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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Group Accuses Blm Of Phantom Forest Plans Logging Based On Outdated Records, Environmentalists Say

Scott Sonner Associated Press

The Bureau of Land Management plans logging and estimates forest growth rates based on outdated, inaccurate and incomplete records that often exaggerate reforestation efforts, a watchdog group said.

“BLM claims to be managing stocked forests, but they are phantom forests that exist only on paper,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said in a new report.

Agency policy dictates that most BLM forest inventories be updated every 10 years, but in reality most were last updated in the 1960s and 1970s, and in some cases even those plans were based upon aerial photography taken during the 1950s, said a copy of the report provided to The Associated Press.

The result in many cases is that the publicly-owned forests are being logged at a rate faster than they can grow back, based on inflated “Allowable Sale Quantities” that are supposed to be calculated so as to insure sustainable harvest levels, PEER said.

Environmentalists have leveled similar charges over the years about the 191 million acres of national forest lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service but PEER’s report marks the first comprehensive outside review of the 270 million acres administered by the BLM.

Leaders of the non-profit group said they spent 18 months reviewing 22 BLM resource areas in 12 districts covering five Western states - California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

“Because the agency’s basic planning tool supporting its timber sale program is inaccurate and inflated, the claim of sustainability is indefensible and patently false,” said Jeff DeBonis, PEER’s executive director.

“Many of the surveyed districts reported healthy reforested tracts when in fact the reforested plantations had failed due to disease, insects, animals or drought,” the report said.

BLM spokesman Bob Johns said agency officials had not had a chance to review the report but generally denied the agency was inaccurately portraying the condition of its forests.

“The BLM forestry program is absolutely what it claims to be,” Johns said.

“That doesn’t mean that every detail of every page of every report we have done is accurate. Any time you do anything in broad scale, you are doing thousands of things. It is possible one or two or three could be mischaracterized,” he said.

PEER said some districts lack inventories altogether while others misclassify the lands. Outdated material includes:

Spokane District in Washington relies on inventory data from 1976

Salmon District in Idaho uses data from 1975

Lewistown District, Montana, last updated inventory in 1974-75

Dillon, Mont., resource area planning is based on forest inventory completed in 1972

At three Idaho districts - Shoshone, Idaho Falls and Burley - PEER found evidence that timber sale records had been lost.

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