Return of Timber Wars to USA

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

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8/19/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

Following is coverage from the New York Times of the recent court

ruling against the U.S. Forest Service. In my opinion, the time is

now to stop all old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest.

g.b.

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Title: Return Of The Timber Wars

Source: New York Times Editorial

Date: August 16, 1999

For the past two years, Mike Dombeck, the chief of the U.S. Forest

Service, has struggled to change the culture of a notoriously stubborn

agency that has long favored the harvesting of timber in the national

forests at the expense of wildlife protection and other environmental

values.

But old habits die hard at the Forest Service, no matter who is in

charge. That is the unhappy subtext of U.S. District Judge William

Dwyer's recent ruling that the Forest Service has been violating a

landmark 1994 plan to protect the spotted owl in the old-growth

forests of the Pacific Northwest, mainly by failing to conduct

wildlife surveys on federal land before approving logging contracts.

The decision, which also faulted the Bureau of Land Management, could

halt logging on more than a half-million acres of federal land.

Dwyer thought he had straightened out the Forest Service eight years

ago. In 1991, ruling on a lawsuit brought by environmentalists, he

found that the Reagan and Bush administrations had systematically

failed to honor their obligations under various federal laws to

protect the habitat of the spotted owl in the old-growth forests in

northern California, Washington and Oregon.

Dwyer's ruling effectively shut down the logging business until 1994,

when the Clinton administration brokered a compromise. Under the plan,

the timber industry's annual cut in the region was set at 1.1 billion

board feet, greatly reduced from its mid-1980s high of 5 billion board

feet. Some old-growth trees would be cut to meet that target, but

about two-thirds of them would be preserved.

The plan included other protections, including the survey requirement.

In exchange, the administration provided job retraining for displaced

loggers.

The revelation that the Forest Service - specifically, Dombeck's

subordinates on the regional and local level - failed to honor a key

part of this agreement is disturbing. Yet some good may yet come of

it.

For one thing, it may shock Dombeck into paying much closer attention

to what his people on the ground are actually doing or, in this case,

not doing. This is not the first time he has been blind-sided.

For another, it could focus congressional attention on a pernicious

rider to the Interior Appropriations bill that would in effect

legalize the very behavior that Dwyer found illegal. Slipped into the

bill by pro-logging Northwestern senators before the judge's decision,

the rider would excuse Forest Service employees from their legal duty

to conduct detailed wildlife surveys, not only in the Pacific

Northwest but in all national forests.

Finally, the Dwyer ruling could usefully refocus the administration's

attention on the 1994 compromise plan, which needs strengthening.

Officials at the Oregon Natural Resources Council, which brought the

recent suit, have said that they can live with the 1994 plan if it is

scrupulously followed. But the plan still presupposes the loss of up

to a third of the old-growth trees.

Dombeck might therefore begin thinking of ways to save those trees,

perhaps by reducing the timber harvest, or by expanding his previously

announced policy of banning new logging roads in the national forests

to include those in the Pacific Northwest, which have so far been

exempted from the ban.

Both moves would infuriate powerful senators who underwrite Dombeck's

budget. But it would be a good way to atone for his agency's

indifference.

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