Shades of Green

By Joe Keating

Oregon’s U.S. Senator RonWyden’s proposal to designate 160,000 acres of the Mt. Hood National Forest as a protected wilderness area needs to be placed in perspective. It is an election year and Wyden has correctly taken a shellacking from enviros for his Healthy Forest Initiative and his passive role in the gutting of the rules of the NW Forest Plan.

The Mt. Hood Wilderness proposal is a step forward. Its outcome, however, is highly dubious. By the time that Wyden receives ‘input’ to arrive at a political consensus the plan will get watered down. When and if it reaches the Congress in the form of a bill it will again get watered down. All of this will take place after Wyden’s re-election bid. In my experience I have never seen an environmental proposal actually improved. The number of trees if any coming from this plan is likely to be comparatively small.

Balance this proposal against what Wyden has actually done this year in real time. Bush’s plan to more than double the annual cut within our national forest (one billion board feet per year) is based upon an estimated increase of logging by 20 percent now allowed by Wyden’s Healthy Forest Initiative and an 80 percent estimated logging increase now allowed by the gutting of the rules of the NW Forest Plan. Mark Rey verified these percentages in a recent Portland visit. He is the Undersecretary of Agriculture and architect of the Bush/Wyden plan to destroy our forests.

Jim Lyons, a former undersecretary of agriculture in the Clinton Administration who is an architect of the Northwest plan, said “the changes strike at the very essence of the plan’s intent, which is forest management based on science rather than commercial imperatives.” Jim furnish, the former supervisor for the Siuslaw National Forest in western Oregon adn a former forest service service deupty chief said “Some forests will be affected, others won’t. But the changes are tragic because it’s picking the scab off an old wound, and all for a small timber industry upside. The changes were just the first step. Now you’re going to see a counterattack by the environmentalists, and it will be by any and all means.”

Citing agency figures that delays in salvage logging could cost the government $448,000, Pacific Northwest Regional Forester Linda Goodman last week declared an economic emergency to encourage harvests of timber burned in the 2002 Flagtail Fire in the Malheur National Forest. Burnt timber loses value for every day it goes unharvested, meaning lengthy delays can cost the government millions of dollars in potential revenue.

Meanwhile, officials at the Rogue River and Siskiyou National Forests are requesting that Goodman declare a similar economic emergency for salvage projects associated with the Biscuit Fire, which burned nearly 500,000 acres in August 2002. The Forest Service is considering logging 518 million board feet (mbf) of timber, according to the agency’s draft environmental impact statement (EIS). That is more than all the logging that was done in the country last year. That is over 100,000 logging trucks loads from one sale alone.

The Flagtail Fire projects mark the first time the Forest Service has declared an economic emergency for salvage logging. The declaration allows the agency to proceed with a project immediately rather than waiting out any administrative appeals. Prior to that change, the Forest Service could only use health and safety criteria in order to declare emergencies, said agency spokesman Rex Holloway.

Authority to make such declarations was included in a 2003 rulemaking package related to President Bush’s and Senator Ron Wyden’s Healthy Forests Initiative. Bush used the burning Siskiyou National Forest as a backdrop when he unveiled his Healthy Forests plan in August 2002.

Environmentalists have opposed both the Flagtail and Biscuit salvage projects, and a number of groups have filed suit challenging the Flagtail project record of decision and emergency declaration but our legal position is greatly reduced due to the healthy Forest Initiative and the NW Forest Plan amendments.

Thanks, Ron, for throwing a token bone to those of us who love the forests. I wonder if there will be any trees left in Ron’s proposed Mt. Hood Wilderness area

For more information, or for issues that you would like to see discussed in this column, please contact Joe Keating at keats[at]teleport.com