U.S. Forestry Practices Rapped by Southwest Activists
9/15/96
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Activists Rap US Forestry
By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN
Copyright 1996 The Associated Press
Sunday, September 15, 1996 8:25 pm EDT
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Environmentalists and federal forestry bureaucrats
are facing off over trees destroyed by fire.
It's the latest skirmish in the battle being waged by litigation-minded
activists who don't like how the nation's public forest resources
are being managed and protected.
The Southwest Center for Biological Diversity wants to keep the U.S. Forest
Service from clear-cutting 69 acres of burned trees north of Douglas, 1,600
trees in all.
The trees were sold by lottery as timber-salvage -- one of a half-dozen
such sales in Arizona and New Mexico's 11 national forests. They are
scheduled to be cut this month and next.
The center bought 714 of the 1,600 burned and dead trees offered in the
Rustler Park Salvage Sale Area. And even though some of the trees,
including Ponderosa pine, White fir and Douglas fir, are supposed to be cut
down, the center wants to leave them in place and allow them to decay
naturally.
The center paid $5 each for the trees. It wants to leave them as nesting,
feeding and hiding places for wildlife, to help prevent soil erosion and to
provide nutrients to the soil as they rot.
"There's wildlife everywhere, there's birds nesting, grass, oak and pine
and fir seedlings everywhere, it's beautiful. And they're just going to in
there and destroy it," said Shane Jimerfield, the center's assistant
director.
If the salvage trees, which are 9 to 17 inches in diameter and 30 to 70
feet tall, are cut, they will be used as vigas, the round ceiling beams
found in Santa Fe-style homes.
The trees were among 27,500 acres of mixed-conifer and Ponderosa pine
forests consumed in 1994's monthlong, $6 million Rattlesnake Fire in the
Chiricahua Mountains.
The Forest Service, which sold the trees under a controversial salvage
rider passed by Congress, wants them removed. Coronado National Forest
Supervisor John McGee promises to resell them to someone else who will take
them out if the center doesn't.
The environmental center lost its federal court bid for an injunction to
block the cutting; a hearing on its appeal is set next month before a
federal appeals court in San Francisco, just days before the first deadline
for cutting the trees down.
"If we're victorious in court, the trees would remain," Jimerfield said.
But right now, the Forest Service doesn't really consider the trees as the
property of the center -- even though it paid for them.
"However, all the trees are property of the United States government until
removed and therefore not `your' trees because you paid for the permit,"
wrote Brian Power, a forest ranger in Douglas.
The center was part of the environmental coalition that last year won an
injunction from a federal judge in Phoenix that blocked most timber sales
and logging in Arizona and New Mexico over habitat of the Mexican spotted
owl. The injunction remains in effect.
Jimerfield believes the salvage sale violated the logging injunction. Only
pine forest vigas were exempt under the injunction, but the salvage sale
allows trees other than pines to be sold for cutting.
Twice before this sale was approved, the Forest Service offered trees for
sale but withdrew them following objections from the center, Jimerfield
said.
The center also challenged that on grounds it needed a biological
assessment and an environmental evaluation, but lost.
Jimerfield said the Forest Service's decision to award the salvage sale and
let trees be cut before the appeals process is completed means things could
get ugly.
"If the court agrees with us, people who bought trees are going to be
blaming us, not the Forest Service."