Republicans rip Clinton logging policy
9/02/96
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Feb. 7, 1996
Year in Review: Congress vs. Environment -
Dec. 29, 1996
Republicans rip Clinton logging policy
August 2, 1996
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Western Republicans clashed with Agriculture
Secretary Dan Glickman over President Clinton's logging policy,
accusing the administration of slowing salvage harvests to win
votes from environmentalists.
"The bottom line is that you rolled, in my opinion, your Forest
Service chief to curry favor in an election year with national
environmental group leaders who oppose all timber harvesting on
federal lands," Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, told Glickman during a
congressional hearing Thursday.
But conservation leaders say Glickman's recent directive to put some
salvage logging on hold didn't go far enough -- leaving thousands of
acres of national forests unprotected.
"The public forests withdrawn from the salvage program by Glickman's
memo have received only a temporary stay of execution. They are still
on death row," said Carl Ross, executive director of Save America's
Forests.
Glickman assured the lawmakers that the Agriculture Department's
Forest Service still intended to achieve its goals this year for
logging the dead and dying timber posing emergency fire threats.
"This secretary is not in anybody's hip pocket --not the Sierra
Club's hip pocket not the timber industry's hip pocket," he told
members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Glickman, a former Kansas congressman, said the deferral of some
logging until next year would affect only about 650 million out of
4.5 billion board of salvage timber slated to be cut by the end of
this year.
Glickman's order prohibits salvage logging in most roadless areas and
limits the cutting only to emergency situations. He said it came in
response to concerns that too many live, green trees were being
slated for logging as part of the salvage operations.
Craig chastised Glickman for failing to seek input from Forest
Service field workers before announcing the new restrictions on
salvage logging earlier this month.
"If you had millions of acres of wheat land, you would not have
picked up the phone and called your field people in Kansas just.
before harvest and say, `Put it off for a year, we have some
problems,"' Craig said.
"You get the wheat out of the field when it is ripe and ready. Timber
is the same way," he said.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Montana, added, "This delay will limit the
amount of timber to be salvaged because dead and dying timber will
eventually be useless for harvest."
Glickman said the Forest Service projected only 60 million to 78
million board feet of timber, valued between $5 million and $7
million, would be lost to deterioration during the deferral.
Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the committee, said
President Clinton constantly was changing its logging policy, citing
last summer's so-called "salvage timber rider" -- which Clinton first
vetoed, then signed into law.
The rider exempted salvage logging from the normal environmental laws
and waived citizens' rights to challenge the harvests through
administrative appeals.