KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Suspending Environmental Laws to Support Logging the National Forests
The Bush administration along with its allies in Congress have proposed legislation to exempt some commercial logging of our National Forests from the National Environmental Policy Act, the keystone environmental law that requires analysis of environmental impacts before a federal agency can proceed with activities that may significantly damage the natural environment. In addition, administrative appeals would be forbidden and courts would be blocked from issuing temporary restraining orders that would stop challenged harvests until the legal issues were settled. As a result, even illegal harvests would be allowed to proceed to completion with the courts restricted to impotently concluding after the fact that the trees should never have been cut. This will truly be “logging without laws” on our public lands.
Commercial extraction of wood from our National Forests is not a high priority to most Americans. After all, the National Forests provide only a tiny minority of the nation’s wood fiber; most of the wood fiber we use comes from private lands. Our National Forests, to most Americans, are natural areas that should be managed for a broad array of non-commercial forest values such as water, wildlife, fisheries, open space, scenic beauty, and outdoor recreation. Those public attitudes have made it difficult for the timber industry to demand commercial access to those public lands regardless of environmental impacts. In the past, the timber industry has had to arrange its exemption from environmental laws through legislative trickery, hiding exemptions in obscure legislative riders such as they did in the mid-1990s with the so-called “salvage rider.”
This time commercial timber interests have latched on to our fear of catastrophic wildfire to declare an “emergency” that justifies exempting some timber harvests on public lands from environmental review. Commercial logging of our National Forests, we are told, will reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire by removing trees from the forest. This is alleged to have a double bonus: It saves our homes and communities from being incinerated and realizes the commercial value of those trees that otherwise would be wasted in a blaze of fire and cloud of smoke.
This political ploy pivots on a purposely confused play of words: commercial logging is called thinning or fuel removal. The pursuit of private profit becomes the pursuit of forest health. With the touch of Governor Martz’s magical wand, commercial loggers have been relabeled the forest’s physicians and their chainsaws, surgical tools. In this Orwellian world, miners are the dentists of the earth, removing dangerous abscesses while inadvertently leaving behind open pits. And coal bed methane developers are just relieving the earth of painful gas and dangerous accumulations of groundwater. The corruption of language in this public dialogue is intentionally disorienting, hoping that in the confused public babble commercial logging will obtain the special privileges it seeks.
The fact that Bush’s proposals have nothing to do with reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire is made clear by the inclusion of the harvest of old growth trees in the ancient rainforests of the Pacific Northwest where wildfire has rarely been a threat. In addition, the proposed exempt timber harvests are not focused in the areas immediately around the communities at risk to wildfire. Instead much of the exempt commercial timber harvest will be centered in areas far removed from human habitation where the chief attraction is not the potential to reduce forest fuels but the opportunity to harvest valuable trees without environmental review.
Another
key part of the Bush proposals is to allow the US Forest Service to enter into
what are euphemistically called “stewardship” agreements with logging companies
under which the commercial loggers would be paid with large commercially
valuable trees to remove vegetation that has no commercial value but
contributes to the wildfire potential.
That way, the Bush administration and Congress would not have to come up
with the money to pay for forest fuel reduction; instead it would barter our
trees for those forest fuel reduction services and the cost would stay off the
books and not contribute to the federal deficit. This Enron-like cooking of the books to hide costs is
objectionable enough. But the biggest
objection is that this arrangement will not improve forest health or reduce the
threat of wildfire. As University of
Washington forest ecologist Jerry Franklin recently emphasized, "You
achieve no ecological or fuel hazard goal by cutting old, large trees. If
you're really trying to carry out [forest fuel reduction] and pay for it with
[commercial] timber [sales], you're going to do bad things to the forest and
reduce the resiliency of the system."[1]
That doesn’t sound much like forest health improvement.
This new effort at “logging without laws” on our public lands is a tragic political mistake. As with the earlier “salvage rider,” it will mobilize environmental opposition to all of the activities carried out without public oversight and environmental review. Less forest fuel reduction will be carried out, not more. Creating this controversy and new policy gridlock is entirely unnecessary. Last year environmental groups, the Western governors, the Forest Service, and wildfire control experts all agreed on a community protection plan that required no gutting of environmental laws. A consensus still exists for efforts focused on reducing forest fuels in the areas where our homes and communities are located. If our politicians would stop listening to siren song of timber industry dollars and focus on actually protecting the public, we could already be at work effectively and efficiently protecting ourselves from catastrophic wildfire.
[1] Oregonian, 8/23/02, “The policy: Thinning plan calls for cutting past brush into big, old trees, Michael Milstein.