On Friday, Molloy heard a last hour of arguments over the Bitterroot National Forest's Middle East Fork Hazardous Fuel Reduction Project. He promised a prompt decision.
Missoula's WildWest Institute and Friends of the Bitterroot sued the U.S. Forest Service last April over the agency's proposal to reduce fuels on a little over 4,000 acres in the Middle East Fork of the Bitterroot.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Molloy didn't abuse his discretion in turning down the preliminary injunction.
The two environmental groups want the court to set aside the Forest Service's decision and grant a permanent injunction.
But the Forest Service has awarded a contract on the timber sale. Rocky Mountain Log Homes of Hamilton began logging operations at the site about three weeks ago.
On Friday, the environmental groups' attorney, Thomas Woodbury, argued the agency had neither properly addressed the cumulative impacts of historical logging in the area nor properly assessed the remaining old-growth timber.
At the core of the group's complaint, Woodbury said the agency failed to address a federal requirement that says management actions can't create irreversible damage to soils. The agency's threshold for irreversible damage to the soil is 15 percent, Woodbury said.
Since the area was logged heavily in the 1960s - a time when logging technology was heavier on the land - Woodbury contends that threshold has already been met in the watersheds.
The Forest Service calculated its soil measurements inside the units planned for thinning.
“That's cherry picking,” he said. “It doesn't address the cumulative impacts basinwide.”
Woodbury said the agency also used a subjective technique to decide which trees were alive and which had been killed by bark beetles. Woodbury said the agency guessed which of the infected trees would survive and that decision skewed which acres were considered as old-growth habitat.
“It's all guess work,” he said. “We'd like to know how many live trees were called dead. We'd like to see surveys and data sheets that indicate how many trees were imminently dead, dead and alive.”
Lori Caramanian, the Forest Service's attorney, said the Bitterroot National Forest took a hard look at cumulative impacts to soils.
The agency's soil scientist took 3,889 samples in the area in preparation for the project, she said. The conclusion: A total of 288 acres out of the 25,800-acre project area would have additional soil impacts. About 4,100 acres would be logged.
In order to keep those impacts to a minimum, Caramanian said the agency required the logging contractor to use helicopters and other low-impact techniques.
“The Forest Service used very conservative harvest methods,” she said.
Agency employees spent a lot of time in the field in preparation for the project, she said. “There were field visits to every single stand by multiple people on multiple occasions.”
While the groups may argue that every green tree is a live tree, Caramanian said it's not that simple. The Forest Service should be allowed to determine whether a tree has succumbed to bark beetles or not, she said.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)