Four environmental groups have filed suit against the U.S. Forest Service alleging the long-term Superior National Forest plan fails to protect biodiversity in and around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
The groups claim that extensive logging planned near the BWCAW may have impacts on wildlife and biodiversity within the wilderness area that the 2004 forest plan fails to account for.
The suit was filed by the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Minneapolis, also seeks to reinstate discontinued wildlife research that measured logging's impact on specific species.
Since the forest plan was approved in 2004, after nearly a decade of planning, the Forest Service has proposed thousands of acres of clear-cut logging within a quarter-mile of the boundary waters, said Clyde Hanson, a Sierra Club activist who lives in Tofte.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources also plans to log thousands more acres of state land mixed amid federal land in the area around the BWCAW.
The forest plan also allows logging on many areas that had been designated as roadless area preserves under the Clinton administration but which have since been re-opened to roads and logging by the Bush administration.
"This plan allows logging roads through roadless areas right to the doorstep of the Boundary Waters," Hanson said. "These roads can result in motorized trespassing inside the wilderness, and they become passageways for damaging invasive species like buckthorn, spotted knapweed and gypsy moths."
The groups also claim that the Forest Service has cut the number of indicator species used to measure the impact of logging from 34 wildlife species to three animals and one tree.
Jim Sanders, supervisor of the Superior National Forest, said he hadn't seen the suit and couldn't comment on the specific allegations.
"I can say we're disappointed that, after all the years of work on the plan, and two years now since the record of decision on the plan, we're still seeing this," Sanders said, noting the plan was upheld through all levels of the Forest Service.
Some of the same issues already have been decided in a federal court regarding the Tomahawk timber sale. In March, federal Judge Joan Ericksen ruled the Forest Service adequately studied the environmental effects of logging in the Tomahawk area, just south of the BWCAW.
Wayne Brandt, executive vice president of the Minnesota Timber Producers industry group, called the lawsuit baseless.
"The Sierra Club is opposed to logging nationally, locally and everywhere else," Brandt said, predicting the litigation has little chance of success. "Suits over forest plans have been generally frowned upon by the courts."Duluth News Tribune
