After the U.S. Forest Service unveiled a proposal last month to give Montana’s lumber industry a “predictable” timber supply from three national forests, questions about the agency’s plan to incorporate an 82-year-old law into a modern forest-management framework abounded.
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After the U.S. Forest Service unveiled a proposal last month to give Montana’s lumber industry a “predictable” timber supply from three national forests, questions about the agency’s plan to incorporate an 82-year-old law into a modern forest-management framework abounded.
would direct the Helena-Lewis and Clark, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Custer Gallatin national forests to supply local businesses with at least 35 million board feet of timber per year. The Forest Service is pitching the proposal as a tool to sustain local economies and encourage investment in the lumber industry for the 22-county region included in the unit. It’s necessary, the agency says, because therecent hearing the Forest Service hosted in Helena , the proposal drew a mixed reception. Some commenters offered tentative support, tempered with skepticism that the agency will meet its established goals. Others voiced opposition to the overarching premise, arguing that logging shouldn’t take priority over other purposes national forests serve such as supporting wildlife habitat, providing the public with recreational access, and protecting healthy watersheds. Still others questioned whether a decades-old law that will limit competition for federal timber is the right tool to bolster Montana’s Montana Free Press spoke with agency officials and local stakeholders to garner more information about the history of sustained yield units, how this one intersects with environmental laws, and what’s next for the Tri-Forest Federal Sustained Yield Unit. This is what we learned.
Congress passed the Sustained Yield Forest Management Act in 1944 to provide timber towns near national forests with a continuous supply of lumber. According to athe goal of the act was to give mills and timber-adjacent businesses enough raw material to stay economically viable while discouraging the “cut-and-run” approach timber barons used at the turn of the century.
acres of national forest that has already been designated “timber emphasis land” on the Helena-Lewis and Clark, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Custer Gallatin national forests. If all goes according to plan, at least 35 million board feet of sawlogs and other material felled from the 22-county area incorporated in the unit would be delivered and processed at facilities within the boundary each year. The proposal, outlined in a, lists the 25 businesses incorporated in the unit. About half of them are mills; the other half includes fencing companies and construction businesses that work with the smaller-diameter material. According to Chelsea Pennick, the University of Idaho professor who authored “Revisiting Sustained Yield Units,” the framework has demonstrated shortcomings in the decades since the law that established it passed. Pennick wrote that the act gave the Forest Service considerable discretion to develop a sustained yield unit in pursuit of a larger “community stability” objective, but some clear tradeoffs emerged. Those include the “monopoly effect” they created and a reversal of the Forest Service historical orientation toward supporting competition and maximizing returns to the federal treasury. She also noted that development of sustained yield units stoked fears that private companies would have greater influence over national forest management.
HOW DOES A SUSTAINED YIELD UNIT DIFFER FROM THE STANDARD PROCESS FOR CONDUCTING A TIMBER SALE? According to both the Forest Service and industry representatives, the proposal won’t dramatically change the volume of timber coming out of the three forests included in the unit. How timber is harvested won’t change significantly either, according to Nick Horn, Sun Mountain Lumber’s outreach forester. What will change is who is authorized to submit a bid in the initial timber sale and where the wood will go for processing. The unit was drafted using areas that existing forest plans — overarching visions for managing a given forest to meet myriad objectives — designate as areas suitable for timber production. The agency said the proposal won’t authorize logging in wilderness areas or wilderness study areas, or pave the way for new roads to be built in established roadless areas — at least for the time being.
Clint Nagel, president of Gallatin Wildlife Association, is concerned that the Forest Service will find a way to use the proposal to subvert NEPA. He also argues that history has shown that other benefits intact forests provide to federal land — watershed protection, for example — have been “corrupted by the timber industry.” He fears that will happen here, too.
According to Cipriano, there aren’t any regulatory mechanisms that will “increase or enforce program outputs” even if the agency decides to move forward with the proposal. She wrote that the unit is instead designed to “demonstrate the Forest Service’s long-term commitment to a sustainable supply of timber for local processing infrastructure.” This is one of Horn’s critiques of the project. He described it as a “landscape-level directive” that’s “not enforceable by anyone.” Between wildfire and litigation, he said, a lot of variables exist that could keep the Forest Service from hitting its targets. Cipriano said the Forest Service anticipates adopting a final decision on the proposal in the coming months. If it authorizes the plan, the unit will remain in effect for 10 years. At the end of that 10-year period, the agency could dissolve the unit, make adjustments to it, or reauthorize it for another 10 years.
Montana Animals General News MT State Wire Hilary Eisen Emily Platt Climate And Environment Clint Nagel Michael Garrity U.S. News Chiara Cipriano Business Nick Horn Climate U.S. News
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