Federal Scientists Unveil Progress On Forest Study
Meetings
A team of scientists will hold an open house Wednesday 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and give a public progress report 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday at the Idaho Panhandle National Forests headquarters.
Federal scientists mapping new strategies for managing Inland Northwest forests will meet for the first time in Coeur d’Alene this week.
The Walla Walla-based team will show off its year-old project at an open house 5-8 p.m. Wednesday and during a public progress report 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday.
Both events will be held at the Idaho Panhandle National Forests headquarters, 3815 Schreiber Way, between Ramsey Road and U.S. Highway 95.
By the middle of next year, the Eastside Ecosystem Management Project will develop a new approach to managing 75 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management forests in the six-state Columbia River Basin, officials said.
Although the entire region, including privately owned lands, will be examined, any recommendations from the study will apply only to federal property, said project spokeswoman Patty Burel.
“We’re not going forward in an attempt to make decisions on private lands. That’s not within our authority,” said Burel, rebutting some citizen claims that the study is a land grab or an infringement of private property rights.
President Clinton commissioned the massive forest study during his 1993 Portland timber summit. Work began in January 1994.
Science team leader Tom Quigley calls it “a landmark project” that will tell researchers what shape the land is in from past management practices.
In addition to Quigley’s group, two other Forest Service and BLM teams in Walla Walla and Boise will use the scientific findings to develop more ecological ways to manage timberlands.
Instead of managing by timber sale or watershed, planners will consider the entire landscape, or ecosystem. That’s why all 144 million acres in the Columbia River Basin will be studied, from northern Nevada to Canada.
Those plans, covering the upper and lower Columbia River regions, are due out by the summer of 1996.
Despite enormous citizen interest and public meetings rotated throughout the region, the Eastside Ecosystem Management Project is misunderstood and widely viewed as too complex, vague and secretive.
Some private land owners are rushing to log their property because they fear states might adopt the new federal recommendations, a timber official said.
“People consider it (study) a weird little federal sideshow,” said Ken Kohli, spokesman for the Coeur d’Alene-based Intermountain Forest Industry Association.
“None of us has a hook in the lip far enough to know how hard it pulls.”
In its worst form, the project could bring more bureaucracy and gridlock over logging in federal forests, he said.
At best, the plan will better guide forest managers through a maze of environmental laws and cut loose federal timber for responsible harvesting, Kohli said.
“If this is driven by real science, objective science, then we have no fear of this process because we believe that science shows we now have a choice in our Western forests,” he said.
“We can either watch them burn, or we can intervene and remove the dead and dying material and act in an ecologically sensitive way to restore the health of our forests.”
Environmentalists applaud the scientific review but fear decisionmakers in Washington, D.C., ultimately will shape the findings to fit a long-standing agenda - logging.
“My concern is that the Forest Service … will use whatever science it has to get whatever it wants, which is trees,” said Sara Folger, Forest Watch coordinator for the Spokanebased Inland Empire Public Lands Council.
“I’d like to be wrong. But the decision-makers are not scientists,” she said.
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