HUPC Updates

GOOD NEWS ON GRAZING!

For decades the High Uintas Preservation Council and the old Utah Wilderness Association have argued, pleaded, pushed and pulled for grazing closures on the High Uintas. Piece by piece, breathtakingly slow, some grazing allotments have been closed. Back in 1991 the Vernal District Ranger, now the Deputy Intermountain Regional Forester, took a courageous step and closed the Chepeta and Whiterocks grazing allotments. Some of you will remember those public meetings and the hope we all felt. A long decade later and a new District Ranger closed the Lakeshore Basin allotment. The better part of a decade again passed by and this time the Forest Service closed Grizzly Ridge, Iron Springs, McKee Draw and Marsh Peak allotments.

All of this activity has been on the Ashley National Forest and primarily on the Vernal Ranger District. Kevin Elliott,
the Ashley Forest Supervisor and his staff deserve a pat on the back for the most recent grazing closures as now a considerable portion on the eastern Uintas are closed to grazing.

What this means is portions of the western Uintas (including some of the Lakes Roadless Area), primarily on the South Slope, are closed to grazing, along with some of Rock Creek, the Yellowstone River, much of the Uinta River as well as Chepeta, Lakeshore Basin, Marsh Peak and Whiterocks. Within the High Uintas Wilderness most of the sheep grazing still occurs on the North Slope, Uinta-Wasatch- Cache National Forest, and on the lower elevation cattle allotments on both forests.

Well over two dozen grazing articles have appeared in the LYNX, ranging from maps of allotments to specific allotment issues to the vision pushed by HUPC with respect to grazing. Still, a long path of resistance to end grazing in high elevation sensitive subalpine and alpine ecosystems exists. Ironically and sadly, much of this energy comes from the Forest Service, but the path is now a bit less steep!

FOREST SERVICE RELEASES NEW PLANNING REGS

After half a decade of starts, fits, and chaos Forest Service released in April its new forest planning regulations (HUPC LYNX 2/07, 6/05, 2/05, 8/04). Well, not so new. When originally released in 2005, they were promptly litigated by conservationists. The court sent them back to the Forest Service. The agency re-issued them in a form almost identical to the original regs that were successfully litigated!

And guess what? The cyber-ink was barely dry on the Forest Service web site when conservationists sued again. It hard to say whether this is a new chapter or a paste up paragraph in the old chapter. While the problems with the new/old forest planning regulations are many, concerns are primarily focused on: 1- the elimination of requiring the Forest Service to assure viable populations of native fish and wildlife on national forests; 2- the unlimited discretion in forest planning by limiting the use of enforceable standards with unenforceable guidelines; 3- the decision to not require the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for each forest, allowing even the minimal categorical exclusion (CE), and; 4- the concomitant reduction in analysis, preparation of alternatives and information provided to the public. The list goes on.

The Forest Service continues to insist forest plans are, at best, strategic documents, thus not actually impacting the ground and requiring no formal environmental analysis and public review. Yet, forest plans obviously make decisions as to where timber harvesting will be allowed, where grazing will occur, where wilderness will or will not be recommended. Impacts are obvious, and accountability is necessary--both deeply ignored and restricted by these new regulations! The Forest Service essentially argues that environmental issues will eventually be fully considered in post-forest plan National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents such as EISs or Environmental Analyses (EAs), thus no meaningful NEPA analysis is needed in forest plans. The disingenuousness in that argument actually smells, as under present Forest Service direction many management actions, as we’ve noted in this newsletter and in dozens of instances in past newsletters, now fall under some categorical exclusion where NEPA analysis is severely limited!

The intent is not to make forest planning smoother or less timely--the latter seems particularly obvious--nor to shift the burden of analysis to another level of planning (site specific projects), but to devalue planning, analysis and public involvement making it easier to slide back to a style of forest management where true public concerns, wildness and ecological values are easily dismissed.

Of course, the Ashley’s revised forest plan falls squarely under these regulations, but to the credit of the Ashley and the Intermountain Region, so far, the forest is not immediately gearing up under these regulations, recognizing the surrounding and intense controversy. They continue to work on data gathering and planning neutral analyses until July when they say they will have a full strategy of implementation. Let us hope they brighten the light, prepare an EIS, formalize public involvement, and finally move forward with a sensitive, wild, revised forest plan, now already more than a decade behind in revision!

ROOM FOR WOLVES?

In mid-March, consistent reports of a number of wolves in the far northeastern corner of the Uintas were issued. We have known or heard these and other reports in various places of the Uintas for some time.

Just a bit later in March came the long un-awaited announcement by the Fish and Wildlife Service that the northern Rocky Mountain distinct population segment (DPS) of the gray wolf would be de-listed (see HUPC LYNX 2/07) from the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This includes all of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana and a tiny segment of northern Utah east of I-84 and north of I-80. Elsewhere in Utah (e.g. the Uintas), wolves are still fully protected by the ESA.

Of course, if you are a wolf, getting here has been made considerably more troubling since you are now classified as a varmint in much of southern Wyoming. Idahoans are not quite as rude, but just about. And if you are a wolf in Utah and pass back and forth into Wyoming, you go from ESA-protected to varmint-hood.

It is an utterly ridiculous scenario from any meaningful perspective. And the de-listing proposal has been greeted with at least two court actions-- one from humane and animal welfare organizations, one from conservationists-- both arguing, in essence, the present number of wolves and wolf packs in the Northern Rocky Mountains is simply not high enough to assure survival over a long time frame and that state management plans simply focused on allowing the absolute minimum number of wolves and wolf packs. The Governor of Idaho has actually called for a “gray wolf kill” and promised to bid for the first ticket to shoot a wolf. In northwest Wyoming, outside of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, wolves are subject to a trophy hunt and in the rest of Wyoming are simple varmints to be shot on site.

The anti-wolf rhetoric is hitting a peak in Idaho with bumper sticker reading, Smoke a Pack a Day. One can only wonder if we are really ready to share a world with wolves or grizzly bear, cougar or black bear, lynx or wolverines. That is what this issue is really all about. Elk hunters are worried about elk being eaten by wolves--after all, it is their elk and we’ll only share this world with elk if we can have them and certainly not wolves.

It is wolf and grizz and wolverine that challenge our sense of the world being ours. If it is our world, they will succumb regardless of the ESA or our conservation politics. There is no disputation here; the issue is profound and deep.

Maybe it plays out as clearly as it can be played out, not on the slopes of the Uintas, where we strain to hear a wolf howl, but on the diminishing ice flows of the Arctic where the polar bear has finally been designated threatened under the ESA with a special rule built in to prevent the listing from having an impact on global warming! Spin it any way you want, the polar bear is listed because we have made the world ours. We have even altered the fundamental climatic cycles!

The depth we have to look into our hearts to make room for wolf or grizz is scary and looking right smack back at us-- is US, as Pogo warned way back in 1970!

LYNX HABITAT PROTECTED?

The Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed additional critical habitat for lynx conservation under the Endangered Species Act (see HUPC LYNX, 8/07). Just about 43,000 square miles of new revised critical habitat was identified in northwestern Washington, northern Montana, the greater Yellowstone area (including Wyoming’s Salt River Range), northern Minnesota and Maine. Vastly improved over the previous effort!

But it still falls confusingly short in that critical habitat need not be constrained to areas only occupied at the time of species designation. In this case the proposed rule ignores both the Colorado Rockies, where lynx have now occupied and reproduced successfully for a number of years with the area acting already as a potential source for lynx migration (Wildlife Research Report, Post Release Monitoring of Lynx Reintroduced to Colorado, 7/07), and the High Uintas. This same study clearly documents a large number of sightings of lynx within the High Uintas, an area consisting of the 460,000 High Uintas Wilderness surrounded by that much high quality identified roadless country. These sightings have consistently increased over the last few years and there is no dispute that the
Uintas were historically inhabited by
lynx populations.

The point is the Uintas are a massive core area with deeply suitable lynx habitat, historically inhabited by lynx and connected to the Greater Yellowstone complex (A Biological Conservation Assessment for the Utah-Wyoming Rocky Mountains Ecoregion; Report to the Nature Conservancy. Noss, et al. 2001,) The habitat similarity of the Uintas to the proposed critical habitat of the southern extent of the Greater Yellowstone area is more than notable! The Uintas are a natural geographical extension to this area and obviously geographically connected.

Given the recognized, long-range dispersal of lynx and its importance to population dynamics and the obvious compression of lynx habitat, along with the ever-increasing negative impacts within that compressed habitat, it seems more than prudent that all large core habitat areas be protected as critical habitat, particularly given the additional stress of climatic change. It seems only fitting, given the obvious scale and size of the Uintas and its connection to the Greater Yellowstone area and Southern Rockies, that the Uintas would be part of the critical habitat rule.

There is no point in attempting to continue to use the Endangered Species Act as the tool to delimit critical habitat to a species that is fundamentally wide-ranging, dependent upon vastly distant dispersal areas and the corridors connecting such areas. The context of the Endangered Species Act is to achieve precisely this goal.