Re: Upper White River Integrated Resource Project, Preliminary Possibilities Activities Draft

April 18, 2008

Melissa Reichert:

Native Forest Council and our 2,000 national members know that public land logging provides short-term financial benefits for industry at the expense of economic and ecological benefits for the rest of the citizenry; it is therefore in the American taxpayers’ best interest to terminate the Federal Timber Sale program. Recreation’s economic benefits alone are worth dozens of times the value of logging, while the publicly-owned asset value of nature and nature’s services is worth hundreds of times more than that.

With the 21st century understanding we have of unlogged forests’ vital roles of attracting, storing and filtering clean drinking water; regulating rainfall and moderating regional climate; storing and sequestering carbon to combat climate change (northeast forests store the 2nd greatest levels of carbon of any forest region in the US); creating fertile topsoil and preventing erosion; ensuring the survival of fish and wildlife, etc., there is no honest justification for further asset stripping and logging in our public forests.

If we had not liquidated all but 5% of our nation’s native forests, with over one-third permanently deforested for cities, agriculture, roads and other development, logging might still have had a small role in our public forests today. But the liquidation of our country’s 1.082 billion acres of native forest over the centuries demonstrates a clear need to place our publicly owned national forests (and many other forest lands) under the strongest protections possible, banning all forms of resource extraction, as a form of “ecosystem insurance.”

With the small area that Green Mountain National forest encompasses in Vermont (about 400,000 acres out of 6 million, roughly 15% of landbase), it is appalling to think that even an acre of these precious lands would be sacrificed to the chainsaw. New Englanders should be well aware of the past history of wholesale forest devastation in their region. For the sake of future generations, let us not repeat the mistakes of the past.

The logging industry and beholden agencies will argue that only a small portion of the Green Mountain National Forest would be logged. However, climate change, along with the declining health of terrestrial ecosystems worldwide and their now-compromised role in maintaining a functioning biosphere, suggests it would be in every American’s best interest to protect every tree possible.

Further troubling is the Forest Service’s obfuscation of their clear desire to ramp up destructive profit-driven public land logging in the northeast. While a few parts of the Upper White River Integrated Resource Project draft contain Forest Service’s intentions to log merely for financial gain – despite massive tax subsidies and the true costs of logging, which likely involve the loss of $1,000 of forest benefits for every dollar made by the timber industry – the Forest Service also appears to be dishonestly exploiting the concept of “restoration” to continue to get out the cut.

On page 5 of the Upper White River Integrated Resource Project draft, in “Goal 2, Issue 2, Priority 3” the Forest Service recommendation is to: “Provide timber sales and vegetation management that converts northern hardwood stands to softwood, pioneer species and openings….” (the text seems to be cut off in the document).

The rationale for this concept of “restoring softwood” stands appears on the Green Mountain National Forest website: (http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/gmfl/about/index.htm)

"As a result of farming and logging activity, Vermont's forests went under a drastic transition. From a largely softwood forest with timber often reaching some 140 feet high, Vermont has become a hardwood forest within a predominately rural setting. This transition was caused by the natural regeneration of logged areas and abandoned farms with crowded and, for years, less valued stands of Pin Cherry, Poplar, Beech, White Birch, and other fast growth hardwoods."

However, contradicting this dubious assertion is data from “The forests of presettlement New England, USA: spatial and compositional patterns based on town proprietor surveys,” by Cogbill, Burk and Motzkin, 2002, which suggests that “the presettlement northern hardwood forests (were) absolutely dominated by beech” and that “this study resets some preconceptions about the original forest, such as the overestimation of the role of pine, hemlock and chestnut.”

According to the 2002 study, the estimates in order of most common tree species in pre-settlement Vermont were: Beech (36.0%), Maples (15.3%), Spruces (12.3%), Hemlock (11.1%), Birches (8.6%), Ashes (2.6%), Fir (2.5%), Pines (2.2%), Oaks (2.1%), Ironwoods (2.0%), Basswood (1.9%). Including several other species of hardwoods in the tally, overall hardwood species consisted of over 70% of Vermont’s original forests, contrary to the Forest Service’s version of a mainly coniferous forest.

If the Forest Service has an honest desire to conduct legitimate restoration, its first step should be to regain the public trust which has been lost after decades of acting as little more than handmaidens of the logging industry. Honest restoration would prioritize actions such as obliterating sediment-spewing roads, as opposed to much of what amounts to no more than mitigation – replacing culverts, while often necessary to mitigate the damage Forest Service logging roads have caused, does NOT “restore” a watershed.

Every time the Forest Service exploits “restoration” as a way to simply log and profit from the sale of the public’s trees, such as the Upper White River Integrated Resource Project draft leads us to believe, it only further jeopardizes the credibility of any genuine recovery or restoration projects the agency might have planned for the future.