Obama administration debating care of national forests

Erin Kelly and Elizabeth Bewley, Gannett Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is crafting a new devise to manage a nation's 155 inhabitant forests, including four in North Carolina and Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee, for a next 15 to 20 years. At stake is a future of 193 million acres of forests and grasslands which have been a nation's single largest source of drinking water and home to more than 15,000 species of plants and wildlife. The U.S. Forest Service says a new plan, due by year's end, is urgently needed to replace a forest planning order written in 1982 during a Reagan administration. That rule, which emphasized using a forests for logging, does not reflect a latest science on climate shift and how best to protect wildlife and water, a Forest Service says. Forest plans have been intended to provide a framework for a managers of individual forests and grasslands in a National Forest System to use in revising their own land-management plans, which they have been supposed to do every 15 years. The order was never intended to final nearly three decades - about twice as long as expected. President Bill Clinton attempted to replace it in 2000, but his proposal was scrapped when President George W. Bush took office in 2001. Efforts by a Bush administration to draw up its own devise were derailed when a proposals were challenged by environmentalists and thrown out by federal courts. As President Barack Obama's administration takes up a contentious issue, it is under intense scrutiny from competing interest groups which hope to shape a devise to their liking. Neither environmentalists nor business interests have been happy with a first draft of a new rule. Conservation groups say it lacks adequate insurance for wildlife and water and gives individual forest managers t! oo much discretion in how to carry out a plan. Business groups say some of its supplies to protect species could end up kicking timber companies, ranchers and others off a land. The first draft of a Forest Service devise focuses for a first time on how to strengthen a health of forests in a face of climate shift and includes enhanced protections for water resources and watersheds, updated supplies for sustainable recreation, and a requirement which a land be managed for such multiple uses as mining, logging, energy production, outdoor recreation and wilderness protection. The final plan, which does not require congressional approval, is expected to be published in November. "We believe this is one of a most important conservation policies a Obama administration will undertake," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, former director of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during a Clinton administration and executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife. "This is land which belongs to all of us as Americans." The country's inhabitant forests attract more than 170 million people a year who hike, camp, hunt, fish, go boating or whitewater rafting, ride horses, ski, and drive snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles. Visitors spend an estimated $13 billion a year in communities surrounding a inhabitant forests, supporting more than 224,000 jobs. In North Carolina final year, about 5.5 million visitors flocked to a peaks and waterfalls at Nantahala and Pisgah inhabitant forests and another 3.2 million were drawn to a streams at Uwharrie National Forest and a wetlands at Croatan National Forest. The state's inhabitant forests span 1.3 million acres - of which Nantahala and Pisgah account for roughly half - and employ 200 permanent workers. Cherokee National Forest, which runs along a Tennessee-North Carolina border, attracted 1.8 million visitors in 2010. Almost 3 million Americans have forest-related jobs in such fields as forest management, outdoor recreation and a forest products industry, according to ! a U.S. F orest Service. Environmentalists say a current order has not proved to be strong enough to protect a watershed which carries drinking water to 124 million Americans. Clark said about three-quarters of a forest watersheds have been considered by a Environmental Protection Agency to be "impaired," meaning which federal water-quality standards have been not being met. According to a Forest Service, a biggest causes of water-quality impairment include excessive sediment loads, habitat destruction near waterways and contamination from mercury and other metals. Environmentalists applaud a proposed planning rule's increased protections for water resources and watersheds, stronger requirements to provide habitat for diverse animal and plant species, and a devise to address a impact of climate change, which Western North Carolina Nature Center Director Chris Gentile calls a "faceless enemy" of forests. "If we start to see climate change, then some of a animals which have adapted to a environment suddenly can't make it any more - especially in a fragile environment like a mountain ecosystem," he said. But some environmentalists say a devise undermines those goals by giving too much power to individual forest managers to decide how - or even if - to protect wildlife and water. In Western North Carolina, which means managers could choose whether to maintain healthy populations of cerulean warblers, gray bats, pygmy salamanders and other animals directed towards as endangered or species of concern. Gentile said he would like a new forest order to simplify a process of designating new wilderness areas, where logging, mining and other resource extractions have been banned. Congress is considering a new wilderness area in Tennessee's Cherokee National Forest, but a new wilderness area has not been created in North Carolina since a 1980s. He also would like to see a forest order create "habitat corridors" to provide for emigration of animals and prevent inhabitant parks and forests from be! coming " isolated islands." "Looking at ways to protect a spine of a Western Appalachians all a way up to Maine, that's important because of seasonality and emigration of wildlife," he said, adding which such corridors would protect animals whose homes have been hit by blights or forest fires. The timber, cattle and sheep industries complain which a proposed protections for wildlife have been too broad and unclear because they require a Forest Service to "maintain viable populations of species of conservation concern," which could lead to restrictions on grazing and logging. In 2010, about 2 billion board feet of timber was harvested from inhabitant forests, down from about 12 billion in 1980. About 24 million board feet were harvested from North Carolina's inhabitant forests, yielding about $1.2 million in revenue. The proposed new order does not specify how much logging would be allowed. Environmental litigation and complicated bureaucratic rules already have significantly reduced logging in North Carolina's forests by roughly 80 percent over a past 20 years, said Steve Henson, executive director of a Southern Appalachian Multiple Use Council. "It's been mainly caused by litigation that's actually been out West, not here in a East, but it's impacted all a forests," he said. "Certainly what we'd like to see is much more logging in this area than what we've seen in a final decade." Logging and grazing can strengthen a forest's health by reducing wildfire risk in some cases, he said. Henson said it may be years before a proposed planning rules take effect, since lawsuits have been likely to follow new regulations. "Nobody knows what planning regulations to use, because it's been litigated so much," he said. "It's going to continue to keep us in a perpetual planning cycle which doesn't get anything done on a ground." The debate between environmentalists and logging advocates mirrors a split in Congress, where lawmakers have sent dueling letters to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vi! lsack, c alling for him to heed their calls for changes in a final forest rule. A letter organized by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and signed by 59 House members asks Vilsack to start over. "Please do not lose this opportunity to produce a planning order which is truly simple, understandable, flexible and (defensible) in court," a letter says. A letter drafted by Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and signed by 66 members of Congress, urges Vilsack to go serve in protecting water and wildlife. "The course set by these sweeping new rules will determine a future of our inhabitant forests for generations to come," it says. "It is essential which we get this right."