Old-Growth Logging Continues, Activists Say

Contrary to the public perception, the Clinton administration continues to award new logging contracts in Northwest forests with centuries-old trees, exempt from environmental laws and insulated from citizen appeals, environmentalists said Tuesday.

The old-growth logging continues despite the administration’s announcement last week that it was prematurely ending advertisements for bids for salvage logging under a controversial “salvage timber rider,” the critics said.

“The Clinton administration is trying to look like Santa Claus when they’re really acting like Scrooge,” said Brian Vincent, conservation director for the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance in Bellingham, Wash.

“The directive is a cynical ploy to fool the public into thinking the problem of the rider is solved while allowing the clearcutting of thousands of acres of old trees,” he said.

The directive issued Friday by Agriculture Undersecretary James Lyons applied only to the logging of dead and dying timber that was scheduled to continue under salvage operations through the end of the year under the rider, perhaps as much as an additional 100 million board feet.

Untouched by the new order is hundreds of millions of board feet still intended to be offered for sale in the remaining two weeks of the year in national forests covered by President Clinton’s Northwest forest plan, known as “Option 9,” the environmentalists said.

Logging also was continuing in other places nationally where the salvage timber already had been advertised for bid, but not yet actually sold by the time the administration’s order was issued last Friday.

Lyons has said the salvage program had proven controversial and he didn’t want to give the impression there was a “Christmas rush” to beat the Dec. 31 deadline. Effective Jan. 1, logging operations are subject to the normal administrative appeals process and the usual environmental safeguards.

Lyons was not immediately available to respond to the criticism Tuesday, a spokeswoman for his office said.

Clinton’s Northwest forest plan dropped the projected harvest level on national forests in the region to about 1 billion board feet annually - down from the peak annual average in the 1980s of more than 4 billion board feet.

It established a series of forest reserves and key watersheds where logging would be off limits, while establishing additional areas where experimental forestry would be conducted and still other areas that would be treated like normal Forest Service lands open to logging.

Environmentalists complained the reserves are not big enough to support threatened wildlife and fish stocks. Timber industry leaders complained the reserves were too big and said the administration was failing to produce even the relatively meager 1 billion board feet of wood promised.

While the focus of the salvage rider approved by Congress and signed by President Clinton in July 1995 was the rotting trees posing catastrophic fire threats, the rider also waived the normal laws protecting fish and wildlife to expedite timber sales the Forest Service planned under Option 9 through Dec. 31.

“The public isn’t aware big old trees - some 800 years old - are being auctioned off Dec. 19 at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest” in Washington state, as much as 28 million board feet total, Vincent said.

The Forest Service also intends to auction 51 million board feet of timber in Oregon this week at the Mount Hood National Forest, 20 million board feet at the Siskiyou National Forest and 15 million board feet in the Umpqua National Forest, the environmentalists said.

“This is manipulative and deceptive,” said Kim Mosel of the Siskiyou Project in Cave Junction, Ore. “The Clinton administration gets to play environmental hero and the public gets the stumps.”

The Wilderness Society was among national environmental groups that praised the administration last week for halting new salvage timber advertisements.

Mike Francis, national forest director for The Wilderness Society, said Tuesday he would have preferred the “Option 9” sales be stopped as well, but believes the early halt to the salvage sales was better than nothing.

Timber industry leaders said last week they expected about 100 million board feet of timber to be affected by the salvage directive.