Babbitt Foresees Pre-Burn Harvests But Timber Thinning Not Likely To Be Very Lucrative, Create Jobs

Some endangered forests could be logged before fires are used to thin them, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt says. But the operations won’t make much money or create many jobs.

“It is important not to raise expectations that this is some sort of panacea for Western employment,” he told the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior on Tuesday.

Babbitt was responding to criticism from Rep. George Nethercutt about the administration’s reluctance to log diseased and insect-infested timber in federal forests of Eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.

“Why do you rely on burning to such a great degree rather than harvests that would help sustain timber communities?” Nethercutt asked.

“I don’t see the (budget) numbers going up for harvesting,” the Spokane Republican said.

Babbitt said the salvage and thinning should be accelerated in appropriate places. But Congress will have to acknowledge that in some cases the costs will exceed the commercial value of the timber recovered, he said.

“What we should be focusing on are the ponderosa dominated forests of the inland West,” Babbitt said. “In some cases we may be subsidizing the harvests.”

Babbitt said an experimental effort combining prescribed burning and thinning of forests is proving successful at a site known as Mt. Trumbull near the Utah-Arizona border north of the Grand Canyon.

“It may work in Arizona,” Nethercutt said, “but we’re waiting in the Pacific Northwest.”

The federal government also seems to be pushing two contradictory theories, he contended.

“One day, Environmental Protection Agency Director Carol Browner suggests that the nation’s air quality is so poor that we must adopt tough, new air quality standards particularly in the West,” he said. “Then (Babbitt) offers a proposal which would put even more smoke and particulate matter into the air.”

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said he’s supportive of the effort to set low intensity fires to burn off the fuel loads before catastrophic fires burn out of control. He said research as far back as 30 or 40 years ago suggested it was a serious mistake to suppress fires in the ponderosa pine region east of the Cascade mountains.

“They said some limited fire hardens trees so bugs won’t infest them,” Dicks said.

“I know all of us have to represent our districts, but I think you probably have the science on your side with this one,” he told Babbitt.