The Sierra Club has asked the forest supervisor of the George Washington & Jefferson National Forest in Virginia to impose a moratorium on all ground disturbance activities that could endanger the federally listed candy darter, a small fish that can only live in relatively pristine streams in the Jefferson National Forest.
As noted in the January decision of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that denied access to one of these same streams by the Mountain Valley Pipeline project in large part because of that project’s impacts on the Candy Darter, there are only four streams in Virginia that are home to this species, each of which is isolated from the other and at risk of extinction.
One of these four streams is Dismal Creek in Giles County, which is currently the location for a large logging project encompassing fourteen different logging sites of varying sizes, totaling over 600 acres in total.
Some of these projects are nearby drainages that could potentially unload sedimentation into sensitive habitat for this endangered species.
In its letter to the Forest Service, the Virginia chapter’s Forest Issues Chair, Sherman Bamford, noted that the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s 13-year-old analysis on which the Forest Service relied was done before the candy darter was even listed as an endangered or threatened species.
As noted by the Fourth Circuit in its Feb. 3 decision, that analysis “failed to adequately evaluate the ‘environmental baseline’ and ‘cumulative effects’ for … the Roanoke logperch and the candy darter” and “the agency neglected to fully consider the impacts of climate change.”
In his letter to Supervisor Joby Timm, accompanying the Sierra Club letter, Appalachian Mountain Advocates attorney Ben Luckett noted that:
“Activities with the potential to cause harm to the candy darter include timber removal, road building, road reconstruction, skidding, prescribed burning, and any other land disturbing activities having the potential to release sediment or other pollutants to waterways. A moratorium is necessary because significant new information and circumstances relevant to the darter make clear that those activities threaten to jeopardize the survival of that deeply imperiled species in violation of the Endangered Species Act.”
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