Litigation Logjam In Need Of Thinning

Jack Ward Thomas, the first wildlife biologist to head the U.S. Forest Service and a hero of the Sierra Club set for his work to save the spotted owl, has committed political heresy. Or has spoken the truth, depending on how you look at it.

Testifying before a congressional subcommittee the other day, Thomas said, “We have a forest-health problem.” It is, he said, “a very large problem that we have to collectively address in some intelligent fashion.” Decades of misguided management policies have left some of the West’s inland forests at risk of catastrophic fire. Some stands are diseased, bug-infested, dying and packed with tinder.

The unnaturally intense wildfires of 1994, damaging the ability of some forest areas to recover, were a warning.

Thomas also said recent litigation is impeding a solution. The battle - only the latest in a long line of forest-policy standoffs - involves a federal law intended to allow speedy salvage logging of forests scorched by 1994’s fires.

But the law touched off a political firestorm by limiting the rights of appeal which are to the environmental-litigation industry what trees are to the forest-products industry.

While we support the salvage law, it won’t solve the larger problem. That will take permanent forest-health legislation, a fact recognized years ago by former U.S. Rep. Larry LaRocco, D-Idaho, and now advocated by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, among others.

For months, Craig has been negotiating toward a bipartisan compromise on his bill, S391. It would empower federal land managers to identify forest areas in urgent need of restoration and to embark on a range of remedies such as thinning, replanting and prescribed burning. Without eliminating rights to appeal the remedial plans, the bill could expedite appeals so they do not become yet another opportunity for ideologues to paralyze forest management.

Logging foes such as the Wilderness Society respond that the forest-health crisis does not exist. But as Thomas and many other foresters have made clear to Congress, the weight of credible analysis says otherwise.

The challenge - one that Congress ought to meet this fall - is to thin out the litigation so the region’s land managers can implement today’s more enlightened forestry methods, deal with the current crisis and re-establish the public’s lands as a sustainable source of wood.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board