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Foothills
Landscape
Initiative
Georgia
The Foothills Landscape Initiative is a sweeping, long-term forest management effort that encompasses 143,419 acres of the Chattahoochee National Forest, including a large portion of the Chattooga River watershed in Rabun County. The project involves up to 55,000 acres of commercial timber harvest, 90,000 acres of non-commercial harvest, herbicide applications on over 60,000 acres, and forest thinning just about everywhere. The project’s final environmental assessment and decision notice were approved in April 2022.  We are monitoring this large project through involvement with the ongoing “Foothills Collaborative Group,” an assembly of interested citizens, agencies, and NGOs.
The Foothills Initiative is also slated to address roads, trails, and recreation areas such as this heavily used camping area on Earl’s Ford Rd. in Rabun County, GA.

Background

The Forest Service launched its “Foothills Landscape Initiative” in the fall of 2016. The project area encompasses a vast 143,419 acres (originally 157,625 acres) of national forest land in north Georgia, including a significant portion of the Chattooga River watershed in Rabun County. The Forest Service is seeking public input to consider as they develop specific aspects of the project.

We have been engaged in the Foothills Project’s “collaborative” process to push for the restoration of native forest types, old-growth forests and native canebrake ecosystems, and to also push for the protection of water quality, wilderness areas, and roadless landscapes within the project area.

After a series of public meetings and workshops during 2017, the Forest Service issued its “proposed action” for the Foothills Project. The agency also developed an online forum to solicit public participation.

We submitted 3 sets of comments on the Foothills Landscape Initiative in the early stages of planning:

1) Input and recommendations at the start of the project

2) Comments on the first draft of the Forest Service’s “restoration plan”

3) Comments on the Forest Service’s “proposed action”

On December 2, 2019, the Forest Service released the Foothills Landscape Project Draft Environmental Assessment (EA).  After denying a request for a delayed start date of the commenting period, they published their official legal notice in Gainesville Times for the 30-day comment period ending January 10, 2020.

Over 2,000 comments were submitted by the Jan. 10th deadline! The Chattooga Conservancy submitted comments in partnership with the Southern Environmental Law Center, Defenders of Wildlife, Georgia ForestWatch, Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society, as a document totaling more than 200 pages. We also prepared a separate brief set of comments. Both documents can be read here:

In August of 2021, the Forest Service issued a lengthy 500+ page revised environmental assessment (EA), plus a suite of associated documents for the project. The agency gave citizens minimal time to review all of this paperwork and to submit comments by mid-August. Unfortunately, the revised programmatic EA still failed to provide essential details about exactly where, when, and what kind of actions will be implemented within the huge project area, and instead deferred these specific disclosures, as well as site-specific reviews of their full environmental impacts, until later on during the project implementation phase.

The project’s final environmental assessment and decision notice were approved in April 2022.  We are continuing to monitor this large project through involvement with the ongoing “Foothills Collaborative Group,” an assembly of interested citizens, agencies, and NGOs.

This is a large project that is slated to be implemented over several years. Stay tuned for further updates, and thank you to all who have gotten involved!

Visit the project page for full details.