Monday, May 21, 2007
News

Up in smoke

While Georgia's forests burn, the legislature purges environmentalists

A tree is devoured by flames in one of 220 reported fires currently burning in south Georgia and north Florida. CREDIT:Oscar Sosa/Getty Images

By Josh Clark

The State of Georgia's own policies—or lack of policies—may be partially to blame for the past month's destruction of a quarter-million acres by wildfires in the southeastern part of the state. At least one prominent naturalist has suggested that the state has historically failed to properly manage the area's vast tracts of timberland.

"Fire is a necessary component of most of the landscape of the South," says Janisse Ray, a south Georgia native who has written three books, including the seminal "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," which has become something of a bible for environmentalists. "What is going on in Ware County is we've allowed very poor timber management practices that allow fires like this to get out of control."

Native Americans used fire in these same regions for thousands of years as a means of forest management. The fire rid the forests of underbrush, snakes and pestilence. It also burned up the duff—the layers of pine straw and fallen leaves that can build up into a massive undercoating of tinder if it's not burned regularly.
Which is what happened in southeast Georgia.

The Native Americans, however, weren't growing timber on a commercial scale; corporate and private landowners in south Georgia are. Native longleaf pines have been supplanted during the past 150 years with faster-growing and more densely placed commercial species, and what appear to be forests are actually loblolly pine plantations, where fire travels fast.

"It's not that the fire shouldn't be there—that area gets more lightning strikes than any other area in the course of a year," Ray tells The Sunday Paper. "Fire is normal. What is artificial is that we've removed the means to allow this fire. And then we expect lightning not to strike. It's a house of cards."

And just when Georgia's fragile and rare eco-system most needs guardians to correct such wrongs, some believe the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) board is being intentionally stripped of environmentalists. Earlier this month, the Georgia state Senate refused to confirm the reappointment of Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, to the DNR board.

Even up in Vermont, where naturalist Ray now lives, Bethea's story is being followed.

"Here we have a person who was willing to speak out on the side of the environment, and she was ousted," says Ray. "The people who are in power know exactly what they're doing and, of course, they're on the side of business."

Bethea's name appeared on a list of more than 200 candidates, but two things made her stick out: first, the fact that she had already been a board member for the previous seven years and, second, her status as an environmental lobbyist.

"Ms. Bethea is a registered lobbyist, and the law does not allow us to support those conflicts of interest," says Sen. Tommie Williams (R-Vidalia). Williams heads the powerful Committee on Assignments, which oversees confirmations to state boards. "We had unanimous support for that decision; it wasn't me driving it."

To the casual observer it might appear that the state is stacking the DNR board in favor of developers. And while appearances aren't always what they seem, they may be in this case: Lobbyists are barred from appointment to the board, but developers, as well as timber and power industry workers, are not. They may serve on the board entrusted with protecting the state's wildlife refuges, wetlands and nature preserves. And they do.

William Archer, a DNR board member from Lake Burton, is a retired executive vice president at Georgia Power and has a consulting contract with the company until 2009. Earl Barrs, of Cochran, owns a timberland management and investment company, as well as other land investment companies. William Carruth, from Dallas, is a developer. Walter Hudson is a developer and Realtor from Douglasville. Phyllis Johnson, of Hazelhurst, is a partner in Thompson Hardwoods Inc., a lumber company. James Walters, from Gainesville, owns a company that manages commercial buildings and shopping centers. Same for Tom Wheeler of Atlanta. That's seven out of the board's 18 members. None of these members are registered lobbyists, but that doesn't make their appointments any less complicated: They work in the areas deeply affected by environmental regulations.

As Bethea characterizes it, "The board itself is a policymaking body dealing with air quality, water quality, landfills—basically, all activities that affect the natural resources of Georgia."

One option would be to change the language of the law to exclude anyone with a direct conflict of interest. And if this ends up being the case, the state might also have to take a second look at the legislature.

Peruse the background of just about any of Georgia's state senators and representatives, and you'll find their profession listed as "Realtor," "investor" or "attorney." Williams, like many of his fellow senators, is listed as a "businessman." The job of serving as an elected representative in the state government of Georgia is considered a part-time, low-paying one (legislators make less than $20,000 annually). This is not to say that one should conclude that legislators are on the take. Rather, the way that Georgia's state government is run means that legislators often continue working in the business sectors that they themselves are regulating. The situation seems not so different from that of Bethea's appointment, about which the governor's office has little to say.

"Gov. [Sonny] Perdue reappointed Ms. Bethea and she was not confirmed by the Senate," Perdue spokesperson Bert Brantley says matter-of-factly.

But Bethea thinks Perdue could have done more.

"Last year was an election year," Bethea says. "The state Senate has a confirmation role, but I feel that if the governor wanted me to be on the board, he would exert some influence."

Lobbyists and board members

As the executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, Bethea is indeed a registered lobbyist. Her organization is devoted to protecting the watershed in central Georgia and is grappling with the task of maintaining clean water in a metro area of more than 4 million people. The nonprofit also meets with policymakers in an effort to persuade them to see things from an environmental perspective. Therein lies the conflict of interest that Williams cites.

He says there was no hidden agenda or motivation for Bethea's nonconfirmation. He argues that he and the committee he chairs were simply following the letter of the law, a law that he would like to change to remove all lobbyists from any state boards.

"My desire is to have people either be lobbyists or board members," he says, adding that he is aware that there are lobbyists on other boards in the state, but that the law does not allow the Senate to simply remove them from their current positions; the legislators can only use their power to confirm or deny appointments, which they did in Bethea's case.

Not everyone is hip to the way Williams has read the law he used to pass over Bethea.

"Sen. Williams and his committee have bent the law to suit their needs," says Gordon Rogers, who runs Satilla Riverkeeper in Waynesville, a nonprofit similar to the one Bethea oversees. Rogers believes that the Committee on Assignments found a law that they specifically molded to get rid of Bethea.

Upon closer inspection of the law, David Pope, director of the Georgia/Alabama Office of the Southern Environmental Law Center, says the Senate had no reason to pass over Bethea at all.
"The statute cited by [the Senate committee] does not apply to Ms. Bethea or her organization," says Pope, who has served as an environmental attorney for almost 30 years.

He explains that the law cited by Williams requires that lobbyists not be allowed to serve on a board that regulates the activities of a business or agency that the lobbyist represents. The DNR board does not regulate the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. So who does?

"Nobody," Pope says. "The Riverkeeper is a private organization that is not regulated by the state. The statute that was cited on its face does not apply to Ms. Bethea."
Pope said as much in a letter to the editor of the Savannah Morning News, and he's not the only public figure to weigh in on Bethea's side. Former Gov. Roy Barnes, the man who first appointed Bethea to the DNR board seven years ago, also supplied the Savannah Morning News with his own letter and sent a separate op-ed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"Bethea's non-confirmation was not the result of a serious advice-and-consent role of the state Senate, but rather the work of lobbyists who did not wish to answer some of the tough questions she posed about the safeguarding of our natural resources," Barnes wrote in the AJC.

Bethea's story has caused an uproar, but she is not the first DNR member to be let go recently. In the past four months, three other members of the DNR have been removed. Both Ralph Callaway and Sara Clark preceded Bethea in departing this year, victims of redistricting. Coincidentally, they, along with Bethea, represented three of a five-member group that tended to vote in favor of the environment.

Additionally, Clark Alexander, a coastal geologist with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, was not reappointed to the DNR's Coastal Marshland Protection Committee. He was replaced by H.E. Sonny Timmerman, a developer from Florida.

"What's been going on on the board for the last 18 months or so is a coalition or voting block has been developing that's very progressive," says Rogers, the Satilla Riverkeeper. "These are people who are voting their conscience on policy. That coalition has been dismantled over three months."

Bethea agrees.

"What has happened in the past few months, we've gone back to the board we had 15 years ago," she says. "In my mind, the board has become a rubber stamp for growth industries in the state of Georgia."

The environmentalists aren't asking for an all-environmentalist board. It's balance that's needed, they say, not a shift in one direction or the other.

"The DNR, to a degree that's greater than in any other department and board, touches more Georgians in an anonymous way than any other regulatory committee," Rogers says. "That's why it's incredibly important it be balanced. Right now, it's about as balanced as a tire on an old pickup truck in south Georgia. It's just flippity-flopping down the road."

Thanks to the handling of her dispatch from the board so closely on the heels of her two like-minded fellow members, Bethea's story has shone a spotlight on some important upcoming votes. New policies concerning acceptable mercury levels in the watershed, as well as for buffers between development and coastal marshlands, will come before the DNR board for votes this June.

Due to the hubbub, these votes, and the board that does the voting, will receive more scrutiny than either would have before. In a way, then, the Senate's nonconfirmation of Bethea may prove to be a necessary sacrifice, especially if she gets her wish that, "In the next governor's race, this needs to be made an issue. Candidates need to be asked where they stand on the environment." SP