Hikers make their way up Piper Trail on as they make their ascent toward Mount Chocorua’s summit. Chocorua is in the Sandwich Range in the White Mountains National Forest. (Photo by Christopher R. Mazza/iStock/Getty Images)
A group of environmentalists have launched a legal battle to stop a logging project in the Sandwich Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest.
The Sandwich Vegetation Management Project, which was approved by the U.S. Forest Service last year, will allow 638 acres in the Sandwich Range to be logged by private companies, reconstruct about 16 miles of roads through the area and authorize prescribed burns on 306 acres. The Forest Service has said that the project will help manage vegetation to provide a sustainable supply of timber for local economies and the burns will help diversify vegetation and wildlife. It’s one of several logging projects in the White Mountain National Forest, several of which are being challenged in court.
“The Forest Service in this project, like in recent projects, is flouting the requirements of federal law as they approve these significant logging projects across the White Mountains,” Christophe Courchese, the attorney behind the lawsuit, said in an interview with the Bulletin. “And they’re doing less than the bare minimum required reviews of these pretty significant efforts that will really change the face of these areas for decades to come.”
The Sandwich Range Wilderness spans about 35,300 acres within the southern portion of the national forest. It includes Mount Passaconaway, Mount Tripyramid, Sandwich Mountain, several rivers, and about 60 miles of hiking trails.
An allegedly ‘shoddy’ process
In a lawsuit filed in late June, Standing Trees, Inc. — a Vermont environmental group that seeks to protect forests across New England — and attorneys with the Environmental Advocacy Clinic — a project of the Vermont Law and Graduate School — allege the Forest Service didn’t sufficiently prove logging was necessary in the area or go through the proper steps for environmental review and public input.
“If you go down the list of various resources that they were supposed to analyze, and you really look carefully at what they put together, what you see is a pattern of the Forest Service just concluding, without evidence, that the project will have no impact on those resources,” Courchese, who serves as director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic, said. “And that doesn’t meet the requirements of federal law.”
The lawsuit argues the project runs counter to guidelines outlined in a plan for the forest established by the federal government in 2005 called the White Mountain National Forest Plan. It claims the project fails to comply with that plan because it doesn’t include any measures to protect the officially designated wild and scenic Cold River and will affect parts of the forest visible to hikers and recreationists in violation of requirements to not impact scenery. The suit also says the Forest Service failed to demonstrate that logging will help manage vegetation and won’t harm the habitats of animals in the forest, including the northern long-eared bat, a federally listed endangered species that lives in the range.
They certainly went through a process, but the process wasn’t adequate.
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It also alleges the Forest Service plans to build four times as much mileage of roads than authorized in the 2005 plan by classifying the proposed road construction as reconstruction of existing roads. The lawsuit argues those roads have been decommissioned for so long that reforestation has occurred over them.
“The public should have a right to weigh in on these uses of federal public lands, especially, these really beautiful, important areas that have major species and other important water quality benefits and all these sorts of things that that the Forest Service was supposed to take into account,” Courchese said. “And they really did a very shoddy job in analyzing these impacts.”
The lawsuit also accuses the project of violating the National Environmental Policy Act in numerous ways including by failing the so-called “hard look” test and not properly examining the impacts on forest health, climate, and endangered species.
“They certainly went through a process, but the process wasn’t adequate, especially given the types of information that they presented and the analysis that they did in that review,” Courchese said. “So it’s not that they didn’t do any review, but the review that they did really fell short of the federal requirements.”
The Forest Service’s stance
The Forest Service has not filed a response to the lawsuit, according to online court records. Officials with the Forest Service and White Mountain National Forest’s Campton office did not respond to the Bulletin’s requests for an interview or comment. However, in a letter outlining approval for the project, Jim Innis, Saco District ranger at the national forest addressed public concern over the project, writing “The National Forest System is managed under a multiple use mission, which not everyone agrees with.”
“Public opinion on forest management has and will continue to be controversial,” he continued. “Federal land management policy can be complex and difficult to understand. My staff and I did our best to explain the ‘why’ of our management actions and will continue this approach for future projects. … I have considered public comments received throughout the analysis and balanced them with the best available science in making this decision.”
The Forest Service had three 30-day comment periods and held five public meetings and five meetings with clubs and organizations on the project.
After those meetings, the Forest Service excluded 50 acres of old-growth forests from the project, Innis wrote. He also said the agency consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which determined “the proposed project may affect, but not is likely to adversely affect the northern long-eared bat.”
Several contested projects
This isn’t the first time Courchese and the Environment Advocacy Clinic have sued the Forest Service. There are more than a dozen logging projects approved or proposed in the White Mountain National Forest, and the Environmental Advocacy Clinic, partnered with Standing Trees, Inc., have targeted several of them.
“We’ve been very active in this space,” Courchese said, “challenging the Forest Service and trying to hold them accountable for complying with federal law.”
That includes their lawsuit over the Tarleton Project near Gorham and Lake Tarleton in the western portion of the forest, and a lawsuit against the Peabody Project in the famous northern Presidential Range of the White Mountains. Those lawsuits are ongoing and revolve around similar disputes.
They’ve also challenged logging projects on state land in Vermont and sued chemical manufacturing giant Monsanto over its alleged harmful impacts on water in New England.
New dynamics under Trump
The logging projects have been ongoing across multiple presidential administrations. However, when President Donald Trump retook office in January, Courchese said he noticed two major conflicting changes happening simultaneously.
“Clearly, at the presidential level and at the top of the agency, there’s a real imperative to get these logging projects going,” he said. “And there’s a real set of commands, through executive orders and other directives, to put more of these national forest lands on the chopping block, so to speak, for reasons that don’t hold up, such as the fact that we have a supposed emergency in the national forests in terms of wildfire risk, which is just not the case in the White Mountains.”
However, at the same time, he said that massive cuts in staffing and funding appear to have hamstrung the Forest Service employees’ ability to work on this quickly.
Trump has taken several actions aimed at opening up more forests to logging across the U.S. Late last month, he announced plans to end the quarter-century-old “roadless rule” and lift restrictions on road construction in nearly a third of U.S. National forest land, a necessary step to build logging infrastructure. Trump also instructed his cabinet secretaries to bypass endangered species laws and other environmental restrictions to allow loggers to tap into more areas. These actions follow a series of executive orders in early March meant to streamline timber production and bypass environmental protection laws on claims of national security and natural disaster risk.