Tuesday, February 07, 2012 – Capital Press
The U.S. Forest Service violated environmental law by approving a plan to increase allowable logging levels on national forests in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, according to a federal appeals court.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned federal judge’s ruling that sided with the Forest Service.
The agency failed to take a sufficiently “hard look” at the effects of the plan on individual species of fish, violating the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the 2-1 majority opinion of the three-judge panel.
The legal controversy stems from changes made by the Bush administration to a plan developed under the Clinton administration for managing national forests in the region.
The Sierra Nevada Forest Plan, which governs management in 11 national forests across nearly 11.5 million acres, was updated by the Clinton administration in 2001.
Under the Bush administration, the Forest Service again revised the plan in 2004 to significantly increase allowable levels of logging over about two decades. The new plan would have permitted logging of 6.4 billion board feet of timber — more than four times the level allowed under the previous version.
The Pacific Rivers Council, an environmental group, challenged the plan based on alleged shortcomings in how the agency evaluated effects on fish and amphibians.
U.S. District Judge Morrison England dismissed the complaint in 2008, ruling that “the Forest Service had the policy discretion to change the framework to provide more or less emphasis to any given resource or interest, so long as essential protections were afforded.”
The 9th Circuit has upheld that ruling regarding amphibians, finding that the Forest Service had site-specific measures to minimize harm to such species. However, the court said the agency’s analysis of the revised plan was inadequate regarding fish.
The 2004 plan relies on environmental findings from the previous plan “but contains no analysis of additional or different environmental consequences … even though the new framework authorizes substantially more environment-altering activities,” the majority opinion said.
The Forest Service promises to conduct site-specific studies on individual fish species “but that promise is not fulfilled,” the ruling said.
Circuit Judge Randy Smith filed a dissenting opinion, finding that the majority opinion overstepped the court’s bounds by not deferring to the agency’s expertise.