Environmental and other groups and interested individuals who have filed objections or comments about the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests Land Management Plan began meeting virtually this week with agency officials to air their concerns.

The U.S. Forest Service plan guides land management decisions on the combined forests and is aimed at providing for social and economic needs while sustaining the health, diversity and productivity of the 4 million-acre forests for future generations, Forest Supervisor Cheryl Probert has said.

The plan is more than a decade in the making and updates the management direction adopted 36 years ago.

A coalition of conservation groups have criticized the plan for having a “timber-first” approach that would expand clear-cuts that are harmful to endangered species and climate mitigation, and open up wild areas to increased motorized recreation that would be damaging to wildlife.

Over the last several years, numerous individuals and conservation groups including Friends of the Clearwater, WildEarth Guardians, Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen Task Force and the Sierra Club submitted scientific and policy input urging the Forest Service to safeguard habitat for endangered and threatened species like grizzly bears, wolverine, chinook salmon, steelhead and a host of other important plants and animals.

“Instead of looking to the future, the Forest Service produced an antiquated timber plan that will further imperil the forest for decades to come,” Jeff Juel, forest policy director with Friends of the Clearwater, said in a news release Tuesday. “The Revised Plan would more than double the maximum cut produced any year so far this century, and more than quadruple the regular limit on clearcuts to over 200 acres in size.”

Julian Matthews, wildlife and lands coordinator for the Idaho chapter of the Sierra Club and coordinator of Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment, said the revised plan “threatens animals that are sacred and important to the Nimiipuu people, including salmon, grizzlies, and elk. It’s shameful to see the Forest Service propose actions that would actually take us backward on species recovery efforts that it’s supposed to move forward.”

The environmental groups said the revised plan “is critically important to ensure and direct grizzly bear recovery in the Northern Rockies for decades to come.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service emphasizes that true recovery of the grizzly population requires a robust population in the Bitterroot ecosystem, much of it on the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest.

This recovery zone and adjacent areas provide essential habitat and serve as a vital crossroads linking grizzly populations in the Yellowstone, Northern Continental Divide, and Selkirk/Cabinet Yaak recovery zones.

“The revised forest plan would be lethal to bears, undermining efforts to recover the Bitterroot grizzly bear population and compromising their future,” the news release said.

Conservationists also said the Forest Plan ignores President Biden’s 2022 Earth Day executive order to enact policies to protect mature and old growth forests.

“Instead of protecting the little remaining old growth for wildlife, the Forest Service would remove centuries-old trees, claiming they are the wrong species for that site,” Juel said. “And every apparent logging restriction in the plan is written with huge loopholes such that all managers would have to do is find a couple of Douglas-fir beetles or diseased trees in old growth to justify the chainsaws and log trucks.”

The conservationists objected to the revised plan’s expansion of areas that could be available for future snowmobile use. Groups noted the Forest Service stripped protections from the Great Burn Recommended Wilderness area that is essential for the recovery of the North American wolverine listed as a threatened species in 2023.

“The Forest Service did a hatchet job on recommending wilderness, proposing only 17% of the wilderness quality lands in the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests,” said Gary Macfarlane, board member of Friends of the Clearwater.

“It eliminated previously recommended northern additions to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, eviscerated the Great Burn and Meadow Creek, and omitted remarkable wildlands like Weitas Creek, Rapid River, Cove-Mallard, Pot Mountain, the upper North Fork, and large additions to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness that the Forest Service protected in the old Selway Primitive Area,” he said.

“Further, the Forest Service sees certain areas have high qualities for wilderness but when it comes to recommending those areas for wilderness, it claims otherwise. In sum, the wilderness review was a shoddy and disingenuous process.”

Hedberg may be contacted at khedberg@lmtribune.com