Sierra Club Stumping For Panhandle Report Assails Heavy Logging In Flood-Damaged Region

Is it the Idaho Panhandle National Poster Child?

The Sierra Club is using the Idaho Panhandle National Forests as one of 12 examples of egregious management in its renewed campaign to stop logging on federal lands.

The Panhandle was cited in a report, “Stewardship or Stumps,” that the group released Wednesday, the 100th anniversary of the Organic Act.

That’s the federal legislation that opened Smokey Bear’s home to Paul Bunyan. In recent months, national media from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have published major articles on the alleged connection between overlogging and floods that are washing millions of tons of toxic mine tailings down the Coeur d’Alene River.

The environmentalists don’t deny efforts to make the Panhandle a poster child.

“It’s one of the best or worst examples of 100 years of logging dominating an area,” said John Leary, a forest policy specialist with the Sierra Club. The area watersheds are unraveling, washing toxic mine tailings down to the region’s larger cities. That bodes ill for the economy in the long term, he said.

Industry analysts see it as a clever ploy to drum up anti-logging support. “It’s part of their no-cut position,” responded Joe Hinson, executive vice president of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association.

“They are attempting to pick the topic that forwards their agenda.”

“Looking at the Coeur d’Alene River, you can see that it flows through a flood plain,” Hinson said. “That’s not by accident; it evolved over eons.

“The natural history of the river is it gets over its banks.”

Logging, mining and road building may have contributed to problems in the upstream watersheds.

“To the extent there is human activity up there that we judge unfriendly, we need to fix it and they aren’t offering any alternative,” Hinson said.

The fix that Hinson is referring to is timber sales like Yellow Dog Downey, in the Wallace Ranger District. Yellow Dog Downey calls for logging 2.1 million board feet of timber. But after the logging, 42 miles of road would be ripped out and seeded with vegetation.

About 7 miles of fisheries habitat would be restored, there would be erosion control work, culverts removed and other watershed improvements, said Andy Anding of the Panhandle National Forests.

Forty-three miles of existing road would be reconditioned, 4.4 miles reconstructed and about one mile of new road built, Anding said. But the bottom line is there would be 42 fewer miles of road in the end.

The Forest Service has to sell the timber in order to pay for the road removal and the other improvements, Anding said. In fact, the agency wanted to take out 124 miles of road, but the area can handle only enough logging to pay for removal of 42 miles.

Beyond that, “every law that has come out mandates multiple use,” Anding said. “We are living with the laws the best we know how.”

The Sierra Club insists this doesn’t make sense.

“That’s spurious reasoning on the part of the Forest Service,” Leary said. “Why should they be forced to log questionable areas for questionable reasons to improve the ecological health of the area?”

If the taxpayers weren’t subsidizing logging road construction, for example, those same dollars could be used to obliterate roads and improve watersheds. And recreation and tourism eventually will be worth 30 times what logging is worth to the economy if there is enough of a national forest system to attract tourists, the Sierra Club maintains.

Finally, the environmentalists say there is the incalculable cost of harm to public drinking water. They claim that more than half of the water supply for millions of people in 16 Western states flows through national forests.

, DataTimes MEMO: IDAHO HEADLINE: Sierra Club stumps for Panhandle