The Lands Council's Forest Watch Program keeps a watchful eye over the U.S. Forest Service, protects roadless areas, safeguards communities from wildfires, ends destructive timber sales, preserves old growth areas, and defends wildlife such as mountain caribou, lynx, and trout.

Current projects:

• Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition
  Collaborating with a diverse coalition of stakeholders to protect communities from wildfire, promote restoration, and design and implement innovative approaches to forest management.

• Idaho Panhandle National Forest Protection
  Applying science, research, fieldwork, advocacy, and litigation to protect the integrity of these public lands.
  

Click Here to Help Protect Idaho's Roadless Areas!

Help The Lands Council Achieve New Wilderness in Eastern Washington in 2008!

Breaking News:

• The Lands Council wins important court ruling to protect areas affected by fire in the Umatilla National Forest (February 2007)
  
  
• The Lands Council is one of the plantiffs in another important legal victory for national forests! Read the March 31, 2007 Washington Post article

Accomplishments:

• Iron Honey Court Case
  In 2004, The Lands Council won a significant court case in the Ninth Circuit of Appeals (TLC vs. Powell) in which the court found that the IPNF timber database inventory is outdated and inaccurate and is not a reliable indicator of old-growth habitat.

• Old Growth Campaign
  An investigation by The Lands Council regarding the Forest Service's inventory of old growth in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest developed into an ongoing campaign focused on identifying and protecting the last remaining old growth areas in Northern Idaho.

• Aerial Guide to the Northwest
  We produced the fastest-going pamphlet at the Spokane International Airport in 1998.

• Destructive logging
  From 1991 to 1993, we reduced the proposed amount of logging in four national forests by 75 percent.

• Clearcut Shame
  Our 1991 billboard campaign to halt clearcutting led to establishment of the Interior Columbia Basin Environmental Management Project.

To get involved, click here.

Background:

In 1990, The Lands Council launched its Forest Watch program in response to the hundreds of timber sale decisions in Inland Northwest forests, which proceeded without public scrutiny and without challenge. The Forest Watch program recruited, trained, and supported individuals and groups to provide on-the-ground oversight of Forest Service timber sales and other decisions. The Forest Watch program has been highly successful, decreasing the cuts on individual National Forests from unsustainably high levels to the lowest levels since the 1950s. The Forest Watch program provides valuable input to national efforts – from education on fire ecology and defensible space planning, to advocating ecological restoration principles and old growth and wildlife protection. The Forest Watch program places an emphasis on coordinating our conservation campaigns with local, state, regional, and national conservation organizations, and serves as a critical link in the conservation movement.

For more information contact the Forest Watch Director, Tania Ellersick at (509) 209-2401, or at tellersick@landscouncil.org.

The Lands Council Winter 2008 Newsletter Article
Protecting Idaho's Roadless Areas

Ellersick Lumbermen 1921

Standing in back: Frank G. Ellersick, unidentified, Jack Ellersick

Sitting in front: unidentified, Walt Ellersick, John F. Ellersick (reading newspaper), three men at right unknown.

In 1900, my family moved to north Idaho in search of white pine.  Nicknamed the White Pine Savages, documents from the 1920s show the miles of roads my family built to access and remove white pine timber.  At this time, the first "roadless" or primitive area inventory on national forests was conducted and the Forest Service inventoried many tracts of land larger than 200,000 acres.  North Idaho was dotted with small mining and logging communities, financed by what could be extracted of Idaho's natural resources.  After we cut all the old growth white pine from the land we had purchased, my family started working for the A.C. White Lumber Company in Boundary County, the Panhandle Lumber Company in Spirit Lake, and established the Kootenai Bay Lumber Company and Riverside Lumber Company north of Sandpoint and near Laclede, Idaho.  In 1951, my grandparents, my aunt, and my dad moved from Coeur d'Alene to Bonners Ferry where my Grandpa was the head saw filer for the Ellersick Brother's sawmill which was started by my great grandfather and his brother. By the eighties, my dad and uncle worked for WI Forests Products in Spokane, and my cousins and I spent our summers in north Idaho.  We collected drinking water in old gallon milk jugs from Snow Creek, packed them in my grandparent's green station wagon, and brought them to the house they built on Buchanan Street.  We were oblivious to how those forests were changing around us, how the roads we drove our yellow dune buggy on were expanding, or that the lake we swam in would turn into the largest Superfund sight in the nation.

If you visit the Museum of North Idaho in Coeur d'Alene, you can view hundreds of photographs donated by my grandma documenting the fragmentation of these pristine forests through our shared history of natural resource extraction, development, and transportation here in Northern Idaho.  This story is not unusual; US citizens are losing open space at a rate approaching 10,000 acres a day.  Mike Dombeck, former Chief of the Forest Service and Director of the Bureau of Land Management, recently pointed out in an article supporting roadless protection, that in the conterminous US, only 3% of the nation's land is farther than 17,000 feet (about 3.2 miles) from the nearest road.

Despite over a million comments from Americans supporting the complete protection of all roadless areas under the 2001 Roadless Rule, the State of Idaho and the U.S. Forest Service are moving forward with a separate Idaho proposal that would decrease the protections of over five million acres of remaining intact ecosystems, leaving them vulnerable to further development, phosphate mining, irresponsible logging, and road building.  Unfortunately, the draft proposal does not include the definitions, explicit language, and restrictions, necessary to honor Lt. Governor Risch's 2006 commitment to protect 95% of Idaho's roadless land.  The proposal permits phosphate mining and new roads they claim are necessary for fuel reduction.  They fail to mention that any new road has lasting and devastating effects, that several phosphate mines in Idaho are Superfund sites, and that Idaho has a $660 million backlog in needed Forest Service road maintenance.  The 2001 Roadless Rule already allows exceptions for community safety.  Projects that protect municipal watersheds, address fire protection, and protect habitat for endangered lynx, caribou, salmon, and grizzly bear are already moving forward under the 2001 rule.

Our shared history of short sited mismanagement of natural resources has left Idaho with 34,000 miles of "official" system roads, and reduced many of the large inventoried pristine areas of the 1920s to fragments smaller than 500 acres.  Without committed and active participation, the Idaho state rule will leave our hiking destinations, our secret hunting spots, our skiing vistas, and our favorite swimming holes vulnerable to even more degradation.  Now is the time to remember what we love about this area, take responsibility for our part in its demise, and tell the Forest Service our roadless areas deserve greater or equal protections than the current 2001 Roadless Rule. 

Take your parent, your sibling, your child, or your friend, document your experiences in Idaho forests, and send The Lands Council and the Forest Service your letters supporting Idaho's roadless areas.  By April 7th, we hope to send a compelling and effective message that illustrates our appreciation of what we call home.

- Tania Ellersick, Forest Watch Director tellersick@landscouncil.org