Utah Environmental Congress:
In The News

Deseret Morning News, Sunday, January 09, 2005

Bush administration putting wildlife heritage in danger

By Kevin Mueller
 

On my visits to Boulder Mountain on the Dixie National Forest the past few years, the one thing that has stood out is the eerie silence. It is not a good silence. Missing is the symphony of chirping songbirds in the conifers. Missing is the tap-tap-tapping of woodpeckers on the snags. And, most important, is the absence of the screaming swoop overhead of goshawks defending their territories.
 

Goshawk is a keystone species for mixed conifer forests. Their abundance is an ecological indicator of the relative health of a diversity of wildlife dependent on conifer forests. The National Forest Management Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon, states the Forest Service must create rules that ensure fish and wildlife populations on each forest are sustained. In relation, the Reagan administration wrote a rule that created a management shortcut to meet this part of NFMA. Forests are required to select keystone species, or management indicator species, in their forest plans and keep an eye on their population trends. If their population crashes, forests are required to adjust management accordingly or change the forest plan direction as needed to ensure that NFMA's requirement that populations of all fish and wildlife are maintained on each forest.
 

All six national forests in Utah have chosen the goshawk as the MIS management shortcut to determine the viability of wildlife communities dependent on old growth conifer forest. The Dixie National Forest plan states the minimum viable population for goshawk MIS is 40 pairs. Thanks to President Reagan's environmental safeguards that require forests to observe the population trends of MIS, the Dixie knows that its silent forest is a problem that must be addressed: Goshawk populations have crashed — with only three productive nests across the whole forest in 2003. In light of this, the Dixie is required by Reagan's rules to evaluate the viability of the species and the need to change direction in the forest plan so the goshawk will recover.
 

This requirement to evaluate changes in management to avoid wildlife population crashes are proposed to be eliminated entirely in a 160-page set of new rules put out by the Bush administration on Christmas Eve. Under the stripped-down rules, there will be no requirement that forests monitor and maintain viable populations of fish and wildlife . . . none. The crashing wildlife populations on the Dixie National Forest will literally no longer be a problem required to fix. Under the new rules, there is absolutely nothing to compel a forest to change management direction even if a forest notices that the population of an important wildlife species is crashing because of logging, mining, road construction or oil and gas development.
 

Hunters and wildlife viewers beware: Nixon saw the need for NFMA to have enforceable management sideboards that maintain viable fish and wildlife populations and curb unsustainable resource extraction. Reagan saw the need to write environmental rules streamlining Nixon's sideboards by focusing on keystone MIS species and using informed adaptive management. Conversely, the new rules propose to return forest management to the admittedly unsustainable days of the 1960s and early 1970s prior to the creation of the NFMA.
 

For example, when President Ford and Congress passed the NFMA in 1976, it required the Forest Service to write regulations that specify what areas can maintain timber production. This was done in response to public outcry and a 1975 court decision that banned clear-cutting on the Monongahela National Forest. With NFMA, clear-cutting was reinstituted but with specific safeguards to prevent the recurrence of unsustainable logging. Certain forested areas were not to be logged because of the inability to regenerate the forest or because it would be impossible to prevent damage to the soil and water. The new Bush regulations fail to address any of these basic concerns and do not contain any provisions that compel protection of soils, water and wildlife from logging. Read between the lines of the 160-pages of "political" science and you will see the stage has been set for losing much more than rich populations of fish and wildlife — we are losing our national heritage as well.

Kevin Mueller is the executive director of the Utah Environmental Congress