Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Supreme Court agrees to hear Sierra Nevada forest case

A long-running Sierra Nevada forest planning dispute will now be settled by the Supreme Court in what could shape up as a crucial public lands case. On Monday, the court agreed to referee the dispute pitting environmentalists with the Portland, Ore.-based Pacific Rivers Council against the U.S. Forest Service over decision-making that dates back to the second Bush administration. While the specific case involves 11 Sierra Nevada forests, the eventual outcome could shape everything from who gets to file lawsuits to the scope of future environmental studies. “Definitely, throughout the West, this could have huge impacts on the moving of projects forward,” Dustin Van Liew, executive director of the conservative Public Lands Council in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Monday. One key question confronting the court will be whether environmentalists have the “standing” to sue against a general forest plan, as opposed to a specific project proposal, by virtue of their making recreational use of the national forests. To gain standing in federal court, individuals must show they’ve been injured or face imminent injury. A second major question is how extensively detailed the Forest Service must be when preparing overarching management plans, such as the one governing the 11 Sierra Nevada forests. The court’s decision to hear the Sierra Nevada case, sometime during the 2013 term that starts in October, means that at least four of the court’s nine justices agreed to reconsider a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision from last year in which environmentalists prevailed. In that 2-1 appellate court decision, the 9th Circuit panel concluded the Forest Service in 2004 failed to adequately study the effect of dramatically revised forest plans on Sierra Nevada fish populations. “The Forest Service provided no analysis despite the fact that the 2004 (plan) allows much more logging, burning, road construction and grazing,” Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the appellate panel...more

 Notice the PLC is called "conservative" while the Pacific Rivers Council has no such modifier. 

Also note 9th Circuit said the 2004 plan allowed for increased grazing.  That must be an error on the courts part.  I've been following this stuff for 40 years now and I've never seen a FS plan that called for an increase in grazing!

 Then there's this:

When presidents have changed, so have the Sierra Nevada forest plans. The Clinton administration issued one Sierra Nevada plan in January 2001, about a week before President Bill Clinton left office. The President George W. Bush administration then scrapped that plan, and issued another in 2004.

But I thought this was all based on science.  Does the science change every 4 or 8 years?  Nope.  These federalized lands are managed by politicians...both in Congress and the higher echelons of the land management agencies.  And oh yes, by the politically well-connected lawyers who sit on the various courts. 


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