The move sets a precedent “that is pretty disturbing” according to conservationists
Fresh assessment: The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests are home to wilderness, wildlife, fisheries, timber harvest, livestock grazing, mining and recreation opportunities. Photo: JD Cooper
By Kendra Chamberlain. January 30, 2024. The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests comprise 4 million acres of beautiful and diverse land located in north-central Idaho. Now, under a new management plan, the U.S. Forest Service is stripping protections from 17 of its rivers.
The plan, released late last year, includes a dramatically pared down list of rivers proposed for Wild and Scenic designation that has conservationists and recreationalists alarmed.
Wild and Scenic designation can only be authorized by Congress or by the Secretary of the Interior, but forest and land management plans often identify streams and rivers that are eligible for designation.
Once deemed eligible, the rivers and streams are afforded interim protections until Congress can act on them.
For the past 35 years, 29 streams and rivers of the Nez Perce-Clearwater Forests were deemed eligible under a forest management plan that dated back to the 1980s.
The USFS identified a total of 89 rivers as eligible for protections under the new draft plan. But the agency conducted a “suitability” study on those eligible rivers, whittling the list down to just 12.
That step has rubbed conservationists the wrong way. Idaho Rivers United, along with American Whitewater and American Rivers, held a webinar last week to raise the alarm.
Nick Kunath, conservation manager of Idaho Rivers United, told Columbia Insight it isn’t common for a forest management plan to include a suitability analysis.
“They will determine eligibility. And typically, that’s where it stops in forest planning,” said Kunath. “The reason it gets so murky is that suitability is never really defined in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. It really is a subjective criteria.”
“While it is correct that suitability studies are not required to be conducted with forest plan revision, it would be beneficial to do so when possible,” according to a USFS website. “Because forest and grassland plans set forth the desired conditions across the plan area and are developed with consideration of integrated resource management, it would be better to conduct the analysis for suitability within the broader picture that comes with the revision analysis. Conducting the analysis with the revision process also eliminates the need for a separate environmental analysis.”
Kunath emphasized the Forest Service has no obligation to include a suitability study, and that doing so has had profound implications for the waters of the Nez Perce-Clearwater Forests.
“Idaho Rivers United and some other organizations are somewhat unsure whether or not that’s even legal to be doing this extra step during this planning process,” he said.
Forest management revisions often offer opportunities to expand protections for rivers and streams, said Kunath. Under the new plan, the Nez Perce-Clearwater Forest will be the only forest in the Pacific Northwest in the last decade to see a decrease in river protections under a new management plan.
Source: American Rivers
This could signal a larger trend afoot at the USFS, according to Lisa Ronald, American Rivers’ associate conservation director for western Montana.
She points to the recent revision of the Ashley National Forest in Utah, which similarly conducted a suitability analysis.
More troubling, Ronald said, was that the rivers previously deemed eligible but not suitable will not be reconsidered for protections under the Ashley plan.
“These two forests are starting to set a trend that is pretty disturbing within the planning process,” Ronald said during the webinar. “What that means is that we’re living right now in the peak of river protection—that the most rivers are ever going to be protected is right now.”
Idaho Rivers United and other groups have filed formal objections to the USFS plan.
