Some Rules In Forests To Be Eased

The Forest Service is moving to relax interim protection of fish and wildlife on national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington to allow more logging in overstocked old-growth stands, agency officials said Friday.

Concerned about fire and disease threats to some of the oldest ponderosa pines east of the Cascade Mountains, Regional Forester John Lowe has proposed changes in the temporary protections he ordered 20 months ago after environmentalists threatened to sue.

Timber industry leaders said Friday they were encouraged by the movement but that the proposed changes don’t go far enough to reduce threats of insect infestations and catastrophic fires.

Environmentalists said the proposed changes could lead to further ecological damage.

“It positions the Forest Service to take a run at the last of the East Side’s unprotected old-growth,” said Nathaniel Lawrence, senior attorney and acting director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s forestry project.

Jim Schuler, chairman of a Forest Service team that reviewed the interim protections, acknowledged “managing some of these old-growth ponderosa stands will be controversial.

“Anytime you manage those stands, some people are not going to go for it,” he said in a telephone interview from Portland.

The so-called “Eastside Screens” that Lowe applied to all new timber sales in August 1993 made most oldgrowth forests east of the Cascades temporarily off limits to logging. They also set up no-logging buffer strips along streams and wetlands - some buffers as wide as a football field - to help protect fish habitat.

The guidelines were intended to preserve all management options, from logging to wilderness preservation, until a permanent policy is adopted.

“Some elements are not working as well as I had hoped,” Lowe said in outlining the proposed changes to forest supervisors in a memo Feb. 8.

Forest Service officials declined to speculate how many acres or how much board feet of timber could be logged under the proposed changes, which have been offered as a formal amendment to the management plans of nine national forests and are subject to public comment.

A report prepared by an agency review team this month said about 200,000 acres currently at risk of fire and disease could undergo thinning or other treatment and still preserve the forest’s characteristics.

Additional changes likely will be proposed by May 1, Schuler said.

The biggest proposed change is intended to allow thinning of the forest understory beneath the centuries old pines by changing the Forest Service’s formal classification of the age of those stands.

By reclassifying them from old aged to middle aged, the agency could harvest trees in those stands without violating the prohibitions against cutting in old-growth, Schuler said.

Schuler said the agency decided to review the guidelines because they originally were intended to be in place for only 12 to 18 months, ending about now. But a permanent policy now appears to be at least another year away, he said.

Lowe also said in the memo that the buffer strips appear to need additional review.

“Our concern is in some cases there are pretty valid reasons for having timber sales either closer or further from the streams,” he said.