Sparta Mountain Stewardship Plan causes backlash
BY ERIKA NORTON
A plan proponents say would diversify forest wildlife species and create "young forest habitat," by selectively cutting down old trees within the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area, has caused backlash from environmental groups and area residents.
Proposed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) in conjunction with the New Jersey Audubon Society, the plan's stated goal is “to maintain ecosystem health, diversity, and integrity” by removing trees to create a “greater balance among the stages of forest succession” over the next 10 years. The Sparta Mountain Forestry Stewardship Plan, which would be the first stage in a larger management vision to be implemented over 60 years, would encompass more than 3,400 acres of land within the townships of Sparta, Ogdensburg, and Hardyston in Sussex County and Jefferson Township in Morris County.
Environmental groups, however, including the nation’s largest and oldest conservation group, the Sierra Club, believe the motives and techniques described in the plan are not in the best interest of the wildlife management area and represent more of a logging operation than “stewardship.”
“The plan is presented as a stewardship project, but in mine and many others’ opinions, it is anything other than stewardship — it is really a logging plan,” said Susan Williams, the Sierra Club Skylands Group chair, at a Sparta town council meeting.
Williams, along with other concerned Sparta residents, presented her opposition to the plan to the Sparta Township Council on Feb. 9, citing the various forest management techniques proposed in the plan — which include "seed tree treatments" and "disrupting" areas of old, contiguous forest through logging operations, controlled fires, and even herbicides — as being more harmful than helpful. According to Williams, the area’s water quality and supply, which contributes to serving more than five million New Jersey residents, would be adversely affected by this plan, as well as the recreational, cultural and scenic resources the area provides.
On the other side of the argument, the New Jersey Audubon Society represents this plan as helping to address the lack of “young forest habitat” available in New Jersey, by creating new habitat for numerous declining birds, such as the endangered Golden-winged Warbler, and other wildlife. John Cecil, vice-president for stewardship of the New Jersey Audubon Society, said that in the past, large expanses of mature, contiguous forest would be disturbed by natural events or human habitation, gaps would be created, and the wildlife that thrives in those types of habitat would take advantage of the gaps, therefore creating a balance in the context of "forest succession" and health.
“There really is an opportunity to create new future forest and help numerous birds and wildlife recover, all while protecting water and aesthetic resources that we all cherish at Sparta Mountain,” Cecil said at the township meeting.
The New Jersey Audubon Society, according to Cecil, has already been actively partnering with the NJDEP Division of Fish and Wildlife since 2011 to implement these types of forest stewardship plans in parts of the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area owned by the Audubon Society and the state, but on a much smaller scale. Instead of creating about 10 to 12 acres of young forest habitat per year, this plan proposes to create roughly 20 to 30 acres per year.
Cecil also said that the plan was developed according to forestry stewardship certification standards, which have been endorsed or supported by the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources and Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation, and other conservation groups.
However, Sierra Club members believe the plan does not comply with previous preservation-area goals and rules, such as those laid out in the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act of 2004 and the Highlands Regional Master Plan.
“The goal of creating young forest habitat flies in the face of the area's original primary goal of preserving what remains of New Jersey’s large expanses of interior contiguous mature forests, which provide … habitat for interior forest species, which have declined due to fragmentation,” the Skylands Group's Williams added. Environmentalists' goals for protecting Sparta Mountain never included providing logging opportunities for the forest industry, she noted.
According to Sierra Club New Jersey Chapter President Jeff Tittle, where the Sierra Club and the NJ Audubon Society see very differently is that the Sierra Club views the Highlands as an area to protect the water supply and for contiguous forest, which neo-tropical songbirds need to breed.
Tittle said that if the NJDEP and the New Jersey Audubon Society want to make warbler habitat, they should take a former sandpit, quarry, old parking lot, former golf course, or other disturbed or barren land and restore them into grassland habitat. The Sierra Club has no problem with creating grassland habitat, he said, but they do have a problem with doing it in the middle of a forest, which changes the deep forest ecology into a meadow ecology.
Bill Wolfe, a former NJDEP policy analyst and planner, and former policy director for the Sierra Club's NJ Chapter, feels that the different groups involved with this plan have other economic motives, rather than real conservation.
“Seeing the players and their games behind the scenes, I find it sinister,” Wolfe said. “They range from the agricultural interests in the farm bureau that look at landowners who own forest blocks of land that want to reap some revenue from that, to other folks that actually want to see a reemergence of the forest products industry in New Jersey — that want to harvest New Jersey hardwood forests in the northern Highlands for timber.“
Regarding the Audubon Society’s involvement, Wolfe said he believes they are either being selfish or misleading in claiming to promote the interests of the Golden-winged Warbler. According to Wolfe, the group has economic interests as an organization with doing this kind of work.
The NJ Audubon Society is the only group in the state that’s certified under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international group whose mission, according to their website, is to “promote environmentally sound, socially beneficial, and economically prosperous management of the world's forests.” According to Tittle, the FSC acts like a governmental agency when they are not, and adds that the Sierra Club has sued the organization in the past.
“To be honest, I will say that it gives an appearance of propriety, when it really is about taking care of logging interests,” Tittle said.
Opponents of the plan, including Williams and Wolfe, have cited research done in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, which shows the effects of forest harvesting on ecosystem health in the headwaters of the New York City water supply. According to the report, after clear-cutting, a 100 percent mortality rate occurred among trout, a fish commonly found in streams in the Sparta Mountain area.
However, Trout Unlimited, America's leading trout and salmon conservation organization, has stated in its newsletter and at the township council meeting that the organization supports the plan. Brian Cowden, New Jersey State Council conservation chair for Trout Unlimited, said the organization has a vested interest in a healthy forest in the management area because it spawns several wild trout streams, including Sparta Glen Brook, a native brook trout tributary slated for an in-stream restoration project by the organization this coming spring.
“There are concerns mounting by some in the community about this proposed plan that have been shared with our organization, but we clearly see the benefits of restoring this forest to one far more healthy than it is today,” Cowden stated in the newsletter. “The Highlands region of New Jersey is so very critical to our state’s drinking water supplies, and healthy forests are where we collect that water that we drink, use for industry and recreation, and to sustain and protect our native brook trout, the state fish. It is no wonder that such a high percentage of wild trout streams occur in the Highlands, and a comprehensive, well-conceived plan such as this will only benefit our forests and our drinking water.”
Cowden also said he manages a 90-acre forest on private land immediately adjacent to the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area under a very similar forest stewardship plan, and has done much of the same work proposed under the state's plan on this private forest. When asked about the research showing 100 percent trout mortality, Cowden replied that research is not an accurate comparison to the work that would be taking place as part of the Sparta Mountain plan because the soil conditions were different, among other reasons.
What surprises Cowden is that the Sierra Club and others have not, to his knowledge, said anything about the forest management activities that have already been happening over the last few years. He suggested that those questioning the plan go out and see for themselves what he describes as successful forest management already happening in the area.
“I’ve been watching carefully,” Cowden said. “When it rains, I want to make sure we’re not polluting our streams. After all, I’m the trout guy. I would be pretty disingenuous if I was doing forestry work that impacted negatively Sparta Glen Brook, as somebody who works on behalf of trout.
“Rather than citing all sorts of studies all over the country, I’m here to tell people I've seen it firsthand,” he said.
Fred Turner, president of the Sparta Lake Property Association, stated, “I have lived in the area for 30 years. What I see is a balanced ecosystem; however, there are other issues that the DEP should be concerned about, such as old septic tanks and areas still damaged by Hurricane Sandy, rather than cutting down all the trees. It appears that the DEP seems more concerned with dollars rather than conservation.”
Robert Demuth Jr., a Sparta resident who lives near the area called “Stand 9” in the plan, expressed his concern with the prescribed fires detailed in the plan for that specific site. Sylvia Opresnick also said that she lives near Stand 9 and is concerned about the prescribed fire method as well.
“What brought my family and me to Sparta was, of course, the natural habitat and the beautiful woods,” Opresnick said. “The proposed benefits do not outweigh the risks of (the) beautiful, natural setting that we have.”
With regard to the use of prescribed fires, Cecil said, low-level fires occurred historically in the area from natural events like lightning strikes or from disturbances caused by Native Americans or early settlers hundreds of years ago. Fire can be very helpful when helping new vegetation grow up and thrive in a forest, Cecil observed.
Cecil said the U.S. Fire Service carries out the prescribed fires under a rigid set of guidelines and protocols, and has implemented this technique on New Jersey Audubon property. The NJ Audubon Society is hoping to use this technique more often, because they’ve seen good results.
“In the context of the plan, we’re interested in reintroducing or mimicking these techniques that mimic disturbance, because historically that's what the forest experienced and we believe that's when the forest was healthiest,” Cecil said.
Dudley Anderson, a resident of Beaver Lake in Hardyston, expressed his concern at the township meeting about the forestry affecting neighboring property values. He said that Stands 28 through 31 in the plan directly surround his home, and the destruction of the forest, plus the truck traffic bringing in dirt, dust, debris, and noise, would greatly impact nearby property values.
But Cecil believes the plan will improve quality of life, because it will ultimately protect the water resources of the region by creating a healthier forest, minimizing invasive plants and pests, and diversifying the structure and age class of the forest, making the forest more resilient to climate change and severe weather events like Hurricane Sandy.
“I actually don’t think it will ultimately make much difference to the individual landowners in the community, and the reason I say that, is because we’ve been doing projects exactly like what we’re proposing for the last four or five years and we haven’t heard much of a peep from anybody,” Cecil said.
Another concern of the plan's detractors is how much it will cost and who will receive any income generated by the wood products being removed. The New Jersey Audubon Society said they sought and received grants from the National Forest Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service, which provided the primary funding necessary to develop the plan. Additional financial support was obtained in the form of small grants and in-kind contributions from other environmentally minded organizations.
The New Jersey Audubon Society also noted that while the NJDEP invested substantial in-kind staff contributions towards the plan's development, it provided no direct funding to the cost of developing the updated plan.
As far as revenue from the project is concerned, the New Jersey Audubon Society's website states that “any revenue attained through the stewardship projects undertaken at the wildlife management area has been paid by the contractor directly to the State of New Jersey; NJ Audubon has not received any of this revenue.”
Cecil said there has not been a full budgeting process developed as part of the plan for a number of reasons.
“There was no budget developed with the plan because to do that would require a commitment in advance of where activities would occur over the next 10 years,” he said. “Because of the nature of the change in the species, and the forest and pests that could influence it, and invasive species and a variety of factors like that, it just doesn't make sense to do that budgeting in advance.”
Cecil said what he expects to happen is that assuming the plan gets adopted, the New Jersey Audubon Society would look at the schedule of activities scheduled for each year in the plan and identify exactly where hose activities will occur. Then they would go through a budgeting process for that year.
According to the Sparta township council, the NJDEP said they would like to schedule a public hearing in March.