The U.S. Forest Service could change a practice that dates back to the early 1980s and forego the environmental impact statement process in the plans required for each of its national forests and grasslands, according to an article to be published in the July/August 2004 issue of The Environmental Forum. The article is written by the career Forest Service employee in charge of a rulemaking to replace the existing planning regulation.
Instead, forest planners would use environmental management systems that conform to the ISO 14001 international EMS standard to address environmental issues and ensure compliance with laws. ISO 14001 was developed primarily for use in industry and has seen widespread adoption in Fortune 500 companies. The standard is now being put in place by many federal agencies.
The plans are required under the 1976 National Forest Management Act, which was passed in reaction to clearcutting in the national forests. Environmental impact statements are the key feature of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act and are required for "major federal actions." The rule is near the final stages of being published as final in the Federal Register. The NEPA components, but not the EMS ones, were in the proposed rule, published in 2002.
“A forest plan only has an environmental effect if it is knocked off the table and lands on the ground,” says DeAnn Zwight, Assistant Director in the Service’s Ecosystem Management Coordination Staff, in the article. “The projects based on the plan from timber cuts to watershed improvements projects to campground construction are what affect the environment, not the plan itself.” Because plans would be made more strategic, EISs would no longer be done for plans, which would become more like county master plans. EISs would continue to be done for projects, where the true impacts are.
Zwight’s reasoning is that as much as 5 to 7 years of the 15-year planning cycle can be taken up by the EIS process, which produces a rigid product that often becomes irrelevant and unusable as soon as it is finished and hard to update. In addition, in trying to replace the existing planning rule, which many see as burdened by red tape, she says, the Service wants to move toward adaptive management, which allows for a constant cycle of learning and change in planning. EMSs are a “management design that is based upon action, monitoring, and adaptation, and a real focus on accountability and transparency,” she says. “EMS literature characterizes this adaptive cycle as plan, do, check, act.”
The rulemaking team chose the well-known ISO 14001 international EMS standard, developed by the International Organization for Standardization, and modified it to fit the needs of a natural system with multiple stakeholders. In particular, the rulemaking team sought to provide public input on a continuous basis, rather just up front, as in the EIS process, she says.
Zwight stresses that while she believes EMSs are a preferred approach, at this point they are just an option. But “whether the Forest Service adopts EMSs, or some other planning structure, we need a system to allow for more adaptive and efficient planning. The way we have done planning for over 20 years does not work.”
Downloadable PDF copies of the article are available at: http://www.eli.org/pdf/smokeyandtheEMS4-04.pdf.
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