In the end, the state Department of Conservation and Recreation chose to remove from its website an executive summary of public input to its “Future Forest Visioning Process.” Activists who have criticized DCR’s plan to continue and expand commercial logging in state forests had objected to the agency’s summary, saying it failed to accurately reflect the widespread public opposition to its logging policies.
“The summary was put up in the beginning because the agency thought it would be helpful to people who didn’t want to wade through [more than] 300 pages of public comments,” DCR spokesperson Wendy Fox told the Advocate earlier this week. Fox said the agency intended the summary to be “neutral” and “without bias.”
“It proved to be a little more controversial, so we took it down,” Fox said, referring to a link on the DCR website that was removed shortly following the publication of a Valley Advocate column about the summary.
The column (“Summary or DCR Spin?” March 10, 2011), which included the now deactivated link, examined concerns raised by Chris Matera of Massachusetts Forest Watch, an activist group that has brought attention to the dramatic increase in commercial logging in state forests under the Patrick administration. (You can now find a copy of the summary on the Advocate’s website: www.valleyadvocate.com/mis/pdfs/LDpcsummary.pdf.)
Disseminated via a series of list-served emails—the emails went to a number of DCR officials, including Rick Sullivan, the former DCR Commissioner whom Patrick recently appointed to run his Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, as well as many activists and journalists—Matera’s correspondence with DCR planner Jessica Rowcroft reveals both DCR’s initial decision not to include the actual public comments in the agency’s final report (Matera was ultimately successful in convincing Rowcroft that the comments should be publicly accessible for review) and the agency’s subsequent refusal to modify its summary.
Matera specifically objected to DCR’s statement that “comments both oppose and support commercial forestry,” which he said seems intended to “neutralize” the overwhelming opposition to commercial logging on state public lands expressed in hundreds of public comments. In fact, more than half of all public comments specifically oppose any commercial logging in state forests.
“This summary seems anything but well balanced, at least from a forestry perspective, which was the controversy that prompted the Forest Futures Visioning process in the first place,” Matera wrote in a Feb. 28 email to Rowcroft, in response to the planner’s email alerting Matera (and those on his distribution list) of DCR’s decision to “let the summary stand as is.”
In response to DCR’s more recent decision to remove the summary altogether, Matera said, “It really sheds light on the insincerity of the DCR public process and lack of respect for public opinion when they cannot even be bothered to make an accurate summary of the public comments that took a huge amount of citizen and agency time and effort to produce.”
Asked if DCR had received feedback from anyone about its decision to remove the summary, Fox said, “Only from you.”
