The Rebirth of Environmentalism by Douglas Bevington

Author:Douglas Bevington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610911443
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Beyond the Sierra Club: Timber Sale Litigation and the National Forest Protection Alliance

While the John Muir Sierrans were working to transform the Sierra Club’s position on zero cut, much of the work of directly stopping logging on national forests was being done by a loose network of grassroots forest protection groups. These groups used the provisions the National Forest Management Act and the National Environmental Protection Act to monitor and appeal the Forest Service’s proposed timber sales as well as the larger forest-wide management plans. At times, their appeals were enough to get timber sales withdrawn. Other times, if the appeals were rejected by the Forest Service, the forest protection groups would turn to litigation to stop the logging. Challenging individual timber sales helped to lower overall logging levels, but the most dramatic impacts came from the lawsuits that halted logging throughout an entire national forest or even an entire region. The northern spotted owl injunction described earlier was the most famous example, but it was far from the only one. By the end of the 1990s, lawsuits had resulted in at least temporary shutdowns of various national forests throughout the country. For example, John Talberth of the Forest Conservation Council—whose mass appeals had provided an impetus for the spotted owl injunction in the Pacific Northwest in 1989—moved from Oregon to New Mexico in the early 1990s and began applying his timber sale appeal and litigation tactics there. During the 1990s, the Forest Conservation Council temporarily merged with another grassroots group called Forest Guardians and together they were part of a coalition of groups that shut down logging on the eleven national forests of the Southwest for sixteen months (see chapter 5). Likewise, by the time that Andy Mahler stepped down as executive director in 1999, Heartwood and its affiliated groups had halted logging on eight national forests in the Midwest, East, and South.72

While Heartwood began with a stated goal of ending all national forest logging, some grassroots forest groups initially did not explicitly call for zero cut, even though they were involved in stopping much logging. Some of those groups were concerned that the major environmental grantmaking foundations would not fund them if they officially endorsed zero cut. In particular, grassroots activists highlighted Pew Charitable Trusts as a prominent funder that would not support zero-cut groups, pointing to its role in an aborted national forest campaign coalition. Journalist Mark Dowie reported, “As they dangled millions of dollars in front of starving organizations, the funding group led by Josh Reichert [of Pew] stipulated that no one advocating zero cut, criticizing corporations by name, or producing ads that did so would be eligible for membership in the forest coalition—or for funding.”73

However, zero-cut groups were able to find a handful of supportive funders. The largest was the Turner Foundation. Others were small to midsized grantmakers such as the Foundation for Deep Ecology, Levinson Foundation, and Patagonia. A common theme among these funders was that their program staff came from activist backgrounds in

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