Request Obama Resolution of Clearwater Issues

Over the next few weeks, American citizens have a unique opportunity to influence the direction of the incoming national administration. Together, we can reverse years of environmentally destructive policies that have endangered wildlands, wildlife, and our own long-term survival. President-elect Barrack Obama has posted a website at www.change.gov that you can visit for more information and to contact him with your comments. As your fellow conservationists concerned about the future of wild Clearwater public lands and wildlife, Friends of the Clearwater (FOC) urges you to take full advantage of your democratic influence on the new administration and write to Obama and his staff regarding these most urgent issues affecting the wild Clearwater country.

Revoke the Idaho Roadless Area Conservation Rule

Idaho officials and the U.S. Forest Service advanced their state-specific roadless rule under the Administrative Procedure Act, to circumvent an October 2006 legal ruling in favor of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule with more stringent, nationwide protections for 58.5 million wildland acres. The Idaho Roadless Area Conservation Rule would establish management direction for the 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in Idaho national forests and would supersede the 2001 Roadless Rule. Although the Forest Service received 1.5 million public comments in favor of the 2001 rule and over 140,000 public comments on the draft Idaho rule, the agency developed and adopted a preferred alternative for the final Idaho Roadless Rule in October 2008 that immediately opens over half a million acres of roadless lands to any and all development.

The proposed Idaho rule blocks increased wildland protections as it effectively amends existing and emerging, individual national forest plans that may provide exhibit development restrictions. Its ambiguous language encourages far more road construction, timber harvest, and mineral development on millions more acres than the current 2001 Roadless Rule. It also allows supposedly temporary road building to accommodate logging in over half of the roadless areas in Idaho, all under the guises of wildland fire risk reduction and forest health. Conversely, the 2001 Roadless Rule provides basic protection of roadless areas and allowances for better safeguards in individual forest plans. Its provisions granting logging are rare and focused on small-diameter tree thinning. The 2001 rule anticipated only 15 miles of new roads and 9,000 acres of timber harvest over the next 15 years, more than what has actually transpired in Idaho roadless areas due to Forest Service avoidance of potential legal challenges. The Idaho rule, however, authorizes 50 miles of new or temporary roads and 15,000 acres of logging over the next 15 years. It also gives the Forest Service the loopholes it desires to develop more Idaho wildlands.

The final Idaho Roadless Rule, thinly veiled as roadless area conservation, is a politically and economically motivated attempt by some state and national political leaders to exploit wild Idaho public lands. It is yet another masquerade of local public involvement concealing an ongoing quest for privatization and ultimate industrialization and devastation of undeveloped lands. The objectives of these schemes are neither democratic citizen empowerment nor preservation of wilderness and a healthy quality of life: they are deceitful ploys to divest Americans of their dwindling natural heritage. In Idaho, home to more national forest wildlands not designated as wilderness than any other state except Alaska, roadless area conservation has been the subject of debate since the Wilderness Act protected some of the country’s remote areas 44 years ago. Never in all those years has a state so presumptuously tried to direct management of the national forests within its borders, which are owned by all Americans and overseen in their interest. Because a broad base of citizens overwhelmingly support stronger protections of inventoried roadless areas in Idaho and across the country, Friends of the Clearwater urges you to make these recommendations to President-elect Obama:

1) As an interim measure, the new President should swiftly establish a moratorium on development of roadless areas in Idaho and throughout the nation that is consistent with 2001 Roadless Rule regulations. More significantly, President Obama should reinstate the 2001 Roadless Rule and its protections for all U.S. wildlands, including roadless areas in Idaho. The 2001 rule most closely reflects the will of the American people, as evidenced by the 95 percent of comments requesting roadless area protections during its public comment period. Several U.S. District Court rulings in 2006 and 2007 also uphold the 2001 Roadless Rule, currently and tentatively in force throughout the nation, and its prohibitions of road building for the purpose of timber extraction. As the most recent venture of state control over federal lands and the most extensive threat to Idaho wildlands, the Idaho Roadless Rule will inevitably be challenged in court and cannot withstand legal and public scrutiny.

3) Our elected administrative leader should support and endorse ongoing legislative efforts to codify the 2001 Roadless Rule. Other alternative legislation may arise that seeks protection of pristine Clearwater basin roadless areas through additions to the wilderness system. The President should only approve these statutes if they provide actual, legal preservation of roadless wilderness conditions and if their language does not compromise the tenets of the Wilderness Act. All of these avenues for various Idaho wildland designations, however, ultimately serve as mere stop-gap defenses against roadless area development, compared to the scientifically-based vision for regional public lands encoded in the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA, House Bill 1975). Supporters of the wild Clearwater country hold Congressional passage and enactment of NREPA as our highest goal and encourage the President-elect to join us in this endeavor.

Support the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act

During his presidential campaign visits to Rocky Mountain states, Senator Obama expressed his support of the ideals of wilderness designation. Although he was not familiar with the details of NREPA, he told a reporter in northwestern Montana this fall that:
...My basic principle on wilderness areas, as well as public lands, is the concept of sustainability. What I want to do is be able to pass on to our children and our grandchildren the same extraordinary gift that we received from our parents and our grandparents. Nowhere is that truer than in Montana. And so designating lands as wilderness lands that are off-limits to development I think is critically important.

Based on accumulated scientific wisdom, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act presents the sole opportunity to comprehensively protect and restore public wildlands on a landscape scale in the lower 48 states. Passing this legislation would not only connect wildlife habitat in the region, it would also help mitigate the effects of global warming on native species by providing relatively secure migration routes for animals and plants seeking optimal conditions. More specifically, NREPA would designate as wilderness the roadless areas in the Clearwater region: places like Weitas and Cayuse Creeks, Kelly Creek, and Cove/Mallard, as well as Meadow Creek, an integral addition to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. These wild watersheds are home to many declining endangered species, from wolves to salmon to even the mighty grizzly.

As parts of the largest wildland complex of temperate forests in our country, Clearwater roadless areas also serve a crucial role in absorbing and storing atmospheric carbon and thus slowing global warming. If these extensive old-growth forests and rainforests are cut down, as proposed by the Idaho Roadless Rule, much of the carbon sequestered in tree trunks and rich soils would escape skyward and exacerbate climate change. Surrounded by huge expanses of the high and dry west, the relatively moist, headwater environments of the Clearwater basin cleanse air currents that may traverse the entire continent and enrich water that courses through the otherwise arid Columbia River system. NREPA recognizes these unique attributes that stabilize and enhance regional climate and conditions, by prohibiting logging of pristine public forests and ensuring their long-term maintenance and restoration, to protect wildlife habitat and ecosystem services.

Not only would NREPA sustain the ecological and wilderness values of the Northern Rockies, but American taxpayers would reap economic benefits from implementation of NREPA compared to the fiscal results of current national forest and roadless plans. By restoring over 6,300 miles of unused, remote roads, NREPA would provide employment for 2,000 workers and save federal tax-dollars otherwise spent on subsidized road-building, logging, mining, and development of backcountry areas. The notorious backlog of road and trail maintenance in national forests across the region would also be partially relieved by both restoration and protection of roadless areas from further degradation caused by increasing motorized recreation and off-road vehicle traffic.

Throughout its decades-old history, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (HB 1975) has garnered the support of regional citizens, respected scientists, and grassroots conservation organizations. Well-poised for early reintroduction and a hearing on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, this visionary bill has also attracted more congressional sponsors every year and stands a good chance of enactment by a new Congress led by a Democratic party majority. NREPA complements other pressing environmental issues that command public debate, such as global warming, as one of its many goals is to assist species’ adaptations to climate change in the Northern Rockies. If President-elect Obama hears from enough citizens who support NREPA, we may convince his incoming administration to support this important legislation. Your input on this bill is a significant step toward achieving NREPA’s enactment and promise of "an enduring resource of wilderness, wildland areas, and biodiversity for the benefit of the American people."

Ensure Regulatory Protections for Northern Rockies Gray Wolves

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS, Service) is currently seeking to again remove the Northern Rocky Mountain population of gray wolves from the federal threatened and endangered species list. In the waning days of the anti-environment Bush administration, this rushed proposal of the same 2007 delisting rule found deficient in a Montana U.S. District Court is obviously politically and not scientifically motivated. The 2008 Delisting Proposed Rule contends that Northern Rockies gray wolves exceeded minimum recovery goals of 30 breeding pairs and at least 300 wolves for three consecutive years in every year since 2002. Moreover, the new rule excludes Wyoming wolves from delisting as state management plans there have consistently proven insufficient to maintain minimal wolf numbers and breeding success.

Endangered wolves in the region are presently protected by a July 2008 preliminary injunction of the initial delisting rule, which reinstated Endangered Species Act (ESA) restrictions on hunting and killing wolves. The Missoula federal judge who issued this order agreed with conservationists’ claims that: 1) gray wolves had not met recovery criteria due to a lack of genetic exchange between their central Idaho, northwestern Montana, and Yellowstone populations; 2) Wyoming’s 2007 wolf management framework was an inadequate regulatory mechanism; and 3) fall 2008 public wolf hunting seasons planned by Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming posed immediate potential harm for wolves. Additionally, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. relisted Western Great Lakes gray wolves as threatened in September. That court ruled that withdrawing federal protection for gray wolves in one region, without considering their recovery throughout their historic range nationwide, violates the purpose of the ESA.

Please ask President-elect Obama and his administration to pursue these measures that will at least minimally assure that the Northern Rockies wolf population can reclaim its critical ecological role and thrive in some of the last wild places of the North American continent:

1) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should maintain endangered species status for Northern Rockies gray wolves until the wolf management plans of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming establish regulations that protect the long-term viability of wolves. State programs that allow more wolf mortality than federal ESA provisions resulted in hundreds of documented wolf deaths and additional unreported fatalities during 2008 and delisting, the most of any year since USFWS reintroduced wolves as a "nonessential experimental population" in 1995. These losses occurred without the public wolf hunting seasons proposed by state wildlife officials after delisting that would allow killing of nearly 1,000 wolves – two-thirds of the present regional population – during a current wolf population decline. In Wyoming, 88 percent of the state was classified as a predator zone sanctioning uncontrolled wolf hunting. State wolf and ungulate hunting regulations and state agency killing of wolves that prey on livestock or supposedly diminish elk and deer numbers present conflicts of interest for the state wildlife departments charged with oversight of delisted gray wolves. These contradictory objectives compromise each state’s commitment and ability to manage wolves at biologically sustainable levels.

2) The Service should substantially revise its Northern Rockies gray wolf recovery and delisting plans and guide development of scientifically-based state wolf management plans that balance the concerns of all stakeholders. These plans should aim to halt current decreases in wolf numbers, increase the regional population to at least 2,000 to 3,000 wolves, and ensure genetic exchange via natural wolf migration between the three sub-populations. The 1,500 wolves in the region represent fewer individuals than independent scientists have determined necessary to maintain the species’ long-term health and survival. Each state should strive for far more than the 15 breeding pairs and 150 wolves in mid-winter mandated by the proposed USFWS delisting rule. This plan encourages the states – that have proven willing to oblige – to maintain minimally low wolf numbers that endanger wolf genetic variability and to promote hunter and state agent reductions of tenuously re-established wolf populations. USFWS should include additional regulations in a revised delisting plan that would foster genetic exchange and ultimate diversity among wolf populations in the region. Current delisting agreements between the Service and states are vague and provide no standards for wolf migration objectives and monitoring. Proposed transportation of wolves between sub-populations by wildlife managers does not constitute recovery as specified by the Endangered Species Act. Establishment of protected wildlife corridors, where killing wolves is illegal, is essential to facilitating gene flow between gray wolf packs in the Northern Rockies and, as the ESA would warrant, beyond the region toward eventual re-establishment of the historic range of wolves.

3) As evident in the legislative history, policy objectives, language, and judicial interpretations of the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is remiss in its implementation of the act concerning distinct population segments (DPS). More significantly, its designations of gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and elsewhere as DPSs within their broader, pre-existing listing as endangered throughout the lower 48 states ignores the intent of the ESA to restore species populations to biologically functional conditions. Because individuals from naturally occurring populations in Canada and northwestern Montana have migrated to and infiltrated packs in the region both before and after reintroduction, Northern Rockies wolves deserve full ESA protection and neither their nonessential experimental nor DPS designations.

4) Many of the elements and particularly the process of the current delisting proposal and state management plans are severely flawed, as apparent in federal court rejection of similar schemes, and cannot withstand the scrutiny of inevitable policy analyses and legal challenges. Following two recent, failed attempts to remove ESA protections for wolves, USFWS has only slightly modified and hurried its deficient delisting proposal through instead of resolving any of the original plan problems. The current strategies of state and federal wolf management plans, if successful, would skew wolf pack dynamics and predator/prey relationships and deter the normal wolf dispersal and expansion into available habitats that fosters a connected, sustainable, regional meta-population. Consequently, regulations governing oversight of Northern Rockies gray wolves should be extensively altered to clearly articulate government and citizen preventative and enforcement measures that avert human-caused wolf deaths before and after delisting.

Recover the Wild Clearwater Grizzly Bear Population

Consistent reports of grizzlies in the Clearwater drainage over many years have alluded to the great bear’s presence in area wildlands. As the best grizzly bear habitat in the lower 48 states, according to a 2001 scientific study, the region nonetheless lacks a viable population of this endangered species. Only one grizzly was verified in fall 2007, when a hunter accidentally shot and killed an old male in Kelly Creek, supposedly mistaken for a black bear. Genetically similar to grizzlies in the Selkirk Mountains, this bear proved that natural migration into the Clearwater basin is occurring and that protection of grizzlies and their habitat in the region is long overdue.

Several changes are necessary to foster grizzly recovery in Clearwater and other Idaho public lands that comprise the "Big Wild." This wildlands complex, with Clearwater roadless areas in its northern half, is currently designated as a grizzly recovery area by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. However, the agency has never developed nor implemented a comprehensive plan for the great bear’s recovery in Idaho. Although the passage of scientifically-based legislation like NREPA would protect grizzly habitat, a recovery plan for bears in the Salmon-Clearwater ecosystem is crucial to their survival. It should include these components:

1) Natural recolonization and recovery of grizzlies in the bioregion is dependent not only on available, appropriate habitat but upon secure migration routes that allow bears to explore and establish new, typically huge territories. As these large omnivores display the greatest sensitivity to high road densities and human land use, a viable recovery plan for grizzlies should designate ample habitat and travel corridors in undeveloped public lands and encourage natural bear movements and critical genetic exchange between ecosystems.

2) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should reinstate the federal protections once afforded grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem by the Endangered Species Act. These bears recently lost their status as an endangered species and are subsequently more vulnerable to human-caused mortality if they venture beyond national park boundaries. Previous citizen science surveys of potential grizzly corridors between Yellowstone and central Idaho and western Montana have documented the possibility of bear migration between ecosystems, which could be compromised by lenient grizzly hunting regulations and undisclosed deaths.

3) The Idaho Department of Fish and Game should restrict or prohibit public hunting activities like baiting for black bears in central Idaho grizzly habitat and connecting migration corridors. The Kelly Creek grizzly killed in 2007 was visiting a bait pile made to lure bears, a currently legal method for hunting black bears in Idaho. More rigorous bear identification and hunter education techniques may also avert mutually disastrous grizzly-human encounters, while reconfiguration of hunting zones may further avoid hunting conflicts.

4) As is commonplace in other North American wildlands still conducive of grizzly life, human visitors to Clearwater public lands should accept and respect the dangers and responsibilities inherent in grizzly habitat. Recreation education and regulations that promote keeping human food from bears, leaving a clean camp, avoiding grizzly-human interactions, and other preventative practices should be adopted, emphasized, and enforced by the appropriate local, state, and federal agencies as well as involved businesses and recreationists.

The wild country of the Clearwater basin will never be truly wild without the great bear. For decades, the federal government has ignored the plight of the critically endangered population of Clearwater grizzly bears. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has even claimed that grizzlies no longer inhabit the region. Now that one bear has proven agency personnel wrong, it is time for them to reverse direction and take proactive measures that grant grizzlies their rightful place in the ecosystem again. President-elect Obama’s incoming administration has the opportunity to make these changes happen, but only if citizens like you alert them of the situation and your expectations for resolution.

Restore the Lower Snake River and Clearwater Salmonid Runs

Since 1975, when the last of four dams was completed on the lower Snake River, native salmon and steelhead populations throughout the Snake, Salmon, and Clearwater river basins have dwindled and neared extinction. Despite dozens of fish hatcheries and fish passage techniques employing fish ladders and smolt barges, federal government attempts to increase salmonid numbers to healthy, harvestable levels have failed. Thousands of business and community leaders, scientists and resource specialists, local citizens, recreation groups, and conservationists in the interior Northwest agree that the most effective salmon recovery plan involves removing the four aged and costly dams and restoring the lower Snake River corridor. Such a plan would benefit farmers, fishermen, and the regional economy. As a collaborative effort of several federal agencies, including the Bonneville Power Administration that operates the dams, this comprehensive program should include these initiatives:

1) The lower Snake River dams primarily benefit producers and shippers of bulk goods, such as wheat and timber; whereas a modernized rail system and highway improvements could not only replace the barge corridor but also enhance transportation to destinations beyond the typical west coast termini. American taxpayers currently spend hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive repairs of outdated dams and inadequate salmon recovery projects. These federal subsidies would be better invested in diversified, improved, domestic shipping accommodations and incentives that reduce fuel consumption, encourage regional markets, and benefit small manufacturers, businesses, and farming operations. Large products of the region could still be exported to the world from the Pasco, Washington seaport, 140 miles downstream of the present port of Lewiston, Idaho.

2) Riverside municipalities would experience direct physical and economic impacts from lower Snake dam removal and river restoration. Some communities, such as Lewiston, Idaho, and Clarkston, Washington, would lose their most eastern Pacific port facilities and associated advantages but would gain economic and recreation opportunities and flooding safety. With lower Clearwater and Snake river levels, levee systems that currently reign in water higher than downtown districts could be dismantled and riverfront properties and development projects would become available. However, the dredging and accompanying pollution necessary to reduce sediment accumulations behind the four dams may adversely affect riparian areas, property values, commercial fishing enterprises, and water supplies downstream of the reservoirs. Federal assistance with these changes and with flood risk studies and economic development plans would ease the unavoidable transitions of eastern Washington and north-central Idaho river communities toward a more sustainable reliance on the lower Snake River.

3) Dam removal would release 30,000 acres of riverfront lands from inundation by water impoundments stretching across 140 miles of the lower Snake River. The rich soils and warm canyon microclimates of this area historically supported productive farms, fruit orchards, and agricultural towns. The free-flowing river once and would again course through powerful rapids, spectacular canyons, sandy beaches, and shrub-steppe desert parklands that provide abundant wildlife habitat and places to swim, boat, fish, hike, camp, and otherwise recreate year-round along river banks and benches. Fishing businesses, hunting outfitters, local farmers, and real estate firms would reap the rewards of more plentiful salmon runs, recreation opportunities, specialty crop production, and amenity migration, all worth millions of dollars to numerous rural economies. Federal, state, and tribal officials would be called upon to develop a sound restoration plan that includes equitable allocation of lands and appropriate waterfront preservation, access, and development to reconnect regional wildlife and local communities with the restored river.

Of course, many other destructive legacies of the Bush administration affect Clearwater public lands, but successful resolution of these five issues by the Obama team will likely produce the best possibilities for keeping the basin and its inhabitants alive and wild. Please join Friends of the Clearwater in voicing these concerns to the President-elect at his website www.change.gov. As in all public comments, include not only rational arguments for these innovations but also personal reasons for your vision of a wilder Clearwater basin in your message. To strengthen the effectiveness of your input, explain where you live and how this affects your perspective, why you care about regional wildlands and wildlife, and how your specific experiences, education, or expertise inform your opinion. Please get involved in these important decisions and participate in this historic process!