In her recent commentary, Mary O’Brien paints a highly misleading picture of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to improve their decision-making under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Ultimately, Ms. O’Brien is attempting to defend the status quo, a litigation-driven approach that has resulted in over 80 million acres of National Forest Service lands being at-risk of catastrophic wildfires, insect infestations and disease.
Utahans, like many Americans across the West, are frustrated with the Forest Service’s inability to protect our communities and public lands from devastation. The agency’s proposed NEPA regulations represent an effort to address those frustrations, and to better enable its personnel to meet the needs of these public lands and its many diverse users.
NEPA requires agencies to assess and disclose the potential environmental effects of proposed actions prior to making decisions. Ms. O’Brien cites her interactions with the Bureau of Land Management as an example of how federal agencies should work with the public on land management activities. Yet the BLM is far more efficient in satisfying its NEPA requirements.
The BLM is able to complete its environmental documents in far less time, and less cost, despite managing far more acres than the Forest Service. According to the Forest Service, it takes them an average of over 700 days simply to prepare a single environmental assessment, typically at a cost of over $500,000 per document, to conduct necessary treatments on a fire-prone forest. By comparison, the Bureau of Indian Affairs typically completes an environmental assessment in one month.
With such analysis paralysis, the Forest Service is failing to restore our national forests at an adequate pace and scale with millions of acres burning every year, and with wildfire suppression constantly draining the agency’s budget.
Ms. O’Brien’s statement that 93.3% of all Forest Service decisions “will lose all the current advance notice and public comment requirements” is simply not true. She is assuming that all Forest Service actions will be taken through the use of “categorical exclusions.”
These are a classification under NEPA that excludes often-routine activities from more time-consuming analysis. They are often used by a variety of federal agencies including the Forest Service. The agency will continue to develop environmental assessments and environmental impact statements for those projects that require such analysis.
The agency’s proposed regulations include a limited “restoration” CE for forest projects that would enhance ecosystem health and watershed conditions, only where those forest management activities would not have a significant effect on the human environment. Any use of a CE, whether to harvest timber or provide access to a hiking trail, must be consistent with existing federal environmental laws and regulations, as well as forest plans that are subject to exhaustive environmental analysis and public input.
Aside from improving forest management, a major goal of the proposed NEPA regulations is to streamline approvals for outdoor recreation providers. Most of the environmental decisions made by the Forest Service relate to special use permits, such as those authorizing outfitters to lead guided hikes on national forest hiking trails. The agency estimates more than 5,000 new special use permits and renewals are awaiting environmental analyses and decisions. More than 7,000 businesses and 120,000 jobs are affected by this process.
Other CEs in the proposed NEPA regulations are aimed at improving the agency’s ability to manage roads, trails and recreation facilities. The changes would allow the Forest Service to more easily implement needed infrastructure projects and improvements to recreation sites such as trailheads, campgrounds, fishing sites and ski areas. Anyone who recreates on our national forests and requires Forest Service facilities and access should support these regulations.
The primary intention of the Forest Service’s proposed regulations is to ensure the agency conducts the right amount of science-based environmental analysis while reducing redundancy in paperwork. It incorporates a decade of experience, extensive analyses and over a year of public input from forest stakeholders. The agency has not updated these regulations since 2008, before changing climate conditions, spiraling firefighting costs and other factors started to pose significant challenges to public lands management.
If you think the Forest Service should make better decisions, more quickly, and at less cost, we should encourage the agency to move forward.
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is executive director of Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities, a grassroots organization advocating for better management of federally owned forest lands.