Forest Service overseer seeks preservation of old growth
Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons ends his term with a request to the timber industry to stop logging virgin forests
Copyright 2000 The Oregonian
December 13, 2000
By Michael Milstein of The Oregonian staff
The federal official who oversees the U.S. Forest Service has for months been quietly urging private timber companies to do what tree-sitters and other activists have long demanded much more vocally: stop logging old-growth timber.
Jim Lyons, completing his term as undersecretary of agriculture responsible for natural resource policy in the Clinton administration, said last week during his final official visit to Portland that "it would be a feather in the cap" of the timber industry to orchestrate an end to old-growth logging.
"I would suggest -- and I've told this to some leaders in the timber industry -- I think it would be wise for the timber industry to step up to the plate and at a minimum begin a dialogue toward that goal, if not suggest some ways to address it," Lyons said in an interview with The Oregonian.
His pitch to protect old growth marks a bold conclusion to his eight years overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, during which he raised its public and political profile as a federal land steward. Lyons kick-started that transition in Portland just after taking office, organizing President Clinton's 1993 forest summit that led to the Northwest Forest Plan, a grand compromise between logging and wildlife protection.
Lyons acknowledged last week that the jury was still out on the success of that plan and that decades might pass before a verdict is clear.
But he predicted an end to old-growth logging on private and public land within 10 years, in response to public sentiment. The timber industry could capitalize on that sentiment, as it has with its sustainable forestry initiative, by voluntarily swearing off logging in the approximately 10 percent of original Northwest forests still standing, he said.
"No one's said no," Lyons said of the industry leaders he has approached. "Some have kind of looked off and thought, 'I wonder.' "
The retooling of many sawmills to accept smaller and second-growth logs, combined with greater knowledge of the wildlife dependent on old-growth forests, has made logging of virgin timber stands unnecessary and publicly unappealing, Lyons said.
"The values of old growth, as the public is coming to understand them and as we understand them scientifically, far exceed their value solely for timber," he said. "I think it would be a feather in the cap of industry to engage in a dialogue to end old-growth harvest and, at the same time, work with mills that are dependent on old growth to develop the technologies to harvest second growth and smaller-diameter material and, frankly, capitalize on the technology and the markets that are out there."
An aggressive program of thinning overgrown federal forests to reduce wildfire hazard in coming years will provide timber to make up for a diminishing volume of old growth, he said.
Message is heard
Although Lyons has staked out ambitious positions on environmental issues before, his high-level message to the timber industry gives the crusade against old-growth logging an air of legitimacy that protests and banner-waving never could.
"It does surprise me, because we don't normally hear that from such a high level," said Ivan Maluski of American Lands Alliance in Portland, a longtime foe of old-growth logging. "It's important when it's not just the environmental community but decision-makers who recognize we are running out of old growth. Trees may be a renewable resource, but old growth is not."
Lyons' statements illustrate the outspokenness that has often earned him the ire of Congress, which in its most recent budget legislation stripped Lyons of his immediate authority over Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck. But that has not kept Lyons, a 45-year-old former congressional aide with a forestry and wildlife management degree, from leading the charge for contentious proposals such as the Clinton administration's plan to protect roadless reaches of national forests.
"I think the fact that Congress took away his management of the Forest Service shows you what serious questions there are about him," said Chris West of the American Forest Resources Council.
But Harv Forsgren, the U.S. Forest Service's regional forester for the Pacific Northwest, said the controversy surrounding the deputy secretary arises from his "passion and his willingness to advance some very significant conservation issues."
"The list of his accomplishments is long and very impressive," Forsgren said.
Northwest Forest Plan
Lyons said he counts among his proudest accomplishments the Northwest Forest Plan, a sweeping presidential mandate to set aside vast tracts of federal forests while opening others to logging. During the 1993 forest summit, Lyons said, Clinton identified the Northwest's "timber crisis" not as an environmental standoff but an economic one, with small communities caught between a familiar economy dependent on timber and a new economy with new sources of income.
The Northwest Forest Plan was the first attempt to manage federal lands throughout an entire region as a complete landscape or ecosystem, he said. Instead of measuring success by the timber that comes off public land, agencies measure it now by what they leave on public land in the way of forests, wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities, he said.
"I don't think the public is willing to see the agency start another round of extensive roading or aggressive logging," Lyons said. "To the contrary, the public is interested in an end to old-growth harvest, and I think many in the industry are about there as well."
Industry giant Weyerhaeuser owns little forest land in the Northwest that has not been logged before, so cutting of pristine forests is not a common practice, spokesman Frank Mendizabal said. Although he did not rule out the possibility that the company would cut small parcels of old-growth timber on its land, he said Weyerhaeuser sometimes sets such tracts aside or trades them into public ownership.