Western Lawmakers Seek To Waive Laws For Salvage Logging

The Forest Service would be exempted from environmental laws and ordered to log millions of acres of national forests facing fire threats in the West, under a proposal Western Republicans prepared in the House Wednesday.

The controversial proposal would set a mandatory minimum, salvage harvest level for the forests regardless of potential impacts on fish, wildlife and water quality, according to congressional sources and lobbyists familiar with the idea.

It is expected to be offered as early as Thursday in the House Appropriations Committee as an amendment to an emergency spending bill that includes earthquake relief to California, the sources told The Associated Press.

Reps. Don Young, R-Alaska, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and Rep. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, urged support for such an amendment Wednesday in a letter to Rep. Robert Livingston, R-La., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

“Our public land forests need to be cleaned up this spring and early summer before a continuation of the record 1994 fires - which burned 4 million acres - permanently destroy crippled forests in 1995,” the lawmakers wrote.

Reps. James Hansen, R-Utah, chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on national parks and forests, and Wayne Allard, R-Colo., chairman of the House Agriculture subcommittee on resource conservation and forestry, also signed the letter.

The letter to Livingston said, “An administrative process is not in place to produce salvage timber sales before the trees become useless. If we do not deal with the situation now, millions of acres of trees will rot and go to waste during the next 18 months,” they said.

Freshman Rep. Wes Cooley, R-Ore., declined to discuss details of the proposal but said he supports it as the result of six weeks of “very informed, scientifically based work.”

“The situation in Eastern Oregon’s forests is unconscionable,” said Cooley, who helped develop the proposal along with the committee chairmen and Reps. Wally Herger, R-Calif., and Charles Taylor, R-N.C.

“Preservationists can scream to high heaven, but if the agencies had done their job with regard to salvage, Congress wouldn’t have to step in,” Cooley said. “Their inaction presents us with an emergency and we have to act.”

Draft versions of the amendment call for a salvage logging floor of 3 billion board feet of dead, dying and diseased timber in the first year and 4 billion board feet in the second year, according to copies obtained by the AP.

That’s more than the 3.6 billion board feet of timber the Forest Service expects to sell in its normal, “live” tree logging program in the coming fiscal year.

In addition, about 115 million board feet of logging would be mandated for the Bureau of Land Management.

During the 1980s, national forests in Oregon and Washington alone produced more than 4 billion board feet of timber annually. But that level has fallen to below 1 billion a year on those forests under President Clinton’s Northwest forest protection plan.

A draft amendment said the Forest Service and BLM still would be required to conduct a formal environmental review of the proposed logging. But the agencies would have only 90 days to complete the study.

In addition, that review would be “deemed to satisfy the requirements” of a host of specified laws, including the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act and Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

Such language, known as “sufficiency language,” is opposed by environmentalists. It helps to insulate the logging from legal challenges.

“This is signing a death warrant for the forests without any public review,” said Kevin Kirchner, an attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

“At a time when Congress is talking about getting tough on crime, it is ironic they would suspend the laws for the Forest Service and BLM. Putting the government above the law is inconsistent with democracy,” he said.

John Fitzgerald, executive director of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, said, “There is no scientific evidence that salvage logging or thinning reduce the risk of wildfires or improve the health of the forest ecosystem. In fact, most evidence suggests the exact opposite.”

The salvage timber sales would be defined as “a timber sale for which an important reason for entry includes the removal of disease- or insectinfested trees, dead, damaged, or down trees, or trees affected by fire or imminently susceptible to fire or insect attack.”

Last month, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, introduced a bill in the Senate to try to expedite the logging, partly by relaxing laws protecting fish and wildlife in cases where the fire threats are the greatest.

Sens. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., and Slade Gorton, R-Wash., are among backers of that proposal, which would exempt salvage logging operations up to 1 million board feet from normal reviews under NEPA.