President Should Veto ‘Logging Without Laws’ Bill
Congress spent the “First 100 Days” systematically gutting our environmental laws.
One outrageous example is what I call the “logging without laws” amendment both the House and Senate have passed in similar form. The amendment would suspend our environmental protection laws for public forests and require federal agencies to sell enormous numbers of trees.
If President Clinton signs this into law, tremendous harm will befall forests here in the Columbia River region.
Congress boldly cuts programs for children, the elderly and other vulnerable people in our communities. But cut corporate welfare on our public lands? Not when corporate lobbyists are writing our laws.
The amendment will cost taxpayers more than $200 million, the Congressional Research Service estimates.
Boise Cascade, Plum Creek, Potlatch and other companies are funding an adroit propaganda campaign that is peddling a “forest health” emergency. Having overcut their industrial forests - leaving what Champion International’s regional planning manager Jim Runyan called a “hellacious hole or gap” - companies are reaching for our national forests. Companies advertise they are “striving to protect the environment”; meanwhile, they are scheming to cut down our national forests.
The companies are trying to manipulate naturally occurring forest events into a “national emergency” to justify massive logging programs - and this isn’t the first time. Paul Hirt, a Washington State University history professor, describes in “A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War II” how the U.S. Forest Service vigorously attacked perceived threats to “timber abundance” during the early 1950s.
Responding to a naturally occurring spruce bark beetle outbreak in the West, the Forest Service secured from Congress millions in road-building money, launched massive salvage logging operations and undertook a large-scale pesticide spraying program that included DDT mixed with fuel oil. Forest Service researchers would later discredit logging for controlling spruce bark beetle as “both ineffective and destructive.”
Yes, specific areas of our forests have fire, insect and disease outbreaks that are integral to functioning forest ecosystems. But according to the Forest Service’s own figures, annual tree mortality amounts to less than 1 percent of total stock. The data do not support the radical treatments now being steamrolled by corporations and Congress.
Salvage logging - an option that may be appropriate if done with care - would be used aggressively across landscapes. As with burned patients, burned forests require a higher level of care, not less. Salvage logging has as its goal cutting trees for someone’s financial gain, not the ecological recovery of forests.
Careful use of the saw and prescribed fire are options for managing forests. But the logging without laws amendment does not promote forest health, it accelerates forest death. This amendment directs the federal government - in addition to the existing timber program - to “salvage log” the maximum amount (in the Senate version) or 6.2 billion board feet (in the House version) on our public forests over the next 18 months.
To put this in perspective, 6.2 billion board feet is enough trees to fill 1.2 million logging trucks. Much of the massive cutting would occur in already-damaged forests of Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Western Montana.
No, this is not a thoughtful, scientific approach to restoring forests. This is corporate plunder and meat-axe forestry at work inside Congress.
Just look at how Congress defines “salvage.” Congress includes any trees “susceptible to fire or insect attack” and all “associated trees.” If this becomes law, we can expect the Forest Service to label all related future sales “salvage.” In 1992, when the Forest Service exempted salvage timber sales from the citizen appeals process, virtually every sale offered was a “salvage” timber sale. Surprise. Virtually every tree in our national forests, unless protected in a wilderness area, would be vulnerable if the logging without laws amendment is enacted.
To open the national forests to the corporations, both House and Senate versions of the legislation suspend such laws as the National Forest Management Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act - the only real impediments to unfettered corporate cutting in our nation forests. These laws allow citizen participation and environmental protection.
Congress took the reckless and irresponsible step of endorsing lawlessness in the forests. Now the real emergency in our forests is logging without laws and stripping the power that makes real public participation in public land decisions possible.
This is not the first time a president has faced illconceived attacks on the national forests: President Grover Cleveland vetoed Congress’s Sundry Civil Appropriations bill in 1897 to save national forests.
When President Clinton convened the 1993 forest summit in the Pacific Northwest, he said his administration would obey the law when it comes to our national forests. He also committed himself to help us find a way to protect and restore our forests and help our communities through this difficult and historic transition. And in a recent Earth Day address, he vowed to veto laws that would unravel the last 25 years of environmental legislation.
It is time for Clinton honor these pledges. Clinton should take the reasonable and prudent course: veto “logging without laws.”
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