Qualified support for

hemlock felling plan

As the Joyce Kilmer hemlock felling project came to completion, the U.S. Forest Service made available the project planning file and answered further questions about the work, suggesting that the agency had received additional verbal support for its plans.

“Cheoah Ranger District staff briefed Brent Martin of The Wilderness Society concerning the project,” said Candace Wyman, (Acting) Public Affairs Staff Officer for the National Forests of North Carolina. “Brent Martin, due to his frequent interactions with WildLaw (Josh Kelly), Southern Environmental Law Center (D. J. Gerken), and Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition (Hugh Irwin), offered to contact those individuals. He did so, and relayed back to the district that they supported the project,” she added in an e-mail of Nov. 17. “Thereafter, district staff discussed the project directly with Josh Kelly and D. J. Gerken, who have reiterated their support.”

Wilderness Society recollection

"Others were contacted, but I was not chosen by the Forest Service as the person to contact them and convince them that this was the right thing to do," Martin said. "They made their own decisions, based on their professional opinions."

In separate interviews and communication, Kelly, Gerken and Irwin confirmed some contact regarding the issue – these are called “verbal scopings” by the Forest Service -- but all qualified their expressions of support for the plan.

SAFC comments from Hugh Irwin

“Brent did talk with me about the plans to take down the Joyce Kilmer hemlock. He said he had been briefed by Cheoah staff, and I think he had gone out to the area with them.

“My response was complex as it still is. I have always thought that the biggest tragedy in this issue is the fact that the hemlock were allowed to die in the first place. The Forest Service strategy at the time of treating with beetles first was a mistake. In hindsight this is very clear, but even discounting the benefits of hindsight the stand was so invaluable that they should have tried aggressive chemical treatments from the start.

“After the hemlock were dead, it was clear that the Forest Service needed to do something. About four years ago when it became clear that many (at least) of the hemlock were going to ultimately die, I asked Joe Bonnet, the District Ranger at the time, what they planned to do. Joe said he thought it would be a decade before they had to worry about it. I knew hemlock start to come down quickly as opposed to other trees and they would have to do something sooner than that.

“In the best of all worlds, I would have supported them closing the area. The upper loop could do with a rest - as well as the need for closing the lower loop while the trees came down. But I knew this would never happen. There would be tremendous pressure to keep the area open, and people would try to go in anyway- creating safety issues. Given that they had to do something other than closing the area, the explosives make more sense to me than any other solution. Taking the trees down at random heights will mimic natural breakup of the trees pretty well. Much better than cutting – either with crosscut saws or chain saws. The breakup will be more episodic than if they were allowed to come down on their own but probably not in an ecologically significant way. The tree limbs and tree boles will become coarse woody debris that works its way through the system in a very long cycle just as it would if the trees were left to come down on their own in the next 5-10 years.

“That’s how I feel now about it, and this was pretty much how I felt about it and what I said when I first heard about the plans. I suspect that this response got condensed down into my supporting it - which I do in most respects, with the caveats above.

“I have not seen the grove since the trees were taken down, and I’m anxious to see it. I expect to be surprised by the appearance. I’m also very interested to see how it develops in the coming years," Irwin concluded.

Comments from Josh Kelly

“I cannot speak for WildLaw, but my support would be in the sense that we were not going to legally oppose the project,” said Kelly, staff biologist for WildLaw in Asheville. “The real tragedy is that these hemlocks could have been saved, but the agency never had a vision to do that.” According to Kelly, the Forest Service earlier efforts to safeguard and treat some Joyce Kilmer hemlocks with an adelgid-fighting pesticide came “too little and too late.”

SELC comments from Austin D.J. Gerken

Austin D.J. Gerken, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center in Asheville, clarified that he did not communicate with the Forest Service in advance of the project. “I don’t know about the process that was used to approve it,” he said, “but I recognize the Forest Service was facing a significant challenge if they closed [Joyce Kilmer] for an extended period.”

WildSouth comment by proxy

Another North Carolina-based conservation group, WildSouth, was apparently also brought into the mix, indirectly. “We were not contacted directly about this project,” a WildSouth spokesman said. “In speaking with [the local district ranger] about this, I believe he used Brent's input as a proxy for most of the North Carolina groups including Wild South.”

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