Tennessee Heartwood 2024 Accomplishments
Founding SPIEL
In the fall of 2023, Tennessee Heartwood began reaching out to faculty at the University of the South at Sewanee about creating a regionwide environmental conference for the South that brought together law, academia, and grassroots advocacy for a weekend of CLE and non-CLE sessions that could take place indoors or outdoors on Sewanee’s Domain Forest. Within weeks, we had a planning committee that included a cross section of people from different backgrounds and the Southeastern Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (SPIEL) was born. With an attendance of at least 160 people from as far away as Texas, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania, the inaugural SPIEL conference was a resounding success. Tennessee Heartwood co-Chair Davis Mounger presented “FOIA for Beginners” and was on a panel about alternative federal lands designations. We are already forging ahead for SPIEL 2025, with a focus on more outdoor sessions and navigating a vastly changed environmental law landscape.
​
State Forests
The torch has been passed in the State Forestry commission, with longtime head David Arnold retiring and second-in-command Heather Slayton assuming the lead. Last Fall, we hosted a kind of informal State Forests Summit with the agency that started in Frankin State Forest and ended in a roundtable presentation and discussion at the University of the South/Sewanee. Attendees included the Center for Biological Diversity, Southern Environmental Law Center, Tennessee Heartwood, as land managers from the agency and Savage Gulf State Natural Area. Along with our presentation, Drs. Jon Evans of Sewanee, and Sarah Neumann of Tennessee State shared their decades-long research from the Cross Creek Forest Dynamics Research Area at Franklin SF. We discussed systemic issues across the 15-forest system, while focusing in particular on the South Cumberland Plateau forests Prentice-Cooper, Franklin, and Bledsoe. From this discussion has come a series of recommendations for cooperative management strategies that we have presented to the agency, as well as key legislators (attached) that we made recently. We will continue to reach out to the agency while monitoring upcoming timber sales. We hope that the agency will take us up on our offer of assistance in identifying sensitive areas and strategies to prevent more forestland turning into low-diversity poplar stands and invasive species.
Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area
As the 3000-acre tornado salvage winds down, we have gone back to key timber sale areas to shoot footage that can be compared ground video and drone footage shot a year ago. There indeed has been a pattern of high-grading of large undamaged trees outside the direct tornado path in many areas, an issue we identified to the agency and officials in early 2023. While we have also seen erosion and stream damage effects, what has been particularly distressing has been the needless impact to the Clay Bay Core Area. The management plan for the LBL is supposed to manage Core Areas as wilderness-like areas where natural processes (of which tornados are an example) are allowed to happen with no logging. This rule was disregarded throughout the parts of the salvage where there were designated Core Area, but Clay Bay was senseless in that it was a fragile wetland with only a few merchantable trees. We requested over a year ago that if nowhere else, this was to be spared. Instead, the ranger in charge had an expensive new road built to access this remote area. Disregarding Best Management Practices, operators drove logging equipment down the slopes and repeatedly through the wetland area to access what were only a few trees. We are processing video footage of these and other issues to provide the new ranger.
There are some silver linings in these unfortunate proceedings over the last year. The LBL has suffered for over a decade from unstable leadership, with a series of unaccountable interim supervisors (seven in the last ten years) rotating through without engaging the public and operating often in secrecy. We organized a campaign to pressure the Forest Service in Washington to bring an end to this dysfunction, and thanks to local support and support from Rep. Mark Green, the agency has brought in a veteran supervisor who was the LBL supervisor 20 years ago. We have had a pleasant series of phone calls and online meetings with Supervisor McCoy and are cautiously optimistic. So far, he has apologized for what were clear process and operational violations to us and the local FACA (Federal Advisory) board. He managed to get the regional forester to essentially nullify the Emergency Authorization that allowed the district to sidestep NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) standards in this salvage. According to Ranger McCoy and activist groups we have polled, this is unprecedented in the agency, and could be an important precedent for forest advocates, as Emergency Authorizations are becoming more common in the Forest Service.
Ranger McCoy has also promised that the agency will return to standard public accountability and comment processes, “respect” the intent of the Core Areas, and record all agency meetings in the spirit of public transparency.
We plan to publicize our findings of the cumulative effects of the Salvage and are currently preparing recommendations for the agency’s upcoming Environmental Analysis for the post-salvage cleanup.
Cherokee National Forest
We continue to monitor the proposed Kirkland Gap and Pond Mountain sales. We had an excellent online meeting with agency staff. While the Kirkland Gap sale is still in development, our early input has yielded some benefit already, with one area planned for logging dropped from the sale proposal and another area having its logging volume reduced- thanks to our field work and recommendations to the agency.
We will be doing on the ground and drone flyovers of the upcoming Unicoi sale, which includes some very steep slopes of Unicoi Mountain, and includes a portion of the Benton MacKaye trail. Our comments in 2022 focused much on some of the sensitive slopes where heavy logging is proposed, so visual documentation of a baseline will provide perspective as we document post-logging effects.