Deciding on Degree of Logging in Lake Whatcom Watershed

Alison Bickerstaff, a resident of Sudden Valley, is an environmental science major and Fairhaven student at Western Washington University. She has been previously published in the Huxley College magazine, The Planet.

By the end of this year, the moratorium on timber sales in the Lake Whatcom watershed, a law passed unanimously by the Washington State Legislature in 1999, may be lifted.

That decision will be based on the Lake Whatcom Landscape Plan, a management scheme the Legislature directed the Washington State Department of Natural Resources to devise for the 15,000 acres of forested state trust lands in the Lake Whatcom watershed. The landscape plan will offer management strategies to balance the trust lands’ long-term economic aims with their environmental protection.

The Legislature also called for the development of the Lake Whatcom Landscape Planning Advisory Committee. Local and state agency representatives sit on the committee, as well as two citizen members, one of whom is Linda Marrom. Their role will be to give Department of Natural Resources input during the planning process and help prepare a timber harvest plan to bring before the state Board of Natural Resources.

Recently the Department of Natural Resources made the decision to combine this planning process with an environmental impact statement (EIS) process for the landscape plan.

“Department of Natural Resources decided to change the process into a regulatory EIS process and go through the public (State Environmental Policy Act) process,” said Alan Soicher, the other citizen sitting on the committee. “They shifted it from one process to another.”

Soicher works with the Evergreen Land Trust in Whatcom County and a nonprofit law center. Former Public Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher asked him to sit on the committee.

In December 2001, the Department of Natural Resources initiated the environmental impact statement process by releasing a Lake Whatcom Landscape Plan EIS Scoping Summary. The document identified comments and concerns received from the public during the Department of Natural Resources scoping process, which ended in October 2001. The scoping summary responded to these comments, narrowed down the focus of the EIS to significant issues, and explained how the EIS process will work.

The committee will give Department of Natural Resources input during the process, and both the committee and Department of Natural Resources will propose several management strategy alternatives. In the coming months Department of Natural Resources will issue a preliminary draft EIS, and they will hold public meetings to solicit public review and comment at this time.

“The most important thing is to pack those meetings with bodies,” Marrom said. Marrom understands the power of public involvement. In October 1998, more citizens than ever before attended a meeting held in the Whatcom County Chambers to discuss the Austin Flats timber sale with Commissioner Belcher. The public presented thousands of signatures at the meeting petitioning against clear-cuts in the watershed. This marked the turning point in convincing the Legislature to step in and establish the timber harvest moratorium.

“(Public input) guides this whole process. It has guided this whole process from the beginning. That’s the reason we’ve been so successful,” Marrom said.

Department of Natural Resources and the committee will make changes to the preliminary draft EIS based on these public comments and try to choose a single, preferred alternative, which they will present in a draft EIS, by September 2002.

But if the committee and Department of Natural Resources cannot come to a consensus on one alternative, then both parties’ proposals will be included in the draft EIS. The Department of Natural Resources will then respond to public comments and issue a final EIS, which they will present to the Board of Natural Resources.

“It could happen that the Department of Natural Resources chooses X and the committee chooses Y. Then the board could pick,” Soicher said. “The moratorium on timber harvesting in the Lake Whatcom watershed could be lifted this way.”

He also explained that the Legislature can step in to prevent the board from lifting the moratorium. Although Department of Natural Resources is the manager of these state trust lands, Soicher said, the Legislature is the actual trustee of the lands. The board, which represents the beneficiaries of the lands, will make a decision based on the final environmental impact statement, but the Legislature has the authority to override the board’s decision.

“I think that Department of Natural Resources recognized that it is in their best interest to work together, ” Soicher said.

The landscape plan Soicher would like to see would put an end to all clear-cutting on state trust lands.

“I would like to see mature forest ecology that’s going to preserve water quality and quantity and habitat,” Soicher said. “That would allow for some low impact, selective logging.”

Marrom said she felt Department of Natural Resources could generate some revenue in this way.

“I would like to see sustainable forestry done in our watershed,” Marrom said. “I would like to see a diverse, mature forest surrounding Lake Whatcom.”

Soicher emphasized that the forest serves functions in the Lake Whatcom watershed such as purifying water and providing habitat for fish and wildlife.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife representative on the committee, Alan Looff, echoed these thoughts.

“My desired outcome (for the Landscape Plan) on the wildlife end would be some diversity of habitat...structural diversity within stands...not all monoculture, not necessarily all Douglas Fir or one species of tree, but some biodiversity within,” Looff said.

According to Looff, the Lummi tribe refers to the area in the watershed as ‘the land that slides.’ This is not good news for the fish, he said.

“As far as the fish, that whole system up there... number one it’s steep, it erodes real easy, so it’s prone to landslides,” Looff said. “A lot of the old logging roads used to have real small culverts in them that would plug up and blow out. That may have been a lot of the problem back in the ‘83 floods.”

In 1983, heavy rains set off landslides on poorly managed forest lands in the watershed. Department of Natural Resources was sued for the disaster, which sent logging debris surging downhill, plummeting through houses and cars, before cascading into the lake. Besides the millions of dollars in cleanup costs and property damage, the catastrophe took a toll on watershed health and public well-being that cannot be measured in dollars. Looff said fish also pay a price for such disasters.

“The problem is that it takes out all of the woody debris in the stream from fish and it scours out all of the spawning gravels down below,” Looff said. “So basically we’ve got really poor fish habitat in just about every tributary to the lake due primarily to logging and past logging practices and development.”

Soicher said forest practices have gotten better since Marrom and Berg lobbied the Legislature to pass a bill in 2000 improving forest management practices. Although Soicher said the improvements are better, they are still not adequate, he felt.

“Better does not imply good,” he said. “It’s all relative. Forest practices are not where they need to be.”

Looff said he felt the 2000 legislation was the result of a balancing act that did not consider best science practices.

“That was a compromise,” Looff said. “And that might be fine in most watersheds, and theoretically that might work in this watershed, but we have problems with extremely poor habitat, certainly for fish... we’ve got development within the watershed....”

Looff would like to see best science practices used, not just best management practices. He feels the cumulative effects of logging in the watershed must be looked into. For instance, running a logging road back and forth across a stream four times may work under best management practices, but this does not take into account best science practices. Specifically, he feels that stream sedimentation monitoring must be done.

“There’s issues with fish habitat quality… sedimentation that you get off the logging roads… buffers need to be bigger,” Looff said. “(Department of Natural Resources) needs to address those issues adequately and I don’t feel that they have at this point.”

For a public drinking water supply with so many pressures on it, Looff said he felt watershed resources must be protected. Marrom also said she felt water quality should be the priority.

“Our drinking water supply is more important than any amount of revenue in the whole world,” Marrom said.

According to Soicher, the decision to allow logging in the watershed, and to what extent, may come down to deciding what an acceptable level of risk is.

“Given the uncertainty we have, what is the level of risk we can live with?” he asked.

This is a question Department of Natural Resources will ask the public to ask themselves in upcoming meetings Department of Natural Resources will host. The public review and comment period should begin in several months, and Marrom said she hopes the public takes advantage of this opportunity to get involved.

“Public input is what got us this far,” she said. “And we hope that the Board of Natural Resources approves the committee’s recommendations. If not, we’re going to have to go to the Legislature to listen to us. And they will.”

Marrom has little doubt that public and legislative backing will prove strong enough to support the shaken Lake Whatcom watershed.