contact Michael Garrity, Executive Director, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, (406) 459-5936
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council are pleased to announce that the Lewis and Clark National Forest has withdrawn the planned Blakenship Vegetation Treatment Project in response to their joint Appeal. The timber sale called for logging and prescribed burning of 1200 acres and the building 5.8 miles of new temporary roads in and around inventoried roadless areas in the Little Belt Mountains east of Monarch, Montana. The logging was planned for the areas next to roadless areas and the burning was planned in the roadless areas. The groups contended that the logging would have violated the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and the Lewis and Clark National Forest Plan.
“The Forest Service made the right decision to pull back this bad timber sale,” said Mike Garrity, the Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “The proposal called for logging and burning in lynx, goshawk and wolverine habitat, but the National Forest Management Act requires the agency to ensure that there are viable populations of wildlife in the forest after they log,” Garrity said. “Simply put, the Forest Service couldn’t find any wolverines or active goshawk nests in the project area because past logging had destroyed their habitat and driven them off, so the agency was already in violation of federal law.”
“The Forest Service’s own studies show that logging destroys goshawk and lynx habitat since it drives out the snowshoe hare and ground squirrels upon which they prey,” Garrity explained. “Far from restoring the habitat, logging will destroy the area not only for lynx and goshawks, but also many other old growth dependent species.”
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently found that wolverine were at risk of going extinct and the agency’s own scientists recommended protecting habitat for wolverines,” added Dr. Sara Jane Johnson, Ph.D., the Executive Director of the Native Ecosystems Council and a former Forest Service biologist. “Those recommendations included avoiding logging big game winter range since it provides a consistent supply of carcasses for wolverine to scavenge. Unfortunately, the Blackenship proposal called for logging and building nearly six miles of new roads in wolverine habitat.”
“Although the Federal government is under a Court Order to examine occupied lynx habitat in the Little Belt Mountains to see if it qualifies as lynx Critical Habitat, the Lewis and Clark National Forest proposed more logging in important lynx habit, which is simply not the way to recover this endangered species,” Johnson concluded.
“Everyone knows that soil is a critical component to nearly every ecosystem in the world, sustaining life in a variety of ways,” added Garrity. “Yet, the Forest Service admitted in its Environmental Assessment that the timber sale would violate their soil quality standards after the project was done. The soil standards were put into place to ensure that logging and road building do not erode away too much soil and introduce too many noxious weeds to keep a new forest from growing after the area is logged.”
The final result, Garrity concluded, “is that this was an illegal timber sale that focused on getting the cut out for a non-existent timber market at a cost to taxpayers of over $2 million dollars. When our government is going broke, the last thing America needs is more corporate welfare for the timber industry.”
Lewis and Clark Acting National Forest Supervisor Michael Munoz withdrew the Blakenship Vegetation Treatment Project Decision Notice on November 14, 2011.
