomery, AL 36110-2059.

WildLaw Executive Director Ray Vaughan was elected to the National Forest Protection Alliance's board of directors. The NFPA is the national coalition working on ending commercial logging in the National Forests. This development is an honor and recognition of WildLaw's hard work to protect National Forests, and it is also a great opportunity for us to work together with some of the most talented and dedicated forest protection activists throughout the nation. WildLaw is doing its part in the national campaign to save all our public lands, and your support makes it all possible.

On October 21, 1999, WildLaw Executive Director Ray Vaughan was featured in a debate on Alabama Public Television's state-wide news show For the Record; the discussion was over protection for our National Forests and President Clinton's recently announced roadless area proposal. As a recently elected board member of the National Forest Protection Alliance, Ray presented the need for complete protection for our National Forests through an end to all commercial logging there. This show can be viewed over the Internet; APT keeps an archive of past For the Record shows on its Web site for approximately one month after the shows air. The show can be seen using Real Player G2; go to http://www.aptv.org,/, click on the For the Record button and then click on the "Click here to watch past shows" button. Then click on the Oct. 21, 1999 show button; ignore the title "Ga. - AL. water" which was put on there.

WildLaw and its clients Lamar Marshall (Wild Alabama) and Ned Mudd (Biodiversity Legal Foundation and Alabama Wilderness Alliance) were featured in a good article by Jane Braxton Little in Forest magazine, the publication of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Called "Alabama's green-leanin' good ol' boys," the article makes much of our unique style to environmental protection.

Thank you to all our donors this year! Your financial help has made all our work and success possible.

Special thanks to our major donors and supporters:

- James Redfield

- The Moriah Fund

- The Foundation for Deep Ecology

- The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation

- Patagonia

- Environmental Support Center

- The Waterwheel Foundation

- Phish

- The Anonymous Doctor

Yes, end of the year, and it's time once again to think of giving and of getting a tax deduction. WildLaw has grown tremendously in the last year, expanding from one office to three and going to five attorneys. Despite our lean staff and relatively small budget, WildLaw has handled more than 200 cases in 1999. To our knowledge, that is more than any other nonprofit environmental law group in the country, even the ones that have budgets 20 times ours.

As shown by our newsletters over the last year, we have done a lot, in a number of areas. We have stopped harmful land exchanges in the Bankhead. We stopped thousands of acres of illegal and scientifically unsound timber sales in many National Forests. Our work has helped make the South's air cleaner and many of the rivers less polluted. Numerous rare species have benefitted from our cases.

All of these many accomplishments are due to the generous support we receive from you, our members. About 75% of our budget comes from donations from individuals like you. So, at this year end, we again plead shamelessly for you to donate once more. As always and as has been shown by our record for 1999, WildLaw will do more with a dollar than any other group. We're lean, tough guerrilla lawyers who get things done and who save wild places. A donation to WildLaw is fully tax deductible and is a sound investment in the future and a great gift for those you love, including yourself. Thank you.

WildLaw Main Office: 300-B Water Street, Suite 214, Montgomery, Alabama 36104. 334/265-6529, 334/265-6511 (fax). E-mail: WildLaw@aol.com for Ray Vaughan and WildLaw2@aol.com for Aimee Smith.

WildLaw North Woods Office: 12005 41st Ave. N., #201, Plymouth, Minnesota 55441. 612/551-9979 (office & fax). E-mail: WildLawNW@aol.com for Leigh Haynie.

WildLaw Southern Appalachian Office: 20 Battery Park Avenue, Suite 405 in Asheville, North Carolina 28801. 828/232-1157, 828/232-1162 (fax). E-mail: WildLawNC@aol.com for Kellam Warren and WildLawNC2@aol.com for Danny Daniels.

Web site for all offices: www.wildlaw.org.

300-B Water Street, Suite 214

Montgomery, Alabama 36104