Manuel F. Correllus State Forest advisory opinion: How well advised?

In her advisory opinion of Dec. 26, Tori Kim, director of the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) Office, determined that there is no need for an environmental impact report (EIR) prior to execution of the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR’s) plan to clear-cut 175 acres of Eastern white pines in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest (Correllus) on Martha’s Vineyard by this coming October. Elimination of white pines is foreseen for hundreds more acres of Correllus.

What is an advisory opinion?

The Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act requires that state agencies study the environmental consequences of their actions (see bit.ly/MA_MEPApurpose).The option for use of an advisory opinion (AO) to avoid full MEPA review via an EIR was a clause that Director Kim added to MEPA in 2022 in order to streamline the MEPA process by providing a way for proponents of new projects, especially housing, to get a preliminary assessment as to whether an EIR would be needed before filing all the required project documents. But an affordable housing project is not the same as a habitat conversion program. 

The object of the Dec. 26 AO is a DCR project from 2001 for which the agency submitted an emergency environmental notification form (ENF) on August 31, 2001, to address a claimed fire hazard emergency by cutting down 500 acres of trees to widen firebreaks. All of the support documents from Island fire chiefs were written in the three days prior to or on this date, suggesting that state officials prevailed upon them to write these letters quickly, to support the ENF. Yet the genuine emergency of Hurricane Bob blow-down fuel removal had gone unaddressed for a decade prior. There was no new emergency in August 2001. And the idea of an emergency lasting for 24 years, into the present day, justifying multiple subsequent activities and mitigations of them, is absurd. There certainly is no emergency now. Secretary Bob Durand’s response to the 2001 ENF was that the project required an EIR. If the 2001 “emergency” ENF has any relevance to the actual current situation, it is that the need for an EIR is even more pressing now than it was in 2001, because of the expansion of the project.

Rubber-stamping? 

The overriding impression created by the AO is that it is more important to rubber-stamp, ex post facto, activities by state agencies than to actually follow MEPA requirements to protect the environment via careful assessment, and to weigh all impacts of large-scale projects. A series of DCR activities since 2001 should have been subject to far greater study and public scrutiny than they were — including connivance by the DCR in an aggressive program of illegal trail-cutting in Correllus from 2018 to 2021. 

This impression of bureaucratic pretzel-twisting to achieve a preferred outcome is reinforced by a lack of discussion in the AO of actual environmental impacts as they are understood today. The word “impact” appears just 10 times, and virtually all of these mentions either are part of a title or refer to impacts on rare species. There is no acknowledgment that the current scientific concept of environmental impacts encompasses far more than a narrow focus on creating habitat for a particular suite of rare species (which some people actually consider to be nearer to zoo creation than to nature). Massachusetts Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer has made a point of highlighting a more scientifically up-to-date, holistic view of the natural foundations of long-term biodiversity and of forests’ contribution to it. Humans cannot predict the exact workings of nature. 

Where is the science?

The AO seems to imply that a series of mitigations can stand in for an EIR. Yet mitigations actually are piecemeal predictions and projections. Furthermore, the mitigations based on incidence of rare species are based on a decades-old list of rare species! How can they be considered science-based? A survey of species currently using Correllus, including underground species, should be the first order of business of an EIR. Additionally, an evenhanded EIR would also revisit project proponents’ designation of the Eastern white pine as a “non-native species,” a label they wield as a bludgeon to neutralize critics of their extreme program of tree removal and replacement. But the non-native status is contended.

It is worrisome that state agencies whose projects should be subject to MEPA requirements feel free to ignore them and to give themselves and one another permission to do what they want without scientific or public oversight, and to shield themselves by invoking exemptions from legitimate FOIAs. Kim’s AO continues the pattern of state agencies’ granting themselves exemptions from mandated oversight. It leaves all of the questions regarding both the checkered history of this project and its true environmental impacts unanswered. 

Who’s afraid of the big, bad EIR? 

Meanwhile, the biggest question of all: Why are Island conservation organizations and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission not insisting on full environmental review of the impacts of this major project on the Island’s largest conservation property, and on getting clear answers regarding its actual planned scope?