A Forest of Objections: The Effort to Drop NEPA Review for National Forest Management Act Plans

• Date: 01 July 2009

7-2009 nEwS & anaLYSiS 39 ELR 10651

A Forest of Objections: The Effort

to Drop NEPA Review for National

Forest Management Act Plans

by Nathaniel S.W. Lawrence

Nathaniel S.W. Lawrence is a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Twice in recent years, the U.S. Forest Service has

decided it could and should stop conducting envi-

ronmental review under the National Environmental

Policy Act (NEPA)1 for the long-range management plans

it periodically must produce for individual national forests

(or in some cases groups of forests). is is, at the very least,

counterintuitive. ese plans govern how the environment

is shaped over the course of a decade or more, on many mil-

lions of acres of public land. What could be more deserv-

ing of plenary environmental review? e Forest Service

has several reasons why it sees the answer to this question as

“almost anything.” After sketching the context for the For-

est Service’s eort, I review below its principal arguments

and their failings, and nish with thoughts about how most

constructively to approach some of the underlying concerns.

Forest management is a paradigm case of the need to con-

sider long-term consequences in near-term decisionmaking.

Trees take decades to reach commercial logging size. Groves

take centuries to mature into old growth. Soils need mil-

lennia to develop. Fish and wildlife species, plants, and eco-

logical communities evolve over millions of years. e short

time horizons utilized d ay-to-day by many people and most

business models are ill-suited to dealing with these processes.

Take the short view and in short order you may wind up with

no forest at all.

National forests are a special case within this class. What-

ever the need for planning in forest management, the ratio-

nale is substantially greater for national forests. First, there

is the issue of accountability: public ownership means t hat

if foresters fail to manage wisely enough, the forest they

run into the ground is someone else’s. Second, a nd closely

related, is the need to accommodate public input about pub-

lic resources and public funding in some way that is both

manageable and meaningful. And third, the diversity of

public interests in forest values dictates that management

1. 42 U.S.C. §§4321-4370f, ELR S. NEPA §§2-209.

somehow accommodate a large array of sometimes conict-

ing factors.2

Regularized long-range planning accommodates all of

these needs. It furnishes performance criteria for account-

ability. It organizes public input at regular intervals. A nd it

creates a forum for balancing interests in something more

than an ad hoc fashion.

In this country, national forests do, in fact, get regular

long-range planning. e Forest Service conducts peri-

odic resource planning pursuant to a detai led statute, the

National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976.3 Before

the NFM A, t he Forest Service planned for national forests

utilizing various approaches of its own device, often creating

dierent plans for dierent resources or uses.4 By the mid-

1970s, however, trust in the Forest Service’s d iscretion had

declined sharply. e NFMA was proposed, in part, to stop

the Forest Service from pursuing commercial logging to the

detriment of the broader public interest, to keep it, as Sen.

Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) put it at the time, from “turn-

ing the national forests into tree production programs which

override other values.”5

e NFMA mandates adoption, and regular revision at no

more than 15-year intervals, of comprehensive, unied man-

2. See 16 U.S.C. §475 (“No national forest shall be established, except to im-

prove and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of secur-

ing favorable conditions of water ows, and to furnish a continuous supply of

timber for the use and necessities of the citizens of the United States . . . .”); 16

U.S.C. §528 (“It is the policy of Congress that the national forests are estab-

lished . . . for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and

sh purposes.”); 16 U.S.C. §529 (“areas of wilderness are consistent with the

purposes and provisions of sections 528 to 531 of this title”). is distinguish-

es national forests from many state lands, established with a specic mandate

to generate income for an identied public purpose. Similarly, planning for

national parks and wildlife refuges in the United States reects somewhat more

focused mandates. See 16 U.S.C. §1 (national parks); 16 U.S.C. §668(dd)

(national wildlife refuges).

3. e NFMA’s planning provisions are codied at 16 U.S.C. §1604.

4. See generally, C F. W  H. M A, L 

R P   N F 19-36 (1987).

5. Quoted in id. at 70.