Iron Honey

In a landmark ruling, on August 13, 2004 a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a U.S. Forest Service decision to log 1,400 acres in the headwaters of the Little North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. The ruling sets important legal precedents.

The Kootenai Environmental Alliance, The Lands Councils, Ecology Center, and Idaho Sporting Congress filed the legal challenge of what the Forest Service had dubbed the Iron Honey "Restoration" Project.  Restoration was indeed the priority here.  Approximately 40,000 acres had been logged in the Little North Fork Coeur d'Alene River watershed since 1960, and an extremely high density of roads had been built in the project area --exceeding eight linear miles per square mile of land.  Because of all the logging and roads, the Little North Fork has flooded higher and more frequently in recent years, resulting in severe damage to fish habitat as well as problems such as the mobilization of toxic sediments deposited in the flood plain downstream of where the North and the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River come together: toxins originating from the legacy of poor mining practices in Idaho's "Silver Valley."

The Forest Service claimed that logging 1,400 acres from steep mountainsides and then selling the timber to obtain restoration funds would result in a net benefit for the watershed and fisheries, but environmental groups pointed out that the agency was ignoring the cumulative impacts of all the past logging projects.  The Ninth Circuit agreed.  In noting that the agency had admitted it had damaged the watersheds with it’s past timber sales, the Court stated: "(T)here is no catalog of past projects and no discussion of how those projects (and differences between the projects) have harmed the environment.  ...(T)here is no discussion of the connection between individual harvests and the prior environmental harms from those harvests that the Forest Service now acknowledges."

The Ninth Circuit declared the Forest Service to be in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the use of sound scientific methodology and accurate public disclosures in the decision making process.
The lack of sound science is a major aspect of this Ninth Circuit's decision.  The Forest Service has relied on speculative formulas and databases of questionable accuracy to prepare their logging project Environmental Impact Statements (EIS).

The Forest Service was, in effect, trying to manage the forest without sending its experts out to directly gather important forest information.  The agency tried to use its unreliable methodology to analyze project impacts on soil productivity, old-growth dependent wildlife species, and stream channel integrity.  In each case the Court rejected the Forest Service's analysis, noting that the agency had failed to gather data to test its assumptions and validate its methodologies.

This was also the first time that the Ninth Circuit made a positive ruling on the issue of soil productivity. Because of the ruling, the Forest Service is required to address soil issues more thoroughly when proposing timber sales.