The WildLaw Letter

For Members and Friends Oct.-Dec. 2000

Yes, end of the year, and time for us to once again assail you with our entreaty to donate early and often. WildLaw had great successes this year, stopping more than 22,000 acres of illegal timber sales on your National Forests and getting legal protection for the Alabama Sturgeon after a nine-year struggle involving three lawsuits. We have expanded to six offices, and now provide our services free of charge to more than 100 environmental and community organizations throughout the East.

Yet, in all honesty, we have had some difficulty in fund raising for the upcoming year. Even public interest lawyers are not popular targets of charitable giving, and some of our successes have led some funders to think that we no longer need their support. In fact, we need your support now more than ever if we are to continue this work and build on it for even more protection for your environment. WildLaw is reaching a national audience now with our work, as evidenced by our being asked by national environmental groups and coalitions to draft not one but three major national pieces of legislation to protect all public lands, native ecosystems and biodiversity on private lands. We are a key part of the growing national plans to accomplish permanent protection for all our National Forests. Our experience and expertise saves special places on the ground and provides the basis for much stronger protections in law in the future. Every dollar you donate goes into the most efficient and effective legal team anywhere in the country.

You can also donate to WildLaw using the Internet and your credit card. WildLaw has partnered with GivingCapital.com to provide our members, friends and donors a way to donate to our work easily and securely over the Web. Please check out our Forest and Biodiversity Protection Campaign at http://www.givingcapital.com/goto/campaign_2496_1_f. You can also reach that site by a simple click from our Web site.

WildLaw and its clients have appealed a large number of National Forest timber sales in the last few months.

North Carolina

Northside Timber Sale (Pisgah National Forest). This is a timber sale on about 60 acres--doing regeneration cutting and thinning. Our North Carolina staff took a field visit with the Regional Forester, other Forest Service staff, a multiple use council person in favor of more logging, and representatives from our clients groups Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, Appalachian Voices and the Western North Carolina Alliance. The project lacks key field surveys for rare wildlife, as required by law.

Sand Mountain Appeal (Pisgah National Forest). This project proposes to restore 13 acres of pitch/shortleaf pine on two sites, regenerate 143 acres on 12 sites using two-aged harvest, thin 21 acres on one site, shelterwood harvest 20 acres on one site, daylight 2.7 miles of road, and create .3 miles of new road. Approximately 177 acres are proposed for timber harvest of some type. The appeal cites numerous problems with the sale, including (1) the Environmental Assessment (EA) fails to adequately evaluate the potential cumulative impacts to soil resources. No site-specific soils survey was performed for the Sand Mountain project, in violation of NFMA. (2) Cumulative effects to aquatic and other resources were not adequately addressed, in violation of NEPA and NFMA. (3) The chief justification for this project, that there is a need to create more early successional habitat, is overstated, miscalculated, and misleading. Ample early successional habitat already exists on public and private land in and immediately around the analysis area. (4) The District Ranger failed to consider a reasonable range of alternatives. (5) The District Ranger failed to perform anything more than a cursory analysis of the No Action Alternative. (6) The Wild Turkey is not a suitable MIS for the Sand Mountain area. (7) Socioeconomic impacts: The project will not maximize net social and economic benefits nor has the legally required Present Nat Value (PNV) been disclosed in the EA. There appears to be a real risk of increased sedimentation to the Johns River and various tributaries to it. The EA simply glosses over this with a conclusory "no impact", but with no real site-specific data to back up their conclusions.

South Carolina:

Calhoun Experimental Forest (Sumter National Forest). In the mind of the Forest Service in the Enoree Ranger District, there is a huge demand by private landowners that the Service use the National Forests as demonstration plots for various types of logging operations. As the logic goes, this will foster goodwill among the various landowners and the Service, as well as provide a valuable tool for private landowners wishing to manage their own land. However, nowhere in the EA or its supporting documents are the requests by these surrounding landowners documented. This alleged "need" is a farce, merely a front to allow logging to occur without actually looking like extraction. This area is part of an old cotton plantation, and as such, has been impacted fairly heavily in the past. Not exactly a pristine wilderness, it does border on the Tyger River, and the impacts from increased sedimentation, while acknowledged, nevertheless are deemed insignificant or acceptable in the EA.

Mississippi:

In the National Forests of Mississippi, we have appealed seven logging projects recently. All the projects have the same legal problems, mainly that no data was used to insure that the logging would not adversely impact rare species and that massive amounts of logging were approved without looking at cumulative and site-specific impacts. Those timber projects are: Holly Springs Tornado Salvage Sale, Holly Springs Chilli Lake Sale, De Soto Deep Creek Sale, De Soto Whiskey Creek Sale, Homochitto Foster Creek Sale, Homochitto Cedar Creek Sale, and Bienville Cherry Creek Sale.

Louisiana:

WildLaw and our client Wild South appealed the Compartments 256, 257, 258, and 260 Timber Sale on the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. This proposal involves 2,499 acres of even-age logging. Problems with the proposal include that the Forest Service cannot justify the use of the herbicide action for site preparation; the National Forest has an agenda to build unnecessary roads, which results in fragmentation of the habitat; the National Forest does not provide baseline numbers on rare and sensitive species as required by regulations and court cases.

Wisconsin:

On behalf of Superior Wilderness Action Network, WildLaw filed an administrative appeal of a "fuel reduction" project on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin. The sale, located on the Washburn District, will involve clearcutting and salvage thinning of over 3,500 acres. The EA prepared by the District failed to consider an adequate number of alternatives and the impacts of new roads in an area already heavily roaded. In the past ten years, 40 miles of ORV trails have been built by the Forest Service with an open road density of 4.41 miles per square mile.

Minnesota:

On behalf of Heartwood and Superior Wilderness Action Network, WildLaw filed an administrative appeal of a "fuel reduction" project on the Superior National Forest in Minnesota. The sale, located adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, will clearcut over 2,400 acres in addition to over 3,000 acres clearcut last fall. Last fall, the Superior National Forest operated exempt from public participation due to alternative arrangements granted by the Council on Environmental Quality. The current administrative appeal is limited in its effectiveness due to Chief Dombeck's granting of "emergency status" on over 1,500 acres of the cutting, which removes the public's ability to appeal this area. This is just one of four sales on the Superior National Forest currently in the pipeline for timber production that could be granted emergency status. WildLaw will utilize every possible administrative and legal process to ensure the public can effectively participate in these sales.

The Northwoods office, on behalf of Superior Wilderness Action Network, filed an administrative appeal of the Rocky Road project located on the Kawishiwi Ranger District of the Superior National Forest. This project includes the clearcutting of 1,044 acres; 161 acres of thinning; 484 acres of planting; construction or reopening of 15.2 miles of road; and prescribed burning of 364 acres. The problem in northern forests is the perpetuation of aspen plantations that far exceeds the historical and natural levels for this tree species. This sale perpetuates the abundance of aspen plantations at the expense of historic white pines and other conifers. This is the second EA submitted on this project since the opening of our Northwoods office; the first EA was retracted and revised after our comments submitted on behalf of SWAN.

Another salvage sale on the Superior National Forest was administratively appealed on behalf of SWAN. This one, located on the Tofte District, will authorize the clearcutting of approximately 1,500 acres and the road construction of 8.5 miles. The total cost to taxpayers for this boondoggle is $1,101,683.00. Instead of leaving the downed trees to replenish the forest soil and provide habitat for species such as the Canada Lynx, the District will build unnecessary roads to salvage log over 9,000 MBF of timber.

WildLaw, on behalf of SWAN, and in coordination with American Lands Alliance, is currently working to stop Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck from granting emergency status on a salvage sale cutting over 1,600 acres of remote forest named Little East Creek. If granted, timber companies will receive over 27,000 cords of wood. The true purpose of this salvage sale is for the Forest Service to double the amount of roads in this area from 19.1 miles of "temporary" roads to 51.7 miles of temporary and permanent roads. SWAN has fought tirelessly on the ground and in the court room to stop road building in the Little East Creek area. A mere four years ago, the Little East Creek area was a 15,000 acre unroaded area. With the pressure of the state and timber companies, the Forest Service has provided the current temporary roads and seeks Dombeck's blessing for the creation of more roads.

What You Can Do: Please call, write, or e-mail Chief Dombeck today asking him to deny the request for emergency status on the Little East Creek on the LaCroix district of the Superior National Forest and withdraw the sale entirely. Chief Mike Dombeck, Sidney R. Yates Federal Building, 201 14th St. SW at Independence Ave., Washington, DC 20024; mdombeck@fs.fed.us.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of Northwoods Wilderness Recovery and Heartwood asks the court to stop a planned logging project within a Wild and Scenic River corridor. The logging, along the Indian River located in the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan, is to improve the "visual quality" for recreationalists.

WildLaw and our client Wild South won our appeal of the Cool Springs timber sale on the Homochitto National Forest in Mississippi. This project would have cut over 11 million board feet on 1418 acres to perpetuate huge pine plantations. Despite this sale being pulled, we will still use it as evidence of the illegalities of the timber program in our ongoing region-wide lawsuit in Atlanta.

Downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where WildLaw has its main offices is contaminated by a huge plume of tetrachloroethylene and BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene). Initially discovered in 1991, the contamination is so bad that even the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), the worst state environmental agency in the nation, recommended that downtown Montgomery be placed on the Superfund list for cleanup. ADEM normally tries as hard as it can to cover up toxic waste contamination. In 1998, the U.S. EPA announced that it was considering putting Montgomery on the Superfund list, but recently the EPA has given Montgomery an indefinite, open-ended pass on listing so long as the City makes "significant" progress on "resolving" the plume problem. Mayor Bobby Bright has complained that the City does not need the "stigma" of being on the Superfund list, but there has been no talk yet of actually cleaning up the waste. Secret sources have informed WildLaw that certain prominent business and political leaders want to avoid listing so that their companies and agencies do not have to clean up the plume that was most likely caused by dry cleaners, machinery shops and printers during the years of 1905 to 1985.

In order to find out the true sources of the plume and to push for actual cleanup instead of coverup, WildLaw filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the EPA in order to get all the documents available on this matter. We also plan to engage in other surveys and investigations to get more information, as well as initiate possible action under the Superfund law itself.

On behalf of Superior Wilderness Action Network, the Northwoods office of WildLaw filed suit in the Western District of Wisconsin over a "salvage" sale, the Delta-Drummond, in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest on October 10. This sale, if implemented, will produce over 35 million board feet for the timber industry. The 3,500 acres scheduled for cutting are remote areas of northern hardwood and located adjacent to a wilderness area and a semi-primitive non-motorized area. For comparison, all the National Forests in Florida produced only 22.4 million board feet in 1999; the Delta-Drummond is only one sale on one district of the National Forests in Wisconsin. The Forest Service did not conduct an Environmental Impact Statement. Instead, the District conducted an EA failing to consider the cumulative impacts of the proposed cutting and is attempting to "segment" its environmental analysis. The Forest Service also plans to cut 400 acres in the adjacent semi-primitive non-motorized area, which is literally across the road from the Delta-Drummond, but does not consider that cutting significant.

WildLaw personnel discovered illegal dumps on land owned by the Alabama Historic Commission. The Fort Toulouse - Fort Jackson site is where the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers come together to form the Alabama River, and the site has been used by Native Americans, the French, the British and then the Americans for more than 3,000 years.

There are at least four illegal dumps along the bluffs on the Coosa River side of the public property at Fort Toulouse/Fort Jackson. While it is clear that the dumping of these materials is in an effort to retard the erosion of these areas of the bluffs, the dumping of metal pipes, straps and other objects, plastics, garbage, roofing tiles and fiberglass insulation and other refuse is not helpful in such an endeavor. Indeed, such dumping is illegal and will result in the direct deposition of these materials into the Coosa River the next time the water rises.

WildLaw has sent the Historical Commission a 60-day notice letter of intent to file suit under the Clean Water Act and state dumping laws if these sites are not promptly cleaned up.

On behalf of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, WildLaw has appealed the issuance of three permits for the discharge of treated sewage into the Cahaba River. The permits allow Jefferson County, the City of Hoover and the Birmingham Water Works Board to discharge millions of gallons per day into the nation's most biologically diverse river. The Cahaba is already listed as an impaired water that does not meet water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. These three permits fail to take into account the effects of the permitted effluent upon native species of aquatic wildlife downstream from discharge outfalls. ADEM must, at a minimum, protect all aquatic species in order to meet the minimum requirements and mandates of the Clean Water Act. ADEM has an affirmative duty, under both Federal and state law, to ensure that it's actions do not adversely affect Alabama's aquatic species. The permits at issue do not meet the test.

ADEM failed to adequately address the permits in terms of antidegradation effects. This neglect has a material adverse impact of aquatic life forms in the Cahaba River. ADEM is aware that, legally, all existing uses of a state water body must be protected. One such use is the maintenance of all aquatic life forms. Yet, we pointed out to ADEM in public comments regarding the permits, many life forms in the Cahaba River are suffering known declines and injury. Some of these species are either already extirpated or on the brink of extinction.

300-B Water Street, Suite 214

Montgomery, Alabama 36104