by Ann Vileisis
The U.S. Forest Service recently denied a petition brought by 27 conservation groups from 14 states urging the agency to adopt a rule to better protect the special type of peat-forming wetlands known as fens.
Nourished by the continual flow of groundwater, fens are formed through the gradual accumulation of partially decomposed mosses or other wetland plants over millennia. Studies of high-elevation fens in Colorado have revealed that it can take 2,000 years to accumulate just 8 inches of peat. Most fens in the region have persisted for four thousand to ten thousand years.
These ancient wetlands serve an important role in sequestering carbon. Acting as sponges, fens also filter and hold water, then release it slowly, thus contributing cool, clean, and steady flows to downstream waterways all year. Fens are cherished as hot spots of biodiversity, hosting an array of rare plants from wild orchids to carnivorous sundews and drawing wildlife from butterflies to moose, especially in the West, when the rest of the landscape becomes parched in late summer and fall.
Though most common in the northern boreal climes of Alaska, fens are peppered across our Lower-48 national forest lands. Because they take so long to develop, they cannot easily be restored, which makes protecting existing fens crucial. But they don’t get the protection they need.
That’s what motivated the petition. One of the petition authors, Peter Hart of Wilderness Workshop, based in Carbondale, Colorado, encountered proposals that would severely impact fens across a number of national forests in Colorado. Although well-intentioned agency guidance documents identified fens as “irreplaceable resources,” that didn’t translate into protection in the face of destructive activities on the land.
When Hart queried botanists and conservationists in other states, he found the same challenges. Fens were being overgrazed, ditched, bisected by roads, rutted by off-road vehicles, and flooded by reservoir expansions. These impacts irreversibly disrupt and alter the wetlands’ hydrology, but the Forest Service seemed to lack sufficient authority, and in some cases, the will, to safeguard the unique and vulnerable ecosystems. Hart recognized that the agency needed a better tool to protect fens: a national rule that could withstand the pressure of local politics.
To make their case, Hart and other petitioners assembled a formidable body of evidence to demonstrate that fens have not been sufficiently protected on National Forest lands. On Colorado’s Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest, researchers found 79% of fen acreage in their study area had been impacted by ditching, draining, flooding, or rutting from off-road vehicles. In 2015, the Forest had extended a road drainage ditch right into the Mt. Emmons Iron Fen, a USFS Botanical Special Interest Area. Kennecott Slough, once described as a 70-acre “floating peat mat,” had been flooded by a reservoir, and another fen was being flooded by a reservoir expansion owing to an improper National Environmental Policy Act analysis. Several more reservoir-expansion and water-diversion proposals at the headwaters of Rocky Mountain streams are poised to destroy valuable fens on the White and Pike-San Isabel national forests, including near the iconic Mount of the Holy Cross and the wilderness area bearing its named.
Beyond Colorado, on the Fremont-Winema National Forest in eastern Oregon, cattle grazing had heavily degraded a 500-acre fen complex — the largest on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest — that provided habitat for imperiled plants, amphibians, and mollusks. Despite the agency’s own monitoring and experts identifying adverse impacts to a threatened species as well as several lawsuits building the case, local Forest Service officials expanded grazing privileges to affect more fen acreage. On the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, too, heavy cattle grazing had impacted the fragile, 10,100-foot-elevation Anastacio Fen and its rare, mat-forming willows since exclusion fences erected to protect the place had fallen into disrepair. These are just a few examples.
To address the threats across many national forests, petitioners proposed to add language to Forest Service rules to align with established guidance documents: a prohibition on “disturbing, draining, excavating, digging in, removing, discharging a pollutant into, or otherwise damaging any fen resource.”
Despite the many examples of irrevocable fen degradation as a result of agency inaction, the Forest Service denied the petition in May, suggesting that it already has all the tools it needs to protect fens. The National Office pointed to regulations that ostensibly prohibit damaging natural features or rare plants and that provide special closure authorities to protect rare species and ecosystems. Petitioners were also advised to engage in local forest plan amendments and an upcoming climate adaptation and mitigation policy process. Some national forests in Region 2 and 5 have already adopted fen protection in their updated plans, but in many regions, plan amendments have been long delayed. Moreover, anyone who works with the agency recognizes that capacity for conservation initiatives is often limited at the Forest level, which is why a consistent, nationwide rule change could mean positive conservation outcomes on a landscape scale.
Considering the broader conservation context, the rejection of the petition is an unfortunate lost opportunity. Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, severely limited federal wetland-protection authorities through the Clean Water Act by excluding wetlands with no direct surface connection to navigable waters. Groundwater-fed fens are now disqualified, though their water tables often affect the flow, temperature, and clarity of aquatic habitats downstream, making Forest Service protection all the more important.
The most recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Wetland Status and Trends report documented a 50% increase in the rate of wetland destruction. This is particularly troublesome in the West where wetlands are rarer but serve important roles in holding waters and providing habitat, making fen wetlands on Forest Service lands all the more valuable.
In the face of increasing threats, diminished protection, and Forest Service inaction, fen defenders will need to redouble their efforts — Forest by Forest and fen by fen.
Ann Vileisis is the award-winning author of three books that explore nature and culture through history, including Discovering the Unknown Landscape, a History of America’s Wetlands (Island Press). She’s a conservation activist and public lands enthusiast in southwestern Oregon.
