Private Companies That Damage the National Forests Should Pay for Their Repair

Mining, timber and grazing on the national forests for the last 100 years have left a huge swath of devastation for the public to repair. Tens of thousands of abandoned mines litter the forests. Clear-cuts and fire suppression paved the way for forest-destroying fires. Barely regulated grazing has destroyed miles of streams and trampled endangered species. Thousands of poisonous pools of spilled oil and gas, greenhouse gas emissions, uranium contamination, silted and polluted streams and rivers, degraded prairies and wetlands, and lost biological diversity are the norm in your National Forests. The litany of destruction is extensive.

The Forest Service thinks this is just the way it should be, in spite of the general public’s belief that our national forests are places that should be protected for the benefit of the entire nation. These forests are what’s left of the immense, primeval natural bounty of North America. However, the negative impacts are uncounted costs paid for by the taxpayers, as owners of our public lands. By allowing such vast destruction, the Forest Service effectively provides a significant subsidy to forest products, mining, grazing and energy companies.

But the era of such protected subsidies is about to end.

President Barack Obama sees the national forests as a tool to combat climate change, while securing many other forest services, including water supplies in a drying world. On November 3, 2015, he signed a Memorandum entitled “Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment.” (Link to https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/03/mitigating-impacts-natural-resources-development-and-encouraging-related) The President makes several points. He says there should be a net gain in forest resources over time, along with productive use of those resources. Companies and people who use the forests for private gain should avoid, minimize, and pay for negative impacts. This concept is called “Mitigation.” He also says this mitigation should provide resilience to potential future environmental change. In other words, mitigation should help combat the impacts of climate change. He also specifically directs the Forest Service to adopt mitigation as a national policy in six months.

The Paris Climate Accord underlined the vital role forests play in absorbing atmospheric carbon. Developed countries pledged money to keep tropical forests from being cut. Temperate forests, like the national forests in the United States, play the same role. They need to be enlarged and kept healthy to store more carbon. On December 18, 2015, a coalition of about two dozen forest industry, conservation and advocacy groups, and scientists sent a letter to President Obama calling for more recognition of the role U.S. forests can play as both a carbon sink and in meeting future emissions reductions targets.

For example, an oil company that wants to drill in, put a pipeline in and construct a road through a federal forest will now have to avoid and minimize many impacts to resources such as water, fish, and wildlife and recreation in light of climate change. They may also have to compensate for remaining resource losses that can’t be avoided or minimized through rehabilitation or purchase of similar landscapes.

Not surprisingly, extractive industries and the West are adamantly opposed. So is the Forest Service.

The Forest Service has long considered this direct and indirect destruction of public wealth simply a cost of doing business to the exclusion of other values, such as water, air quality, and recreation. For decades, these hidden “subsidies” have had the full support and protection of politicians representing Western states. These Western states and their minion — the Forest Service — see mitigation as a stumbling block frustrating efforts to exploit federal lands more extensively or take them completely out of federal ownership. If timber companies, miners, and energy companies have to pay fully for all costs of their projects, their profits will decline.

In direct opposition to principles and mandates in President Obama’s Mitigation Memorandum, Robert Bonnie, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary, Natural Resources and Environment and Tom Tidwell, the Forest Service Chief, have nixed this policy change, especially the part that requires companies to pay for forest destruction. The pro-timber, pro-mining, pro-drilling Forest Service leadership loathes the mitigation concept, and plans to honor it in name only by issuing a so-called aspirational policy. This policy only commits the Forest Service to study mitigation for the future while actually narrowly limiting when, where, and how it can be used now. In short, the Forest Service has concluded the policies in the Presidential Memorandum are not in its best interests and is dragging its federal feet. It hopes by delaying the implementation of a full-fledged mitigation policy, the next president may revoke it entirely.

The choice is stark. Either the Forest Service allows more of the same federal resource-wasting, like mine tailing spills in rivers, endless forest-killing fires, drying reservoirs and extinct species — or opts for more carbon storage, increased forest water storage, fewer forest fires and diversified Western economies. Restoration activities could create a new industry in the West to replace the extractive industries that are fading. However, just because it’s logical does not mean it will happen in Washington, DC.

William Greeley, the third Chief of the Forest Service (1920–1928), once said:

The national forests are no longer primeval solitudes remote from the economic life of developing regions…, or barely touched by the skirmish line of settlement. To a very large degree the wilderness has been pressed back. Farms have multiplied, roads have been built, frontier hamlets have grown into villages and towns, industries have found foothold and expanded. Although the forests are still in an early stage of economic development, their resources are important factors in present prosperity.

Chief Greeley’s vision just doesn’t work in a hotter, drying, forest-burning world with a much larger population.