It’s fashionable these days to curtail public participation in environmental reviews, something advocated across the political spectrum. The rationale is a simple desire for quick approvals and rapid issuance of permits, always characterized as necessary for responding to some urgent need.
The Trump administration is anxious to accelerate opening up public lands to energy projects. Recently, the Department of the Interior offered a whopping seven days for the public to weigh in on the administration’s plans to strip protection from 330,000 acres of public lands surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwest New Mexico, a region with extraordinary cultural significance for more than two dozen Native American tribes.
At the same time, some environmental advocates claim the climate crisis similarly demands cutting corners when it comes to providing public feedback on in-depth environmental analyses in order to speed approvals of renewable energy or forest management projects.
In either case, the public’s interest is not well-served by cutting the public out of participation in projects that permanently alter our shared public lands and resources.
In Southwest Colorado, we are fortunate to enjoy a well-established culture of community collaboration and outreach. Public collaboratives meet regularly to discuss forest management and watershed protection projects on each of the three San Juan National Forest ranger districts. The Dolores Watersheds Collaborative covers the western end of the San Juans, the 4 Rivers Resilient Forest Collaborative spans the Animas River watershed, and the San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership addresses the lands surrounding Pagosa Springs.
All three collaboratives hold regular meetings open to public, where anyone with an interest is encouraged to attend and learn about forest ecology and proposed forest management projects. The public engagement opportunities offered by the forest collaboratives are all the more important with the incessant efforts at the national level in Washington, D.C., to eliminate rules for public engagement under the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act. The culture of public land management built up here in Southwest Colorado over many years embraces, rather than fears, the feedback from the public, an expertise rooted in generations of on-the-ground knowledge among our community.
The collaboratives welcome community input early and often, in contrast to the top-down legislative approach articulated in the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act,” whose intent is to accelerate logging and fuel reduction projects, in part as a response to climate-induced changes to our forests. This legislative approach ignores the value of public feedback, with its premise that quick action should override collective community knowledge. Alas, one of Colorado’s senators, Sen. John Hickenlooper, is an ardent champion of this approach to riding roughshod over local community involvement.
We also locally benefit from a set of partnerships aimed at tackling recreation, set up under the auspices of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Regional Partnerships Initiative. Three recreation partnerships overlap the San Juans – the Montelores Coalition to the west, the Southwest Colorado Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Roundtable focused on La Plata County, and the Pagosa Area Recreation Coalition. Their charge is to balance recreation and conservation while providing equitable access to quality outdoor recreation experiences.
The benefit of these ground-up partnerships that embrace local knowledge and involvement unfortunately hasn’t worked its way up to the highest levels of government. Whether it is the misnamed Fix Our Forests Act, or the cleverly titled SPEED Act – Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development – these legislative efforts are targeted at fixing imaginary problems stemming from too much public participation.
Each of our local forest and recreation partnerships have individual websites where interested folks can sign up for further information.
Mark Pearson is executive director at San Juan Citizens Alliance. Reach him at mark@sanjuancitizens.org.
