Annual Report - Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics

for the Land Between The Lakes’ inexplicable decision to
abdicate responsibility for overseeing corn and soybean
farming to the National Wild Turkey Federation, a private
special-interest organization.
Two farmers grow thousands of acres of corn and soybeans
in the area’s bottomlands along streams. The farmers
pay the Forest Service with hay, which is fed to captive elk
and bison, for the lease of these lands. Not only do these
public lands come cheap, but the farmers also receive tens of
thousands of dollars in federal crop subsidy payments.
The Turkey Federation supports the arrangement because
the farmers leave ten percent of their crops in the field for
deer and turkeys to eat. This high-energy food supplement
supports unnaturally large populations of these game animals,
which make for easy pickings for hunters.
In FSEEE’s second lawsuit over these farming practices
(our first compelled the Forest Service to evaluate farming’s
environmental impacts), we gained a court order invalidating
the special-use permits that the Turkey Federation had given
the farmers to crop these national forest lands. A Kentucky
federal judge agreed that the 1897 Organic Act requires the
Forest Service to administer the national forests; not some
private special-interest group. Who knew?
Other Action
FSEEE staff continued to monitor and participate in projects
on national forest lands across the country on a variety of
issues. These projects included:
• Reviewing and commenting on the Forest Service’s
proposed plan to open 1.2 million acres of national forest
lands in Mississippi to potential oil and gas exploration. The
Forest Service failed to provide a full and accurate accounting
of all the environmental impacts that oil and gas leasing
2010 Annual Report • 11