Clinton’s Forest Plan Attacked Group Says It Would Cause 20 Species To Go Extinct

Environmentalists urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to overturn President Clinton’s Northwest forest plan, saying the logging strategy would cause as many as 20 old growth-dependent species to go extinct.

The threatened northern spotted owl has a one in six chance of going extinct under the president’s plan, the Native Forest Council said in the legal briefs filed Tuesday in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The council challenged an earlier federal ruling upholding Clinton’s plan.

Twenty other vertebrate species “more likely than not” would disappear as a result of continued logging, the court papers alleged.

The appeal does not specify which species would die off, but government scientists, in preparing the plan, identified several mollusk and salamander species as the most at risk. Some fish species also fared poorly in the rating system.

“The central issue in this case is whether defendants may lawfully manage the nation’s forest resources so as to drive the spotted owl and many other species to extinction,” said the Eugene, Ore.-based conservation group.

“It is… beyond dispute that the plan knowingly causes or allows the extinction of vertebrate species… Using the government’s own species’ survival assumptions, it is certain that some vertebrate species will be eradicated,” the appeal said.

Several timber industry groups earlier filed an appeal in the same court challenging Clinton’s plan on the basis it doesn’t allow enough logging.

David Shilton, a lawyer handling the case for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said Tuesday he had not yet reviewed the brief and had no immediate comment.

The conservationists said the forest plan further is flawed because it fails to consider another circuit’s ruling, under review by the U.S. Supreme Court, that weakens federal protection of threatened species on private lands.

The narrower interpretation of the Endangered Species Act adopted by the Washington, D.C.based 10th Circuit in the case involving loggers from Sweet Home, Ore., makes it necessary to impose more stringent protection on national forests, the appeal said.

U.S. District Judge William Dwyer of Seattle upheld Clinton’s plan late last year and lifted a nearly four-year-old injunction blocking logging on millions of acres of national forests in Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

Dwyer had ruled in 1991 that the Bush administration was breaking several environmental laws by excessively logging national forests with no legitimate plan in place to keep old growth species alive.

Clinton’s plan allows only about one-fourth as much logging annually as the 1980s average.

But environmentalists say the strategy contains loopholes that will result in more than Clinton’s projected 1 billion board feet of public timber being cut each year.