Judge Says U.S. Failed to Honor Logging Deal

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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8/7/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

Timber wars in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. are bound to heat up

again, as the court has ruled that federal officials in the Bureau of

Land Management and National Forest Service carried out actions

"arbitrary and contrary to the plain language" of the plan to manage

remaining old growth on public lands in the region. In a compromise

that pleased very few, some 5 years ago 1/3 of the remaining old

growth was made available for logging, but with requirements to

monitor impacts upon certain species including the infamous spotted

owl. The court has found that federal land managers failed to carry

out their duties in this regard, and thus should not have been

approving some nine timber harvests--and this ruling may jeopardize

others. The economic and social impacts of scarcity of old growth

forests for industrial logging can be dealt with now, while their are

still relatively intact core areas of old-growth forest ecosystem, or

in a few years, when it is essentially gone.

g.b.

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Title: Judge Says U.S. Failed to Honor Logging Deal

Source: New York Times

Date: August 5, 1999

Byline: SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

SEATTLE -- Five years after the Clinton Administration hammered out a

landmark plan to settle legal and environmental disputes over logging

across the Pacific Northwest, the region's timber wars are flaring up

again.

The same Federal judge who once issued rulings to protect the northern

spotted owl has now blocked nine major logging deals and threatened to

stop dozens of others by declaring that Federal officials have failed

to take proper steps to insure that other species are being protected

as well.

Siding with environmentalists and enraging the logging industry, Judge

William L. Dwyer of Federal District Court in Seattle ruled on Monday

that the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land

Management had unlawfully neglected to conduct detailed wildlife

surveys on Federal forest land, as required by the 1994 compact,

before approving contracts allowing logging of parcels in old-growth

forests west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon and in

northwestern California.

The ruling could ultimately affect logging on half a million acres or

more of Federal land. The judge, who in 1994 had released the land

agencies from court oversight by approving the so-called Northwest

Forest Plan, declared that the agencies' actions were "arbitrary and

contrary to the plain language" of that plan. Under pressure from

environmentalists and the logging industry, the Clinton Administration

brokered that compromise allowing logging on about a third of

remaining federally owned old-growth forests.

The judge's ruling this week effectively put the land agencies back

under a degree of court jurisdiction until they could show they were

doing a better job of monitoring the logging's effects on 77 animal

and plant species that include rodents, snails, salamanders, mollusks

and wildflowers.

Many of the species are considered indicators of the overall health of

the old-growth forest ecosystem. Under terms of the 1994 plan, all

were supposed to be intensively surveyed by the Federal agencies,

which say they believe they have followed those terms. But the

environmentalists, in their suit, said the agencies had failed to do

complete surveys before granting logging permission.

Judge Dwyer's ruling has the immediate effect of blocking logging

plans for about 100 million board feet of timber, enough to build

about 7,000 average-sized homes. But even more broadly, the judge

indicated that his court's approval would be needed before new logging

could occur under about 200 other deals in the region. If upheld on

appeal, after a likely challenge from the industry, the ruling could

significantly curtail logging in the majority of contracts approved by

the Federal officials in the last three years in the region.

The ruling is being hailed as a "blockbuster victory" by one of the

lawyers for the 13 environmental groups that joined forces in the

lawsuit. A spokesman for the timber industry said it was "disappointed

that the judge feels he knows the plan better than the professionals

in the Federal Government."

The forest service said it was still studying the ruling to assess its

impact. "Our lawyers are still going through it," said Rex Holloway, a

spokesman for the agency in Portland, Ore. "They're hesitant to say

anything until they've had a chance to talk among themselves." But he

said the forest service believed it had correctly followed the

guidelines of the 1994 agreement.

At this point, it is unclear whether the red tree vole, a small rodent

favored as food by the spotted owl, or the blue-gray tail-dropper, a

tiny snail, will acquire the emotional symbolism that the owl brought

to the fight over old-growth forests. Both are among the species at

issue in the case.

But it is certain that the fight is renewed, and that

environmentalists are again on the offensive, trying to move toward a

much broader ban on logging in the Northwest.

"There's so little old-growth left, there's no good place to cut it

anymore at all," Doug Heiken, western Oregon field representative for

the Oregon Natural Resources Council, said in a telephone interview

today. "All of it should be protected for future generations."

The group, one of those that filed the lawsuit, says that only 10

percent of the region's old-growth forests are left, and that about 30

percent of that area remains eligible for cutting under the 1994 plan.

The industry, meanwhile, says the judge's ruling imperils hundreds of

logging jobs and the local economy in some pockets of the Northwest

and many are pressing Congress to relax the survey regulations.

Senator Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, has sponsored

legislation to relax some of the requirements of the environmental

surveys, making it easier for many of the timber deals to go through,

and the judge's ruling is likely to intensify the fight over the

issue.

Still, the region as a whole is far less dependent on logging than it

once was -- in Oregon, for example, the high-tech industry is now a

bigger source of jobs than forest-products companies. And even in some

places that were once deeply reliant on logging, tourism built on the

area's natural beauty is now a mainstay of the economy, which leads at

least some local business people to oppose the logging.

"It messes up the area, big time," said Tom Vuyovich, owner of the All

Seasons Motel in Detroit, Ore., on the edge of the Cascades, who said

much of his clientele is tourists drawn to the area's natural beauty

and its many recreational possibilities.

"A lot of them look around, there are clear-cuts visible all around,

and they say, 'What happened here? Where are the trees?' They want to

know where the old growth is, and I can carefully point them out to

the last few spots that have been saved -- so far."

Chris West, a spokesman for the Northwest Forestry Association, an

industry group, said today that the judge's ruling was just "the tip

of the iceberg" and that it could eventually lead to a ban on logging

for lumber that could be used to build nearly 100,000 homes.

Such a ban would not in itself be likely to significantly affect

building activity or drive up the cost of lumber in general, but it

would curtail the amount of the old-growth wood on the market. Many

builders and prospective home owners, both here and in overseas

markets, consider it particularly desirable.

Many environmentalists say there is no good reason to allow logging of

the old-growth forests at all, and concern over the forests is what

sparked the first of the legal battles that have been revived by the

judge's ruling this week.

Eight years ago, Judge Dwyer issued a sweeping ruling that temporarily

halted all logging in the spotted owl's habitat region under Federal

jurisdiction, nearly 25 million acres in all.

Pressed by both environmentalists who wanted the logging permanently

stopped and by industry officials who described the judge's ruling as

economically devastating, President Clinton moved shortly after he

took office in 1993 to broker a compromise. He did, permanently

setting aside about 10 million acres of Federal land on top of

millions of acres of owl habitat that were already protected because

they were in national parks or other wilderness areas.

The compromise, including the requirement for the wildlife surveys,

cleared the way for Judge Dwyer to lift his ban. But it satisfied

neither side, and there is still a debate over whether the plan is

sufficiently protective of the owl.

The Forest Service estimates that there are about 8,000 pairs of owls

in the Northwest. A recent Federal survey found that the owl

population is declining at about 3.9 percent a year. Agency and

industry officials said the decline rate was significantly less than

what it had been and was in fact an indication that the long-term plan

for recovery of the species was working.

Environmental groups said the continued decline called into question

the whole plan, and they renewed their push for a half to all logging

on old-growth land.

The Clinton Administration has said it is committed to shifting forest

policy toward conservation. It announced earlier this year, for

instance, that it would continue its suspension of logging-road

construction in most of the national forests.

So the judge's ruling will also set the stage for a likely battle

within the Administration over how the Forest Service should respond -

- in other words, whether it should contest the ruling or use it as a

continuing reason to halt logging projects.

Heiken, of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, said that the group

was not opposed to the 1994 plan, as long as it was scrupulously

followed.

And Heiken disagreed with the forest industry's contention that it was

being subject to renewed and unfair judicial oversight.

"This is exactly what the courts are here for," Heiken said. "The

point is, the agencies are going to have to come up with a way to do

it right. And as soon as they figure out how to do it right, the judge

will be out of the picture."

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