Environmentalists Protest Cleveland Forest Use Plan

Federal land-use planners want to preserve the chaparral-covered hills and mountains of Cleveland National Forest as one of the Southern California’s most precious open spaces while opening the area to more use by a rapidly growing population.

Their proposals for the forest comprise a 50-year plan for land management and recreational and other uses of the 567,000-acre area, which covers 67,990 acres--or about 11%--of Orange County.

Most of the changes suggested in the plan, a Forest Service spokesman said, would have little effect on users of the forest’s Trabuco District, the 161,633-acre reserve that straddles the Riverside-Orange county line from Santa Ana Canyon south to Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

‘Dispersed Camping’ Plan

The plan’s most significant recommendation for that district is to allow “dispersed camping” outside the Forest Service’s developed campgrounds, said public affairs specialist Bill Pidanick.

Cleveland National Forest’s two other districts--which together cover 9,976 acres of southwestern Riverside County and 395,427 acres in central and northern San Diego County--would get new picnic areas, developed campgrounds and expanded facilities for off-road motorists, under the proposed management plan.

The Mountain Defense League, a citizens’ group that for 12 years has acted as a watchdog over backcountry development, says the Forest Service, in its plan for Cleveland, is trying to please too many special-interest groups at the expense of the forest.

Defense League’s Position

If forest planners go through with their management scenario, “the overall and ultimate result . . . will be a forest that is unnatural in character and badly degraded in quality,” said Byron F. Lindsley Jr., the group’s director.

Lindsley said he acknowledges the longstanding federal policy that national forests should be tapped for as many uses as possible--unlike national parks, which are intended to be preserved for their natural beauty.

But, Lindsley said, “the proposed management plan takes the multiple-use concept to the extreme. It attempts to take all uses that could be applied anywhere in Southern California and jam them into the Cleveland National Forest.”

Joyce Burk, chairman of the Sierra Club Forest and Wilderness Committee for Southern California, believes the management plan omits one very important goal: expansion of the forest’s wilderness areas, in which all vehicles are prohibited.

The Sierra Club is also concerned about a proposal to put regional parks for Orange County on national forest lands, she said. The environmental impact of such a development is not addressed by the 50-year plan, she said.

Lindsley’s and the Sierra Club’s responses are among more than 140 from groups, individuals and public agencies to the Forest Service’s proposed management plan and its accompanying environmental impact statement. The public comment period on the plan ended Friday, and the forest planners will try to answer the concerns and criticisms expressed.

Management plans for all national forests were mandated by Congress in 1976, and preliminary work on Cleveland got under way in 1979. Once completed, it will be a policy framework for managing the forest’s land and resources through the year 2030.

Steve Winslow, assistant forest planner for Cleveland, said the challenge to the Forest Service staff was to balance the increasing demands on the forest with the need to preserve its wildlife, vegetation, watershed and air quality.

“People don’t want to destroy the forest, yet they want to use it more and more. And that’s what we have to balance.”

Cleveland was one of the first national forests, begun in 1893 as the 50,000-acre Trabuco Canyon Forest Reserve, Pidanick said.

Its primary purpose, like that of other national forests, he said, is to protect watershed areas--and surrounding flatland farms--from the destructive cycle of fires, floods, erosion and watershed depletion.

Unlike national forests in Northern California and elsewhere in the United States, however, there is no commercial lumbering in Cleveland. In fact, chaparral covers 88% of the land. Oak stands are found in the Trabuco District’s canyon bottoms, and conifers grow at the highest elevations, such as Mount Laguna and Palomar Mountain, in San Diego County.

About 820 acres in the forest are set aside for developed campgrounds; over the years, another 476 acres will be added to the camping space, Winslow said.

The Forest Service also wants eventually to double the number of cattle grazing on forest land. As controlled brush fires burn off older vegetation, allowing new growth of a more palatable pasture, Winslow said, additional acreage will become suitable for livestock grazing.

“That’s going to be the new commodity, like timber is in the north,” said the Sierra Club’s Burk. “We don’t think the forest can withstand double the amount of grazing that it currently has.”

Both increased grazing and increased recreational use will likely result in damage to vulnerable areas along the forests’ streams and rivers, Burk said.

But she added, “We are very supportive of their prescribed burning plans. They call that ‘vegetative management.’ ”

Prescribed burning, in which fires are set during favorable weather conditions to burn away years of growth, will become more commonplace under the new management plan as the Forest Service works to control forest fires.

“It’s better to burn it when we can control it, rather than to allow the brush to grow to such heights and density that it becomes a fire hazard we can’t control,” Winslow said.

The number of “fuel breaks,” swaths of land cleared of trees and brush, will be approximately doubled in the forest, he said. “That will have some visual effect, but that’s the trade-off if you want to control forest fires.”

Sierra Club members are concerned that the Forest Service might add too many such breaks in the vegetation, Burk said.

Opportunities for off-road enthusiasts will be enhanced by expansion of the Corral Canyon facility in the Descanso District from 1,200 acres to 1,800 acres. Forest trails open to off-road vehicles will be reduced, however, from 107 miles, including some trails open to conventional vehicles, to 85 miles open only to off-roaders.

“There will be fewer (off-road) trail miles, but they will offer a better off-road experience,” Winslow said.

“One of the criticisms of the management plan is that we’re not specific enough about the future, despite the size of the document,” Winslow said. “But that was a conscientious decision on our part, so we can manage the future with some flexibility.”

Lindsley, the director of the Mountain Defense League, called the management plan a confusing document.

“We’re not in fundamental disagreement with the mandate of the Forest Service, which is that Cleveland have multiple uses, but you have to limit multiple uses within the realities of the land you’re managing.

“And the problem with this plan is that it’s a creature of the present (Reagan) Administration. You don’t destroy a village in order to save it, yet the Forest Service is trying to accommodate all of the pressures to use the forest for special interests, which can’t be done. They will inevitably destroy the land.”

Lindsley said he is concerned about increased water pollution, loss of wildlife habitat, disturbing sensitive species and erosion caused by increased camping, grazing, controlled fires and vehicular traffic.

The Forest Service simply does not have the resources to make an adequate prediction of how its plan would affect wildlife, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups said. “They haven’t had the money to study species to find out what will be the repercussions of their actions in the next 50 years,” Burk said.

“It would be better to limit the number of users and protect the national forest,” Lindsley said, “so that visitors will have a high-quality experience, rather than to allow such high levels of use that the quality of experience for visitors is seriously degraded.”