The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is under increasing pressure to change the way it cuts timber in Wildlife Management Areas, more than a million acres of land scattered across the state dedicated by law to providing habitat for wildlife.
At the federal level, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been trying to get the DNR to follow the rules for several years, and the agency has also been hearing from retired and currently employed staff about their concerns.
Most recently, the Minnesota Office of Legislative Auditor (OLA) charged that the DNR may be violating a state law that requires it to manage these acres for the benefit of wildlife. The auditor cited lack of planning, poor documentation, unclear guidance, and conflicting goals as factors to blame for the agency’s failure to show the public that it is doing what the law requires.
The DNR may at last be responding: Commissioner Sarah Strommen addressed the audit report when it was presented to a legislative committee on October 14.
“We sincerely value the OLA’s recommendations in this report…they generally align with areas of improvements we previously identified and are actively trying to address,” she said.
A bit of history
The problem of timber harvest on wildlife management areas has been festering for some time. I learned a lot about this history from two experienced DNR managers, both now retired. Steve Thorne was Deputy Commissioner of the DNR from 1978 to 1990. Craig Sterle was a forester in Northeastern Minnesota for many years.
As they describe it, logging is somewhat like mining in several ways. It’s a cyclical industry in which demand and pricing are controlled mostly by distant forces. In the 1980s, multinational companies built several plants in northeastern Minnesota to make plywood, oriented strandboard and other engineered wood products, creating a ballooning demand for wood. At about the same time, many industrial forest owners such as Potlatch sold most of their timber lands for resorts and cabins, giving them quicker profits. Now they depend on private non-industrial forests and public lands to supply the mills that remain after the boom period.
Craig Sterle says the industrial contraction has prompted demands to permit higher timber sales. “I think that’s part of why we’re seeing some pressure from the timber industry to try to get back to where we were in the 80s and 90s: more plants, more harvest, more employment.” He says the pressure for jobs must be balanced between the needs of mills and loggers and the needs of society as a whole. “We need to have clean water, wildlife habitat, all of the other amenities that come with healthy forests,” Sterle says.
In 2018 Governor Mark Dayton promoted a concept called “sustainable timber harvest” (STH). Before this, statewide harvest had hovered around 800,000 cords per year. A cord is a stack of wood four feet high, four feet deep, and eight feet long. DNR planners determined that the state could sustainably harvest 870,000 cords—a nearly nine percent jump.
Steve Thorne says the analysis that produced that number was “based on inadequate information about the entire complexity of the lands they were managing, with inadequate weight given to ecosystem services, to fish and wildlife, and to plant communities.” The figure included 140,000 cords from WMAs and Aquatic Management Areas (AMAs). Previously, these units had not been assigned targets for logging; decisions had been made based on wildlife management objectives.
Craig Sterle says another flaw with the application of the new harvest goal was not taking into account the broader landscapes around the WMAs and AMAs. Wild areas are connected with each other, and modern forestry usually tries to coordinate or at least be aware of activities on all the different ownership types: private, county, state, federal.
“They were planning to do that spatial analysis, and I don’t know if it was a money issue or a time issue, but they skipped it,” he says. “So, if there was a huge cut on county land or private land or U.S. Forest Service land, the DNR had no way to recognize that perhaps the state should hold on to its trees to allow some of that other wood to grow up a little bit before harvesting on state land. And unfortunately, as we’re talking with some of the planners, DNR’s Forestry Division is hell-bent on using the same process for the next sale plan three years from now.”
Under the new system, computer programs identify the stands to be cut, primarily based on age. “They want to get it when it’s still growing, not when it’s declining,” says Thorne. “It’s economic rotation age, not biological rotation age. They’re cutting aspen now at 40 years. On my land, I’ve got some aspen 80 years old. We leave it there for wildlife. I’ve got a pileated family that’s been around ever since I’ve lived there.”
Thorne and Sterle joined with others to create an informal group, the WMA/AMA Stewardship Network, to monitor the state timber sales processes. “We couldn’t understand why the DNR was doing it this way except that they were being unduly influenced by the timber industry,” says Sterle.
As Deputy Commissioner, Thorne handled the DNR’s budget for years. “I know about political pressure,” he says. “The thing about the legislature is they can call you into their office and give you hell, threaten to remove parts of your anatomy or do something else to your budget—and they can do it.”
Industry capture?
Sterle agrees. “The budget is the big tool that the legislature can use to threaten DNR, whether it’s timber or mining. The funny thing is, if you look at public opinion—like the vote for Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (77 percent of Minnesota voters passed a constitutional amendment to create it in 1988), the people are still very interested in protecting and managing their natural resources. But there seems to be this undertone at the legislature that isn’t getting that message or doesn’t care. They think other things are more important than our natural resources.”
In the last 18 months the DNR has been revising its 45-year-old plans for the largest WMAs, but Sterle and Thorne say the new plans don’t offer clear guidance on timber harvests. “The biggest change tool DNR has for wildlife management is a timber sale,” says Sterle. “And when you read these plans, not one of them has detailed information about the timber harvest planning for the next ten years. It’s a vacuum. That was on purpose. They were told not to include forestry information. I think it’s coming from the top.”
Another example of industry clout is the decision by the DNR to cut red pine at age 65. Sterle asserts this is because the Potlatch mill in Bemidji can only handle trees 17 inches in diameter or smaller. “That one mill is impacting the management of that whole species on DNR land across the state. Other mills could use bigger wood, but the DNR is ignoring them,” he says. It’s also interesting to learn that red pine is not a particularly good tree species for wildlife, but it’s favored by the DNR. “They’re going to cut that and plant it back to red pine again,” Sterle says. “There’s some wildlife benefit for the first fifteen years or so, until the canopy closes, and after that it’s a continuous cycle of dead zone.”
Three years ago, the WMA/AMA Stewardship Network drafted a bill designed to address these problems. Now the members, including many retired DNR workers, plan to update it, partly using recommendations from the OLA.
Brad Gausman is Executive Director of the Minnesota Conservation Federation. He also serves on the DNR’s Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee. This is a remodeled version of an earlier oversight committee that examined and reported to the legislature on the agency’s handling of money from the Fish and Game Fund. Gausman says the DNR redesigned the citizens committees to gain more forward-looking advice. But he says “something is missing when we don’t have oversight. I think it’s a step back.” Regarding the furor over timber harvests on wildlife lands, Gausman points to a footnote in the OLA report that explains that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should have control over lands acquired with hunting and fishing license fees “to prevent competing interests within DNR from interfering with the authorized purpose of these lands.”
“We have a large DNR,” says Gausman. “It has a very broad scope. It does everything from selling state park T-shirts to looking at sulfide mining. I see its purview as so broad as to be very difficult to manage. We expect a lot of our DNR, and it seems that in every session the legislature asks them to take on another role. Other states do it differently.”
At the Legislative Audit Commission meeting during which the OLA report was presented to the legislature, DNR Commissioner Strommen told members, “Regarding WMA planning, we agree, and we are actively working to complete those plans. We need those plans: these are public lands, and the public should have the opportunity to participate in the development of those plans. In May of 2022 I directed the Fish and Wildlife division to complete those plans. Major unit plans are now complete, and I directed Fish & Wildlife to initiate system-wide planning to cover the remaining WMAs and AMAs. These are scheduled for completion on December 21, 2027.”
At that meeting, the only two legislators who asked challenging questions of the Commissioner were Democrat Rick Hansen and Republican Mark Koran. Koran said, “Rep. Hansen brought up a possible conflict. Are we letting industry drive these things or do we have a forest management plan that’s holistic in nature, that takes into consideration storms and blowdowns? Do we have a plan that answers the question, how much harvest do we need to have a healthy forest?”
Jay Eidsness is an attorney at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. After studying the language in the statutes governing WMAs, and becoming familiar with the issues, he says the legislature should be able to come up with a solution.
“We’re optimistic that people both in and out of the Department saw the OLA report and took to heart the sharp criticism it levied against the Department,” he says. “I’d like to imagine that at this time management of public lands is a bipartisan issue. WMAs are scattered all over the state, and I’m hopeful we can find bipartisan agreement to find a solution that’s recommended to us by this independent body.”
Office of Legislative Auditor Report
Documents from the DNR:
A Vision for Wildlife and its Use – Goals and Outcomes, 2006 – 2012
Minnesota’s Wildlife Management Area Acquisition-The Next 50 Years, 2002
Sustainable Timber Harvest Development of the DNR 10-year Stand Exam List, March 2020
Whitewater Wildlife Management Area Master Plan
Revised master plans also available for:
Red Lake WMA
Mille Lacs WMA
Lac Qui Parle WMA
Carlos Avery WMA
