Judge Clears Way For Clearcuts Environmentalists To Appeal Ruling To Allow Salvage Logging

Huge salvage logging sales in the Kootenai National Forest, challenged because of potential harm to grizzly bears, can go forward, a federal judge ruled this week.

That clears the way for 122 million board feet of lumber to be logged, much of it supplying North Idaho mills. Environmentalists say they will immediately appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

U.S. District Judge Charles Lovell on Tuesday rejected a suit against the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service filed by the Inland Empire Public Lands Council, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Ecology Center. That suit charged that huge clearcuts and new roads would push a fragile grizzly population in the Cabinet-Yaak area to the extinction.

But “the judge said that the Kootenai National Forest efforts to protect the grizzly bear were adequate and sufficient to ensure the bears’ recovery,” said Ken Kohli, of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association which joined the suit on the side of the Forest Service. “The groups criticism of those were without merit.”

“As we suspected when the suit was first filed, this is more of a patch and scratch effort to tie up a timber sale,” Kohli said. The sales are good news because they supply twice as much timber as offered by the Idaho Panhandle National Forests throughout 1995.

The Kootenai National Forest is in eastern Idaho and western Montana, within easy reach of North Idaho sawmills.

The environmental groups find this no Christmas present. The Kootenai sales were offered under a law passed by Congress that essentially suspends environmental laws.

So the groups sued under the administrative procedures act, saying the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service were arbitrary and capricious in allowing the sales.

, DataTimes