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I slept in after a quiet and lovely New Year’s Eve.  I was planning an equally pleasant morning, only to find myself practically cursing the new year when I opened the paper.  Above the fold was a huge headline with Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey’s proclamation that he would complete the renegotiation of road easements with Plum Creek Timber Company before leaving office at the end of the month.

What a brutal way to start the new year – one more giveaway by the Bush Administration.  So imagine my surprise when I received an email this afternoon with the following  heading, “Plum Creek Pulls Out.”  Attached to the email was the formal letter from Plum Creek CEO Dave Holley, announcing that they would no longer continue to pursue a renegotiation of the easements with the Forest Service. (I would attach the letter here, but we had a major website failure over the holidays, and most functions aren't working).

Wildlands CPR worked with the Clark Fork Coalition, Trillium Asset Management Corporation and Newground Social Investment, to pursue a shareholders strategy to challenge Plum Creek’s continued engagement in this process.  We provided extensive assistance to the investment firms about the impacts, questionable legality, and environmental and economic consequences of the proposed renegotiation.  The investment firms then sent a letter to Plum Creek on behalf of a number of Plum Creek shareholders, asking that they cease all negotiations to change the road easements.  The shareholder letter received excellent local media attention, but Plum Creek didn’t seem to waiver.  As a matter of fact, they wrote back, in a guest opinion in the Missoulian, that they didn’t think the investment firms truly represented any shareholders (which was patently false).

After more back and forth between Plum Creek and the investors, the investment firms developed a specific type of shareholder resolution, that would have resulted in continued bad public relations for Plum Creek.  That resolution was submitted to Plum Creek in November, and remains on the schedule for the shareholders meeting this spring.

Happily, it appears that resolution may no longer be necessary (though Plum Creek has other outstanding issues that these investors are also trying to address).  It also appears that a lot of land in the wildland/urban interface will remain in the status quo (which means it could be developed, but each individual land owner will have to negotiate their specific easements with the Forest Service, thus making development more difficult).  

While the status quo isn’t perfect, this is still a huge victory!!   The renegotiation of easements would have made it profoundly easier for Plum Creek to sell off some of their lands for development.  At a presentation this fall, the CEO stated that about 2 million acres are currently being considered for sale.

And while we are thrilled with this victory, we also understand that there were many other factors that contributed, it really was a “full-court press.”  Other pressure included:

• the unceasing pressure and scrutiny of the Missoula County Commissioners in particular, in addition to other county commissioners;
• the constant pressure by Senator Tester’s office to derail this renegotiation;
• the recent GAO report that implied, strongly, that the renegotiation wasn’t legal;
• the real estate meltdown; and
• the change to the new administration and the likelihood Plum Creek would have had to spend a lot of money and political capital defending the new easements in the courts and with a less friendly administration.

So thanks to everyone who worked on this issue, and let’s hope that today’s news bodes much better for 2009 than the initial story I read about this on New Year’s Day.

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot lately about the economy, economic stimulus ideas, and the seeming failure of a consumer economic model.  I found it interesting, then, to see a blog post by Robert Reich today that talked about the implications of Keynesian economics, deficit spending and opportunities to protect natural resources.  While I didn’t know all the correct economic terms for what I had been thinking, Reich offers some strong arguments for reshaping the American economy.  And reshape it we must if we want to have a sustainable society over the long-term that isn’t dependent on consumption and the resulting ecological destruction that it causes in the US and abroad.

So what is it that can replace manufacturing as the basis of an economy (since consumerism obviously didn't work)?  Turns out there are high-wage, high-skill jobs that cannot be outsourced to other countries, and that would bring about benefits far beyond stimulating the economy.

As Reich argues, natural resources and other public goods are begging for investment:

“What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common - clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall. Common goods like these don't necessarily use up scarce resources; often, they conserve and protect them.

Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do - bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with. “

Reich explains that investing in common goods, like cleaning up our natural resources, is a way to restore the economic structure of the United States over the long term.  I agree.  I think it provides an opportunity to create a new economy for the future that meets the interlocking challenges of global climate change, peak oil, and economic collapse.  But it has to be done appropriately, and too many discussions remain focused on quick solutions that will get Americans back into the shopping malls.  Neither we, nor the rest of the planet, can afford, economically or ecologically, to continue to consume at the level we currently consume.  We are now paying the price for the excessive lifestyles we have adopted here.

There are numerous ideas being discussed in the current economic stimulus proposal that would help us move in a new direction – especially the green jobs programs that are being promoted.  Wildlands CPR, for example, is working with more than 100 organizations to promote natural resources/watershed restoration jobs as part of any economic stimulus package that gets adopted by the Obama Administration.  The backlog of investment in the American commons is too large to measure – billions of dollars needed here, billions there.  We can rebuild a solid economic foundation for this country, for decades, by investing in green jobs, and other jobs to benefit the common good, that cannot be outsourced.  And through those jobs, perhaps we can also rebuild or create a new ethic in this country that isn’t based on consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses, but instead on making sure the Joneses, and everyone else, have access to clean air, clean water, good schools, rational transportation systems, and affordable, effective healthcare.

It’s exciting to think about what this stimulus package could look like, and to identify opportunities to transform the American economy in a proactive, restorative way.  But it won’t be easy.  Let’s hope those making the decisions are considering Mr. Reich’s excellent ideas as well.   

If you’re like me and you can’t keep up with all the last-minute policy changes by the Bush Administration, you might not have noticed a new announcement by the Forest Service this week.  Their latest shenanigans will leave us with a lopsided playing field when it comes to recreation.

Managing our national forests is no easy task.  At best it is a balancing act between myriad competing interests.  But in the final countdown to the end of the Bush Administration, any attempt at achieving true balance appears to have been abandoned by the Forest Service.  

In its frantic push to tie up loose ends, the Forest Service is busily finalizing internal agency guidance documents that affect management of both its overburdened transportation system and its network of recreational trails.  

In the recently published (December 9, 2008) final Travel Management Directives, the Forest Service fell wide of the mark by eviscerating one of the goals of  the 2005 Travel Management Rule – to identify and implement a minimum transportation system.  This minimum system would look at where access is needed, where resource damage is occurring, and what roads and motorized routes are poorly designed or under-maintained.  They would then make a determination to either keep the road or motorized route, or take it off the map.  

Unfortunately, in its most recent stab at interpreting how the 2005 Rule should operate, the Forest Service turned its back on common sense and planning for the future and focused instead on how to complete the process as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible.

Draft directives on travel management procedures, published for public comment in March 2007, provided better guidance than the final directives.  Apparently, it took the Forest Service 21 months to figure out how to wiggle its way out of the commitments it almost made in the draft directives.

In contrast, a separate guidance document, the Trails Classification Directives, (issued in an interim final form in mid-October after over two years of delay), set a generally good tone for future management of recreational trails.  But these directives are closely tied to the final directives released this week, and therefore they also fail to provide protective language.  Instead of providing firm guidance for recreation and travel planners to protect forest resources while still providing opportunities for recreation, the interim final directives sidestep the problem.  

For instance, how does the Forest Service determine which uses are allowed on a trail?  One might assume that they involve the public in these important decisions about where and how we recreate, but that would be wrong.  They have no official system.  Some specific trails might have been formally analyzed in the past, so they might look up and use that data.  Another alternative might be talking to “old timers” in the agency to find out if they remember what use was originally intended on the trail.  Then, without any public involvement or further analysis, they assign an objective for the trail and maintain it to that level.  If trail users don’t agree with that assessment, they’ll just have to speak up and try to get it changed after the fact.

That isn't planning. That's "winging it."

The Forest Service once again is being reactive instead of proactive, avoiding taking a comprehensive and responsible look at recreation and the travel system.

The Forest Service, in both its travel management directives and the new trails classification system, should analyze its network of roads, motorized routes, and recreational trails as a whole, and determine what parts of it are truly needed, what uses are appropriate, and which roads, trails or uses may be causing too much resource damage or too many recreational conflicts.

Sidestepping the issue in a last ditch effort to lock in a one-sided policy does a great disservice to our national forests and national forests visitors.

This map shows the locations of firms that have done restoration work under contract for the federal government within the past few years. We obtained the data by exporting federal contract data from OMB Watch's FedSpending.org, imported that data into Excel, culled it a bit, and then Geocoded it using BatchGeocode.com.

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