Tree Huggers Fight Back
In 1992, Kettle Rangers went to work to safeguard what remained of Washington’s Colville and Okanogan National Forest unprotected wilderness. Forest Watch educator and cheerleader guru Barry Rosenberg taught Kettle Rangers and other grassroots activists from eastern Cascades to Rocky Mountains the art of fighting national forest timber sales through legal means.
Forest Watch is a citizen defense of our Public Lands using law including National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), National Forest Management Act (NFMA), Endangered Species Act and Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) policy regulations.
No longer were citizen activist inability to stop logging of our Public Lands. Direct action such as Earth First! tree sits and blockades, though effective, were at best, and as David Brower said, “temporary victories,” while on the other hand losses were more or less permanent. Centuriesold forests cut down for 2x4s and toilet paper cannot be replaced even in a human lifetime.
From 1992 until 2002, KRCG filed about 100 administrative and federal court challenges of logging projects. This effort was very successful in defending wild and old forest and in gaining political traction with Forest Service and some timber industry representatives who were interested in finding workable solutions.
Two significant sea-change events occurred during this period including the Eastside Forests Scientific Societies Report (1995) resulting in Forest Service-promulgated 21 Inch Rule protecting big trees and the Roadless Area Conservation Plan (aka: Roadless Rule) that provided real time safeguards for Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs).
In 2002, Kettle Ranger’s met with a sawmill owner who offered a promise of equanimity: wilderness, retain/restore old growth and sustainable logging. This was called the Thirds. Kettle Rangers were co-founders what later became the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition (NEWFC).
Twenty years of collaborative problem-solving working with Forest Service and an eclectic cross section of NE Washington body politic nevertheless failed to get a promised wilderness bill, and failed even to get a revised Land Management Plan (LMP) that accurately represented decades of collaborative work. The irony is Kettle Rangers good intentions though a significant contributor to local forest products industry surviving the crash of 2008, in actuality led to worse outcomes for forest conservation than had NEWFC never existed. Truth is a promise of equanimity was a ruse.
Hence, Kettle Rangers now rely on tools we know work as in the past (1976-2001) using administrative and litigative measures to solve the most basic of ecological and social conflicts attributable to Forest Service industrial timber management model.
With its release of the revised 2019 Colville National Forest Land Management Plan the Forest Service signaled its opinion of forest “collaboration” as merely advisory, that by definition is not collaborative. The FS misrepresented NEWFC management alternative and then tossed it aside.
Forest Watch has proved most successful in a protracted battle to protect and restore old growth forests and inevitably achieve Kettle Mountain Wilderness, is to challenge the U.S. Forest Service and timber industry’s gluttonous penchant for timber volume, pretty much at the expense of everything the public values most.
It’s common scientific knowledge that forest wildfire is natural & beneficial, but industrial-scale logging is not, climate change and species extinction is human-caused. So it’s up to us to fix it. What is done today that is incorrectly termed forest “restoration” is merely a repair job to fix what Manifest Destiny has laid waste to Mother Earth.