Fire, logging advocates square off
Copyright 2001 Scripps Howard, Inc
June 25, 2001
By MARK GROSSI
FRESNO, Calif. - To burn or chop? Or to burn and chop? Those are big questions facing the U.S. Forest Service as it decides how to thin the forest around prized giant sequoias in the southern Sierra Nevada.
The agency is asking for public comment on forest thinning as well as recreation and other issues in the management of the 328,000-acre Giant Sequoia National Monument. The monument was designated last year to protect about 30 groves of the largest trees in the world.
Five public meetings have been planned for July. Three will be in the San Joaquin Valley, the other two in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
The meetings probably will attract environmentalists, forest users, industries and local governments to talk about the controversial monument.
When Clinton designated the monument in 1.2 million-acre Sequoia National Forest, logging and forest-user groups saw it as a move to exclude them.
"This planning process is going to affect access, landowners in the area and the people who use this forest," said Tom Barile, chairman of the Sierra Nevada Access, Multiple Use and Stewardship Coalition, or SAMS.
SAMS joined Tulare County last year in a lawsuit to rescind the monument. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., probably will rule this summer on whether the case will move forward.
Some of the 84 SAMS member groups, including loggers, boaters, campers, businesses, bicyclists and others, will probably speak at the meetings, Barile said. Members would like to see the forest's overgrowth reduced with the help of logging.
Many environmentalists oppose any logging in the monument, suspecting that it might lead to commercial timber projects.
They say fire should be returned to the ecosystem.
Federal policies to snuff all fires over many decades helped create overgrown forest. The overgrowth is the biggest enemy of the 2,000- to 3,000-year-old trees, which occur naturally nowhere in the world except the Sierra. Thick surrounding growth would allow a small fire to become a catastrophic blaze that could kill these natural relics.
Ecologists say fire has been a natural thinning force for millennia in the Sierra, making it the best tool. But some believe that some mechanical thinning would be reasonable in certain circumstances.
"Fire alone is the first choice," said Nate Stephenson, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who studies giant sequoias. "But ecological logging could be appropriate in stands that are so dense that prescribed fire wouldn't be safe."
Now, Barile said he would like to see the monument managed the way state officials run the Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest, which contains sequoias next to the new monument. For many years, the state forest has used logging to help open areas for young sequoias to grow.
But logging cannot provide the benefits of fire, said Stephenson, who is among the scientific advisers to the monument planning.
"The most conservative approach is to use fire," he said. "It sterilizes the soil and does things that logging doesn't do."
(Contact Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee in California at http://www.fresnobee.com.)