Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Oregon Coast
Posts: 7,481
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Governers reveiw of the coho listing
GOVERNOR KITZHABER REMARKS TO OFIC ANNUAL MEETING
October 22, 2001, 12:30pm, Salishan
Good afternoon.
Thank you for the invitation to come speak to you today. I want to take this opportunity to discuss the recent Hogan decision and my concerns about its impact on the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds. I also want to discuss the future of this kind of collaborative problem-solving process in the context of our current relationship with our federal partners.
Let me start with the Hogan decision. I understand that earlier today you endorsed a recommendation from your Forest Management Policy Committee to carry through on the voluntary commitments you have made under the Oregon Plan, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Hogan decision. I want to commend you and thank you for taking this position. OFIC and its members have been strong supporters of the Oregon Plan from its very beginning and I appreciate your continuing support today.
I am concerned about the potential consequences of the Hogan decision on the Oregon Plan and the willingness of Oregonians to continue working to improve watershed health across the state. As you know a major focus of my administration has been to encourage all Oregonians to work locally through watershed councils, soil and water conservation districts and others to address watershed health issues.
The Hogan Decision certainly complicates our work – and before I turn to the decision itself, and its potential consequences – it will be useful to step back and consider why we embarked on the Oregon Plan in the first place.
First and foremost, the Oregon Plan grew out of a concern over the deterioration of the health of many of our watersheds and of the species which depend on them. There are many signs to validate this concern that we are stretching our watersheds beyond their capacity -- ESA listings being but one of them. We are also experiencing water quality and water quantity problems in watersheds across Oregon. For example, as a result of development and land management decisions, we have blocked access to miles of habitat for many fish species and have built miles of roads along streams, resulting in increased erosion and decreased water quality.
In other words, the objective of the Oregon Plan is watershed health. The restoration of endangered fish populations is, to a large extent, a result of restoring the health of the watershed on which they depend. By the same token, a healthy, functioning watershed is the common building block from which all beneficial uses of a flow: clean water, a thriving forest, abundant timber, and healthy forest species.
We cannot provide sustainable forest products, assure clean water and provide habitat for species unless we first have a healthy functioning ecosystem. The three legs upon which sustainable forestry stands – social, environmental and economic – are all interwoven and are dependent first on a healthy, functioning watershed.
In addition, the Oregon Plan grew out of the conviction that watershed health could not be achieved without a collaborative process that involved private landowners and other stakeholders in the actual on-the-ground restoration work – not because they were forced to, but because they believed that it was the right thing to do.
I believe that the Hogan Decision could potentially undermine this basic philosophy. In addition, the decision has significant economic implications for future recreational and commercial fishing, as well as regulatory implications for a much broader landowner community.
As you know, shortly after the Hogan decision was issued I urged NMFS to appeal the decision and to conduct a rulemaking process to clarify the role of hatchery fish in recovery of salmonids under the ESA. I know that some may find my request for an appeal to be confusing – if not contradictory – since, in the early days of the Oregon Plan, we were trying to get a no list decision from NMFS based on the weight of the commitments in the Plan. Let me take this opportunity to clarify my thinking behind these requests.
First it is important to point out that the legal decision Judge Hogan made was fairly narrow. It was essentially the kind of argument only a lawyer can fully appreciate, and it went something like this: Basically, NMFS included hatchery fish when defining the coho runs they were considering. But they did not include hatchery fish when listing the coho as threatened. Judge Hogan rule, in essence, that hatchery fish must be considered in a consistent fashion. In other words, the decision has more to do with process than with science.
Whether the decision is appealed or not, I am concerned about its potential outcome. First and foremost, I am concerned that the decision will lead people to conclude that the solution to ESA listings or potential listings is to simply increase hatchery production. The problem with this strategy is that it will fail to achieve the goal of the ESA: to have sustainable fish and wildlife populations in their natural environments.
Second, I am concerned with the potential implications of a re-listing that included hatchery fish. Judge Hogan’s decision puts us on the horns of a dilemma. If NMFS does a new status review and remakes the listing decision as ordered by the judge, it is likely that the new decision would list both wild and hatchery stocks. This would have two serious consequences.
First, it would have significant negative economic implications for our commercial and sports fishing industries which could no longer take hatchery fish. Second, it would have significant regulatory implications for private timberland owners who currently have only hatchery fish in the streams running through their property. These landowners are not currently affected by the listing of wild fish but a re-listing that included hatchery fish would make them subject to the take provisions of the ESA.
An appeal of the Hogan decision, however – if successful – could leave us with the status quo: a listing of wild fish only. I do not know whether the decision will be appealed – or whether such an appeal would be successful – but I wanted you to understand the dilemma that has been presented to us by the Hogan decision.
Finally, I am concerned that because of this decision Oregonians will think that the work we are doing to restore watershed health is less important or not necessary. The fact is that the water quality issues we face as a state will not diminish no matter what the legal outcome of the Hogan Decision. This is not the time to abandon our work to restore the health of our watersheds. We in Oregon and the Northwest appreciate the quality of the environment in which we live, play and earn a living. We are making progress -- and we cannot quit until the job is done.
One of the outcomes of this decision is that we may not be able to list wild fish under the ESA without also listing hatchery fish. That does not mean that many populations of wild fish are not on the brink of extinction. It does not mean we should stop trying to rebuild wild populations. And it certainly does not mean that we should stop our efforts to restore the health of our watersheds.
So, again, I want to thank you for your willingness to stay the course and carry through on your Oregon Plan commitments regardless of the outcome of this case. Your leadership in this effort sets an example for all Oregonians of what the Oregon Plan is all about.
This is important because the Oregon Plan represents a collaborative effort through which a wide range of stakeholders have come together to improve the health of their natural environment. It provides a forum in which we can move beyond polarization and find a balance between environmental, economic and social values. The future viability of this kind of on-the-ground problem solving is threatened not only by the ambiguities of legal decisions like the one just rendered by Judge Hogan – but also by our current relationship with federal land management and natural resourced agencies.
Let me give you an example with which you are all familiar: the Eastside Forest Health Initiative – designed to restore the ecologic health of the public forests of eastern Oregon while providing wood to local mills in an environmentally sensitive manner. This initiative offers a working definition of environmental, economic and social sustainability.
Our effort began in 1995 when I appointed a panel of highly respected scientists from throughout the Northwest who reached a remarkable consensus of opinion on what it would take to restore health to the forests of Eastern Oregon. Their recommendations were embodied in a broadly supported set of eleven guiding principles.
This "11-point plan" calls for using active management to promote ecosystem health, while avoiding areas of high public controversy. Restoration treatments include understory and commercial thinning; road maintenance, closure and obliteration; prescribed burning; noxious weed treatment; and stream rehabilitation.
In the first years of the initiative nearly 60 Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management projects that exemplified the 11-point plan were identified. This offered a clear demonstration that it is possible to engage in broadly supported watershed and forest restoration work that both improves ecosystem health and provides some economic benefits to local communities.
Unfortunately, the volume of the wood flowing from this work has been much less than expected. This has been due to a combination of tough markets, the traditional size of these thinning treatments and the difficulty getting projects through ESA consultation and other federal procedures and processes.
As a consequence, the Eastside Forest Health Initiative has not, to date, fulfilled its promise of helping to stabilize local economies. Even mills that have made the investment to retool to take smaller diameter logs are struggling. Ochoco Forest Products – an early and enthusiastic supporter of the effort – withdrew its support early this year and later closed its mill in Prineville.
Joseph Forest Products in Joseph – retooled to take small trees off the Willowa-Whitman National Forest – may face the same fate. With the Wallowa-Whitman choked with overstocked stands of young pine and fir – and with the widely acknowledged need to thin out these stands to improve forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires – the inability to connect the dots and get the wood to the mills has led to a growing frustration with the effort.
While we should not conclude at this point that the Eastside Forest Health Initiative is a failure -- it does appear to be following the course of other similar collaborative initiatives like the Applegate Partnership, the Quincy Library Group and the Grand Canyon Forest Trust.
All of these efforts are built on collaboration at the local level among people working together to solve shared problems on behalf of a shared place. All have enjoyed initial enthusiasm and support from the federal land management agencies. And all have been frustrated to one degree or another by the unwillingness or inability of these same agencies to allow the collaborators to actually make decisions on the ground.
Dan Kemmis, in his recently published book This Sovereign Land, characterizes this phenomenon as the inevitable collision between local collaborative problem solving and the "procedural republic" – the complex administrative processes which try to ensure that all stakeholders have equal access to federal decision makers.
As Kemmis puts it: "At the bottom of this difficulty lies the fact that the collaboration movement represents a form and philosophy of decision making fundamentally different from the decision structure in which the land management agencies are embedded. One is an inherently decentralized, democratic form of governing; the other is inherently centralized and hierarchical. The effort to make something like collaborative stewardship an integral part of Forest Service operations, for example, cannot really succeed unless the agency is willing to turn some actual decision-making and management authority over to the people who are doing the collaboration."
This gets us into the century old debate over the management of public lands in the West. On one side is the position bluntly articulated by George Coggins, a public land legal authority: "The public lands are public. They are the property of all of the people, not just those who live in their immediate vicinity. They are national assets, not local storehouses to be looted … "
At the other end of the spectrum is the position represented by the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s which held that all federal land was state property to do with as states pleased.
The truth -- and the future of sustainable forestry -- lie somewhere in between these two positions.
There is no doubt but that the exploitation of public lands for private gain is an established part of western history. Indeed, the conservation movement in America can trace its roots to efforts in 1870 to prevent corporate interests from abusing homesteading laws – passed to help settle the frontier – in order to gain access to public lands for the extraction of natural resources. These were not sustainable land management practices.
But it is equally true that the current procedure-bound, litigious, cumbersome, glacial process that has engulfed federal land management agencies does not produce sustainable land management practices either. As evidence, look at the sad state of health the public forests of Eastern Oregon and, indeed, of the forests throughout the Intermountain West. Or consider the fact that 10 years after the listing of the Snake River Chinook under the Endangered Species Act, there is no recovery plan in place.
I do not support turning public lands over to local politics. There are legitimate national interests to be served. National environmental legislation – like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act – were enacted for a reason … and a good reason: to secure the long term and sustainable health of the ecosystem we all share.
I believe in the need for this strong framework of federal environmental laws and in having the ability to enforce them. But I also believe -- just as strongly -- that we need to have both the wisdom and the courage to periodically reevaluate the effectiveness of our tools and the way in which we have traditionally applied them.
For example, with over 1000 species listed -- the lengthy, complex and contentious process of actually developing recovery plans under the ESA will doom many of these species to extinction long before anything happens on the ground. Likewise, the processes that guide and shackle our federal land management agencies are leading to similar results in terms of the health of our forest ecosystems.
What I am suggesting to you today is that unless we address this fundamental problem – not with our environmental laws themselves, but with the processes and procedures by which they are applied—we will never achieve our goal of sustainability for our forests or for our endangered species.
We are making an effort to address this problem through what I call the "Oregon Agreement" with the Bush administration. In early May I traveled to Washington DC to try to persuade our congressional delegation and the Administration to support an outcomes based approach to managing natural resources in Oregon. In addition to our delegation, I met with representatives from Interior, Agriculture and Commerce. I was joined on that trip by key stakeholder representatives, including Larry Giustina, representing timber interests. In addition, John Hampton has worked to open the doors to the Bush administration for us and continues to help work with the Oregon delegation on this effort.
The proposal was well received and we hope to begin the process of developing a formal MOU with the administration later this year or early next year that would include a set of principles and outcomes which the state and federal administration, among others share. We successfully used a similar process --called the Oregon Option -- to develop an outcomes based approach to social service issues in the mid 90s.
My hope is that we can use this approach to remove some of the barriers to fully implementing the Oregon Plan and the Eastside Forest Health Initiative. With five years of working on these two initiatives it has become clear that the very same laws established to protect and restore natural resources bring with them some processes and procedures that prevent the overall goal of watershed health from being achieved. It is with this in mind that we are pursuing the Oregon Agreement. I don’t think I need to mention much more than ESA consultations and 404 permitting to this group for you to see the need for such an approach.
I want to thank you for your support so far on this effort and urge you to continue to work with my staff to make the Oregon Agreement a reality. I also ask for your support to help me protect the state agency funding for the Oregon Plan and Eastside Forest Health Initiative during the special session which I expect to call early next year to rebalance the state budget. It will be difficult to convince the Bush Administration to support the Oregon Agreement if the legislature does not keep the funding commitment for these important natural resource initiatives in place.
Finally, as my administration nears its end, I want to thank you for the solid working relationship we have developed over the past seven years. I believe we have made significant progress in the effort to maintain a viable forest products industry in Oregon while improving the health of our forest ecosystems. Clearly we still have much to do and I look forward to working with you during my remaining months in office because I believe that sustainable forests are a cornerstone of Oregon’s future.
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