BACKGROUND
California’s commercial logging practices cry out for fundamental reform. In the 40 years since the state Forest Practice Act became law the vision of this landmark measure has never been fully achieved. Sadly, not even close.
Still missing is attainment of a vital goal: meaningful assessment of cumulative, or comprehensive, effects of all logging projects taken together, in any given watershed. The California Environmental Quality Act requires that this goal be an integral part of forestry regulation.
Not surprisingly, however, the timber industry has spared no expense since then to seize and maintain control of the environmental regulatory process. It has spent millions on lobbying, litigation, and public relations. As a result, Big Timber stands today as the dominant player by far, and sadly has “captured” the very state agencies that are tasked with safeguarding the state’s waters, wildlife, watersheds, and other public trust values against wasteful and destructive logging practices.
Enter AB 1492, which in 2012 capped the industry’s financial liability for the impacts of forests fires, and ended all permit fees the timber companies had up to that time been required to pay for the regulation of forest practices. Under AB 1492 the permit fees were replaced by a one percent tax on lumber products.
The new statute also called for the determination of "efficiencies" and "ecological performance" standards. "Efficiencies" refers to the implementation of various timber-related environmental laws and regulations simultaneously and seamlessly, without redundancy or conflicting approaches. Examples of such laws and regs would include those implementing the California Endangered Species Act, ensuring the sequestration of greenhouse gases by forests, and attainment of acceptable water quality standards.
Determination of "ecological performance" is inherently political, as it would address a wide range of environmental values variously held by an array of stakeholders, from agencies to timber companies to ordinary citizens: What do we mean by "clean water" in the wake of logging in a given area? How do we agree upon-- and measure-- whether watersheds and wildlife habitat are "healthy" and "productive" after timber extraction?
To have any validity and credibility, the relevant scientific tools and methods developed in implementing AB 1492 must be put together with active input from all stakeholders-- all the people who have a stake in the outcome of logging operations in the very watersheds that provide California’s drinking water, on the lands which drive its largest economic sectors, such as tourism and recreation, and more. That input includes the public’s!
Unfortunately, however, an agency- and industry-controlled coalition has been attempting to hijack this reform process. They are backing a so-called "Effectiveness Monitoring Committee" (EMC) which they have engineered, and are taking other steps to develop the new approach to their liking.
The EMC would be made up of the usual cast of timber industry-oriented agency officials and experts, and they would position the EMC as the place where any proposed environmental regulations can be ground down to insignificance or jettisoned.
Recently Forests Forever alerted its supporters to the situation, and your letters and calls were heard. Thanks for speaking out! Since then key agency officials have been downplaying the EMC’s originally stated role, even as they generate new impressive-looking flow charts to bolster their desired approach!
Several "Budget Change Proposals (BCPs)" have been introduced-- legislation that would sideline upwards of $3 million in the 2014-15 fiscal year alone. These funds apparently would go toward staffing the EMC and hiring independent consults to develop “ecological performance” standards and a public-inclusion process.
The bulk of the funds, however, would go toward forest-restoration grants for two consecutive fiscal years. While this sounds good it is a smokescreen! These expenditures ostensibly would clean up damage left behind from past logging operations in specific locales, while providing no assurance whatsoever that adequate reforms would be made to the underlying forest practices that gave rise to the damage in the first place; no assurance is given that standards would be developed for assessing cumulative watershed effects of logging; no assurance that restoration activities would be integrated into forest practices going forward; and no assurance for adequately organizing and making accessible vital information needed for environmental assessment and monitoring.
This $3 million, and future such allocations, can do little toward restoring the thousands of miles of watercourses in California damaged by past logging practices: The allocation is a drop in the bucket! Its true purpose is to look like an earnest restoration effort. In fact, it is intended to draw attention away from the real, fundamental reform needed—reform that will require that industry share a seat at the table with environmental advocates, the concerned public, and other stakeholders with diverse backgrounds. We must not spend millions of dollars on projects that only draw attention away from fundamental reform, the proverbial "elephant in the room!"
More ominously, beyond the restoration grants funding, nearly $900,000 in additional monies that would be provided by the BCPs would be used to hire personnel tasked with keeping the public convinced that its participation is meaningful and that real change is taking place.
We must take action immediately to stop this travesty and demand that a truly meaningful process instead be put into place— one already outlined in detail in legislation sponsored by Forests Forever in recent years. This better approach starts with conducting two or more forest/watershed foundational pilot projects-- managed by qualified scientists and other stakeholders including the public-- in a transparent process that ensures both accountability and oversight! The first step of these pilot projects would be to understand and develop an appropriate response to actual conditions in the forests as they exist currently. This description of actual conditions is an essential precursor to developing the "efficiencies" and "ecological performance" standards that can then be incorporated into improved forest practices.
The EMC is nothing more than a direct arm of forest regulators and industry. Instead there needs to be a high-level, truly independent effort. We have seen a cycle of failed attempts at regulation too many times already!
As any good mariner knows, setting sail for a given port requires more than just knowing that port’s coordinates on the map. To lay in a course to the destination the captain must first know where his or her ship is located, now! Only then can a course toward the goal be determined with any meaning. The alternative is at best inefficient, rudderless drift, albeit possibly with the best of intentions.
The analogy is a good one as regards the need for forest pilot projects funded by AB 1492—independent of control by the timber industry, and guided by meaningful participation by all stakeholders in the logging process-- the public, landowners, regulatory watchdogs, and others-- not just the industry!
Without foundational pilot projects that will establish our true position on the ground—in terms of the real, existing, present-day condition of soils, streams, watersheds, and wildlife we can do little to map a realistic course toward the goal of healthy and restored forests.
Restoration grants are wonderful—but only after pilot projects have laid down the science and guidance that establishes the framework for where and how the restoration projects should proceed.
The BCPs have it backwards. Foundational pilot projects must be the starting point on this long-awaited journey! Many agency players, in some cases challenged by inter- and intra-agency dysfunction as to goals and turf, want to keep our gaze averted from this inconvenient fact!
Timber Harvest Plans (THPs), which have been submitted by the timber companies ever since the Forest Practice Act came into being, represent a wealth of potentially useful data concerning on-the-ground conditions in forests. Foresters, hired by the timber operators, are required to walk every watercourse and provide a description and mapping aimed at taking into account potential adverse impacts on those watercourses. Many watersheds even have had fully digitized information gathered in the THP preparation process.
Yet this valuable trove of material up to now has been wasted on account of data incompatibilities, redundancies, and lack of appropriate organization in central and accessible locales.
Past actions by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have ignored this vast and inexcusable waste of resources. The current EMC sham and the enabling BCPs now introduced are aimed at further institutionalizing this travesty.
The foundational pilot projects need to determine the minimum acceptable types, standards, and formats of information that are necessary in logging plans so that cumulative impacts can be responded to, recovery and restoration measures can be taken, and simple, doable monitoring can occur.
This information needs to be easily accessible on a watershed basis and useful to all interested parties in the conservation and protection of forestland resources in California.
Stream temperatures, canopy cover, siltation and erosion, damage to wildlife habitat…. These and other parameters can be examined in dedicated pilot projects. And, through a process involving transparency and true public participation, the most-efficient scientific techniques and methodologies to understand and regulate these impacts can be developed, standardized and later applied.
Failure to properly assess and regulate “cumulative watershed effects” from logging has for more than four decades stood as the most glaring loophole in California’s forestry laws. This shortcoming has drawn blistering criticism not only from environmentalists but also from federal wildlife agencies, blue-ribbon science panels, and good-government interest groups.
This failure has contributed to the decline of the state’s salmon and steelhead fisheries, as well as to air and water pollution, degraded wildlife habitat and recreation values, increased wildfire danger, and many other costly problems.
But every time an effort has been mounted to address the problem, Big Timber and its allies in the California Dept. of Forestry and the state Board of Forestry have managed to take control of the process and render the result weak and riddled with loopholes—little different than what had come before!
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