Clinton Urged To Visit Salvage Logging Sites Activists Want President To See Healthy Trees Slated For Cutting
Environmentalists urged President Clinton on Thursday to take time on a trip to Seattle this weekend to view healthy, centuries-old trees slated for logging under a controversial law he signed last summer.
The call came at a national forest conference where disagreement over the so-called “salvage timber” law has been a major stumbling block as a variety of forest interests seek common goals for future U.S. forest policy.
“He needs to see the environmental damage that is going to occur,” said Jim Jontz, a former Democratic Indiana congressman who heads the Western Ancient Forest Campaign.
Clinton has no plans to visit the federal logging sites on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula during the stop Saturday in Seattle, where he is scheduled to discuss worker retraining programs.
But an administration official said the president is considering a variety of options - including a flat out repeal of the law - to try to ease concerns about potential harm to fish and wildlife.
“The president said he is going to take a close look at it,” Assistant Agriculture Secretary James Lyons said Thursday.
“He’s had us try to assess what the situation is and what options we have. … It’s been re-emphasized,” he said.
Lyons, assistant for natural resources who oversees the Forest Service, said he is convinced some of the logging should not take place.
He pointed to trees slated for harvest in roadless areas of the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon, where Forest Service officials have raised concerns about the danger to threatened salmon species.
They are among the so-called “Section 318” timber sales in the law which were sold to loggers over the past six years, but never released for logging because of concerns about impact on the threatened northern spotted owl and marbeled murrelet. “I don’t want them cut,” Lyons said during a break at the Seventh American Forest Congress.
“That is a roadless area we’d just as soon not enter,” he said about the sales in the South Umpqua watershed. “We’ve got to figure out a way to avoid harm with the 318 sales.”
The White House also is concerned about salvage logging of dead and dying trees called for under the law but “hasn’t decided whether or not we’ll seek to address that,” Lyons said.
“The salvage sales in general have been pretty solid. In some cases, there may be some problems with the way the sales are packaged,” he said.
Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas has appointed a special team to investigate allegations that some of the salvage sales are actually just repackaged, former healthy sales that had been put off due to environmental concerns, he said.
The logging law suspended most environmental safeguards and prohibits citizen appeals so as to expedite the harvests. It has been in the spotlight at the conference, which is drawing together timber industry leaders, professional foresters, mill workers and citizen activists.