by Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner
April 22, 2024
For four years, Vilas County residents who live near the Northern Highland-American Legion (NHAL) State Forest have alleged that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has violated its mandatory logging best management practices (BMPs) by cutting too many trees too close to shorelines.
Last year, a review of those practices by an international auditing firm quietly ended with the finding that in some cases the agency had been harvesting trees thinner than the rules suggested but that the flexibility of those rules means there has not been a violation — allowing the DNR to retain its certification as a responsible steward of the state’s forests.
That conclusion has raised eyebrows among conservation groups and outside scientists who believe the review’s secrecy is an intentional effort to keep public attention away from the Northwoods and that the episode casts doubt on the validity of the whole global forestry certification system.
Four years of reviews
In 2020, Ardis Berghoff and John Schwarzmann were on a hike near Berghoff’s Vilas County home in the NHAL state forest when they found evidence of a logging operation near a lake that had cut too many trees too close to the water in violation of the best management practices.
The state’s best practices for shorelines state that the DNR must keep a certain amount of tree density within a 100-foot buffer — known as the riparian management zone (RMZ) — from the water. The RMZ buffer doesn’t mean trees can’t be harvested close to the shoreline, just that most need to be left behind in order to protect against erosion and maintain habitat for the plants and animals that rely on it. There are also exemptions that call for more conservative or more intensive cutting within the RMZ, depending on the conditions and slope of the soil. When logging on public lands, the best management practices are mandatory.
Berghoff and Schwarzmann conducted a survey of 15 lakes in the area and ultimately alleged that the DNR’s rules had been violated on nine of those lakes.
Following best management practices is a requirement for forest products logged from DNR land to be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international non-profit that works with loggers, property owners and conservationists to determine whether or not timber was harvested responsibly.
After trying and failing for months to work with the DNR to address their complaints, Berghoff and Schwarzmann went after the certification, which first involved the DNR’s third-party auditing agency, Scientific Certification Systems.
The first audit, modified because of the COVID-19 pandemic, dismissed their allegations but after they filed an appeal, an investigation of that audit was conducted and found that the DNR had in fact been planning to cut too many trees within the shoreline buffer.
The DNR then appealed that decision, prompting an audit of the investigation into the original audit. That review reversed the finding, siding with the DNR and claiming that Berghoff and Schwarzmann had been “confused” and that what they saw was actually a previously unmentioned “equipment exclusion zone” to prevent heavy equipment from being driven close to shorelines and not the shoreline buffer.
ASI investigation
After that finding, Berghoff and Schwarzmann continued fighting, requesting an investigation into SCS. Now a second auditing firm, German-based Assurance Services International (ASI), took on the case.
But in order to participate in that ASI review, Berghoff and Schwarzmann were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. The two activists who had successfully brought their allegations to the attention of multiple statewide news outlets, including the Wisconsin Examiner, Wisconsin Watch and Wisconsin Public Radio, could continue their advocacy but had to do so behind closed doors.
According to a draft report compiled by ASI, obtained by the Examiner through an open records request, the ASI investigation involved interviews with Berghoff and Schwarzmann, DNR staff, outside scientists, FSC staff and the auditors at SCS. A forest inventory report near the sites of the alleged violations was conducted by an outside forester.
The draft report and a public summary of the final report available online show that ASI largely upheld the SCS audit and DNR logging practices, finding that even if there were instances when too many trees were logged close to shorelines, best management practices are flexible enough to allow that action.
“ASI concludes that the intent behind the BMPs is indeed to provide flexible guidance,” the summary states. “When the FSC US standard refers to such documents as ‘mandatory,’ it is ASI’s opinion that this does not turn a set of flexible guidance into a set of clear, technically specific, performance-based minimum requirements. The BMPs remain flexible — and in several cases vague — guidance, so the need to ‘meet BMPs’ in order to comply with [FSC indicators] is simply the need to consider them, as the flexible guidance that they are.”
ASI sent the draft to the DNR to allow the agency to comment and request edits. However, before sharing the final version, the company asked the agency to sign the same NDA that Berghoff and Schwarzmann had signed.
Because of the state’s open records laws, DNR staff could not legally sign an NDA, so the agency refused.
“As a state agency, we are required to follow Wisconsin’s open records law, which provides broad access to records in the possession of the DNR upon request of a member of the public, with some limited exceptions,” DNR state forest specialist Teague Pritchard wrote in an email to ASI. “We can agree that we will not voluntarily disclose the documents outside of DNR, but if we receive a request from a member of the public, we will have to evaluate that request within the framework of our laws, which may result in release of the documents.”
Because the DNR did not sign the NDA, it did not receive the final version of the report and was not made aware when the public summary of the report was made available on ASI’s website.
“ASI no longer shared documents with DNR after this point,” DNR open records coordinator Phil Derge wrote in an email. “There is a public summary available online at ASI’s website … However, Forestry staff were not notified by ASI when it was posted and only discovered it by searching the ASI site.”
In an interview with the Examiner, Pritchard said that the ASI review was mostly about the work of the SCS auditors, so the DNR was on the “sidelines.” He said that the whole episode has raised the importance of training DNR foresters to be careful when operating near any kind of waterway but noted there wasn’t any “cause for alarm” about DNR practices within the report.
Pritchard also acknowledged that it is a bit awkward for the auditing firm to ask a U.S. government agency to sign an NDA, but he believes that’s more about the standard practices of a company that often works with private businesses than a reflection on the system.
“I can understand the rationale for being private,” he said. “You know, working in a government setting where everything is generally open, it’s a little bit foreign, but these are private entities.”
ASI spokesperson Tanuka Mukherjee said in an email that the NDAs are used to protect business information.
“ASI works with many individuals and private business entities around the world,” she said. “In many cases, the process of investigation and appraisal of a complaint involves handling sensitive information of a business or private nature, including personal data. We take their personal and business privacy very seriously and ensure that only the information that is relevant to the outcome of the complaint is published. The use of NDAs in the ASI Complaints process is intended to protect both parties of the complaint from undue harm, while at the same time ensuring transparency and equal treatment.”
But environmental groups see it differently. After years of fighting, the result is that the DNR best management practices are so flexible that even what activists and outside scientists see as egregious violations are given a pass while the entire certification system is able to operate in secrecy.
Dave Zaber, an environmental consultant who has worked in the Northwoods for decades, says the saga reflects a DNR and certification system that has been taken over by the industry it’s supposed to be regulating at the expense of all other considerations.
“The idea of secrecy to protect trade secrets, it’s imbecilic, it’s bulls—t,” he says. “You need to prove you need secrecy rather than everyone gets it. And with that kind of policy, you have to assume that there is damage being done that’s not being seen.”
Andy Olsen, a policy analyst for the Madison-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, says the secrecy is “absurd.”
“What are they hiding? Why the secrets?” he says. “It is unethical and absurd that the Forest Stewardship Council refused to share an audit on our state forests with the DNR. The Forest Stewardship Council brags about being transparent but then they keep secrets from us about logging in our forests.”
Zaber says the weakening of best practices rules is a result of the DNR “being captured by those they regulate” with the effect of harming water quality and animal habitat, which then cascades across the Northwoods ecosystem by raising the temperature of trout streams, increasing the deer population and devastating native plants. He adds that if the agency were serious about managing the state’s forests responsibly, it would find someone who will certify their operations without the secrecy.
“So whatever they’ll need to do to continue their standard operating procedure will continue and, and that’s why DNR shouldn’t use these guys,” he says. “They should immediately cut them off, FSC, and say we can trust that evaluation is accurate, because we can’t seem to get the copies of this, and the public’s being held hostage and they’re paying for it. Cut your ties and get somebody else to do it. Are you joined at the hip with this FSC? Why are you so close to them, you can’t get even the basic information from these guys. Or don’t you want it?” GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
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