Wildfire Strategy Called Insufficient Usda Logging Plan Falls Short Of Forest Service Recommendations

Wed., Jan. 25, 1995

Associated Press

The Clinton administration’s plan to reduce wildfire threats in the West, largely by logging overstocked forests, addresses only about one-fifth of the 5 million acres a Forest Service team identified as needing treatment.

Compared with the strategy the Agriculture Department announced last month, the Forest Service’s Western Forest Health Initiative Team had advocated a broader, speedier effort to remove dead timber and otherwise reduce the amount of fuel in national forests, according to a copy of the team’s report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

“Based on field responses, work was identified for completion over the two years covering approximately 5 million acres on national forests in the West,” the team wrote in its Sept. 30 report to Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas.

“In addition there is a significant amount of ecosystem analysis needed in support of future forest health projects. … Time is critical,” the team said.

Administration officials on Tuesday defended the USDA plan as the first step in a long process to restore the health of Western forests damaged by bug infestations and past mismanagement.

“This was not a one-shot deal,” Agriculture Undersecretary Jim Lyons said Tuesday night. “There is a lot of work to be done on the forests, a lot of opportunities to improve on their health.”

The Agriculture Department’s plan calls for 330 health-restoration projects on approximately 1 million acres of national forests over the next two years.

The projects include plans to obliterate some old logging roads and restore fish habitat as well as remove dead, burned wood and thin bug-infested forests where fuel loads pose a threat.

The salvage logging and thinning is controversial because environmentalists and some forest scientists say the cutting does more harm than good to a forest ecosystem.

Conservationists also point to past cases where the Forest Service used salvage logging as a guise to cut large, live trees without jumping through the hoops of as many environmental regulations.

Some lawmakers have proposed exempting some salvage logging operations from the normal environmental requirements in an effort to expedite the cutting before the dead wood loses its market value.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the Senate Agriculture subcommittee on forestry, is preparing a forest health bill that may adopt some of the team’s recommendations, his spokesman David Fish said Tuesday.

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