Bid to Log in Roadless Area Sparks Debate
11/13/97
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Headline: Bid to Log in Roadless Area Sparks Debate
Date: 11/13/97
Source: The Seattle Times
Author: Jim Simon, Seattle Times Staff Reporter
Copyright 1997 The Seattle Times Company
When Michael Dombeck took over as chief of the U.S. Forest Service
earlier this year, he told Congress that it was simply "common sense"
for his agency to avoid logging in roadless areas of national forests.
Now those words have propelled a planned timber sale in the Okanogan
National Forest into the spotlight of a national battle to keep roads -
and by extension, chain saws - out of inaccessible forests.
Okanogan Forest officials last week delayed plans to solicit bids for
logging 823 acres of lodgepole pine after two environmental groups filed
appeals. The sale would require the federal government to build 12 miles
of new logging roads and reopen 10 miles of abandoned roads.
An aide to Gov. Gary Locke last week sent the Forest Service a letter
questioning whether the sale, in a vast roadless area just outside the
popular Pasayten Wilderness, complies with the new forest chief's
directives.
"We hear these words come out of Dombeck's mouth, and then we get a big,
fat timber sale in the middle of a pristine, roadless area," charges Bob
Freimark, assistant manager of the Wilderness Society's Seattle office.
"It's almost the year 2000. These areas have stayed wild for a reason -
they're hard to get to, they're important habitat, they're adjacent to
wilderness areas. The Forest Service is almost asking for a
confrontation."
The Okanogan National Forest is part of a largely undeveloped swath of
federal and state land that includes steep canyons, sage-covered meadows
and vast stands of larch and lodgepole pine.
The proposed sale calls for harvesting 8.7 million board feet from an
area known as Long Draw, near Oroville just south of the Canadian
border. (A board foot is equal to the cubic contents of a piece of
lumber 1 foot square by 1 inch thick.)
Both the Sierra Club and the Inland Empire Interior Lands Council have
appealed the sale. They charge that heavy logging and putting roads into
the area will damage critical habitat for fish and wildlife, in
particular the state's largest population of the reclusive lynx.
But the sale is also part of a much broader fight over preserving
roadless areas.
Environmental groups, in an unlikely alliance with budget conservatives
in Congress, came within a handful of votes this year of forcing major
cuts in the Forest Service's $56 million road-building budget. Critics
call that money corporate welfare for timber companies.
Dombeck testified last February before the Senate Committee on Energy
and Natural Resources, touching as much on public confidence in the
Forest Service as on ecological questions.
"The unfortunate reality is that many people presently do not trust us
to do the right thing," he told the panel. "Until we rebuild that trust
and strengthen those relationships, it is simply common sense that we
avoid riparian, old-growth and roadless areas."
Afterward, however, the regional Forest Service office in Portland sent
a memo to forest managers emphasizing that Dombeck's statements did not
represent a"top-down dictum." The Okanogan National Forest had targeted
the Long Draw area for logging in a 1989 plan.
Okanogan officials say that logging the Long Draw, using both clear-cuts
and thinning, is necessary because insect infestation and decades of
suppressing fires has created a diseased forest.
A similar forest-health argument has been used by the timber industry
and some government land managers to push the Forest Service into
logging timber damaged by insects or disease. Critics mock that stance
as "cutting the forest to save it."
Brad Flatten, timber-sales manager for the Okanogan, says a prohibition
against entering roadless areas would reduce timber sales in the
Okanogan forest by 40 percent or so, a big hit against local towns and
timber businesses.
Opposition to the Long Draw sale generated extensive lobbying in
Washington, D.C. The Forest Service office in Portland told the Okanogan
National Forest to delay accepting bids for the sale until the appeals
were heard.
Locke's office was also deluged with complaints. "We received a big
outpouring of opposition," said Carol Jolly, an assistant to the
governor.
This area of the Okanogan is perhaps the state's most embattled forest,
with demand for timber east of the Cascades rising because of logging
restrictions on federal land in Western Washington.
The state Department of Natural Resources has begun an ambitious 20-year
harvest program in the Loomis State Forest, adjacent to the Okanogan
National Forest, that calls for more than 140 miles of new roads.
Environmentalists want that logging curtailed, while several school
districts, which receive revenues from the state forests, unsuccessfully
sued last year to force DNR to cut even more trees.
Jim Simon's phone message number is 206-464-2480. His e-mail address is:
jsim-new@seatimes.com
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