Help the Hooch: Protect Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest
Cutting the public out of public lands
The U.S. Forest Service has proposed to log, burn, build “temporary” roads, and close or reroute trails at undisclosed locations within 157,000 acres—roughly twice the size of the city of Atlanta—in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest without input from members of the public who visit and love those lands.
Ultimately, the massive logging project gives the Forest Service free rein to implement potentially detrimental timber harvests for decades to come.
The Foothills Project proposes to use a new “condition-based” analysis approach to bypass basic requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of our most important environmental regulations. The law requires every government agency to look for less harmful ways of meeting its goals. To that end, all agency projects must be based on solid science and made in the sunlight of public accountability.
Under the current administration, the Forest Service has been single-mindedly pursuing one goal: cutting more trees by cutting out public participation. Last summer, the agency proposed to create new, massive loopholes to NEPA including specific authority to pursue the “condition-based” approach the agency is using with the Foothills Project. Those loopholes have not been finalized yet but would allow logging without any public involvement and without the obligation to consider alternatives that would avoid unnecessary harm. The public resoundingly spoke out against that proposal, by submitting over 100,000 comments that overwhelmingly opposed cutting out public notice and comment. The agency clearly didn’t listen, because it’s now proposing to do precisely the same thing here in Georgia’s most visited tract of public land.
The proposed project will look to implement the following actions across the Chattahoochee National Forest with no guarantee of public participation opportunities. It could impact multiple recreational areas, including the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River, DeSoto Falls, Warwoman Dell, Dicks Creek, and portions of the Bartram and Pinhoti Trails:
Up to 60,000 acres of commercial timber harvest with total commercial and noncommercial harvest reaching over 80,000 acres
Compared to the Chattahoochee National Forest’s current levels, it’s over 40 years’ worth of logging
50,000 acres of prescribed burning
Constructing 360 miles of new bulldozer paths to facilitate prescribed burning
Herbicide application across as much as 74,500 acres
Grinding vegetation to wood chips using industrial machinery on up to 83,000 acres
Building an undisclosed amount of “new temporary” roads
Rerouting up to 111 miles of trail
Decommissioning trails and dispersed camping areas