Service can’t see forest for the trees
By KEN MIDKIFF
Published Friday, June 13, 2008
(http://www.columbiatribune.com/2008/Jun/20080613Comm002.asp)

By congressional mandate, wilderness areas are messy - places where manipulation and management, motorized vehicles and equipment, and other anthropogenic activities are not allowed. Big trees dominate, but also brush, shrubs, grasses and, yes, ticks, chiggers and poison ivy are present.

And by another congressional mandate - the Weeks Act - the U.S. Forest Service is charged with managing the national forests for multiple public uses. That means eliminating all the messy stuff.

And therein lies the problem. For the national forests are the primary locations of wilderness areas. There are, to be sure, wilderness areas in wildlife refuges managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and on public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. But the vast majority of federally designated wilderness areas are within national forests, the purview of the Forest Service, an agency more accustomed to managing the public lands for productivity, not what it views as idleness.

We have seven wilderness areas in Missouri, and all but one are on national forest lands. The Forest Service has routinely opposed the creation of these areas, mostly because it receives little or no revenue from such areas and because revenue-generating activities cannot take place. These activities - particularly logging - that are advocated by the Forest Service in our national forests are prohibited in wilderness areas.

The Missouri Wilderness Coalition has submitted a plan that Congress create several more wilderness areas in this state. One of those proposed is right across Cedar Creek in Callaway County.

Known for years as the Smith Creek Sensitive Area - sort of a pre-"wilderness" designation - the Forest Service has taken a hands-off approach. Except for a couple of trails that accommodate hikers, bikers and equestrians and a rather rustic - and not often used - canoe, kayak and raft access area next to Rutherford Bridge, the requirements of the Wilderness Act have been observed.

Indeed, human use is not much in evidence.

There was, in times long gone, quite a bit of activity in the Smith Creek area. Some old, abandoned roads attest to this, along with some fields now becoming overgrown with cedar and other pioneer trees. There are also several foundations of log cabins and evidence of earthen dams that were used to create small ponds below springs and seeps.

The lands of what is now the Cedar Creek Unit of the Mark Twain National Forests were acquired by the public shortly before and during World War II - primarily for taxes. Some has been donated since, but much of the area is what it was before: abandoned farming lands. In fact, most of the land is not wooded. Only about 5,000 acres out of a total of 15,000 are covered in trees.

Now the Forest Service has a plan to cut down most of those. Not only that, but the agency proposes to do so by the most extreme measures: The Forest Service refers to clear-cutting as "even-aged management," in that every tree that grows after every tree and sapling is whacked down will be of the same age. A "shelterwood" and "seedtree" cuttings are merely two-staged clear cuts. Leave a few trees per acre, then after a thicket of small trees is rooted, cut down the big trees that had been previously spared.

While some would have us trust the tender hand of the Forest Service, unfortunately, all the evidence is to the contrary. In its zeal to serve logging companies, the Forest Service has documented that it is a terrible steward of the national lands. Denuded slopes and acres and acres of stumps give witness to current management practices. Those bare slopes encourage fast runoff of storm water, carrying silt and sediment into streams and rivers.

Cedar Creek is only now recovering from past decades of coal mining and acid runoff. Millions of dollars in state and federal money have been expended in the recovery effort of naïve fishes and other aquatic life. But if silt and sediment cover their spawning and egg-laying areas, all of that money will have been spent in vain.

People in Central Missouri heavily use the Cedar Creek Unit of the Mark Twain National Forest. Its proximity to the urbanized areas of Callaway, Cole and Boone counties should indicate that Cedar Creek be managed as an urban forest - a place for escaping the pressures of the workplace.

Instead, the Forest Service has chosen to propose heavy-handed techniques. The best way to manage this area is to erect "welcome" signs at the boundaries and let it be.