Conference Still Focuses On Logging Sides Debate Salvage Logging While Trying To Create Plan

The timber industry says it could be a job saver. Environmental groups call it a license to log.

Debate over new federal policy encouraging “salvage” logging is casting a shadow over the Seventh American Forest Congress, which opened Wednesday.

Partly organized by Yale University, the conference will try to reach nonpartisan agreement on how to manage the nation’s forests.

But some Northwest delegates said the timber policy - passed last summer as part of a package of spending cuts - could make consensus hard to achieve.

“My biggest concern about the congress is that we’ll come up with a vision statement and then it’ll be business as usual - the unecological cutting of national forests and the continuation of logging without laws,” said delegate Samantha Mace of Spokane’s Inland Empire Public Lands Council.

The law requires the federal government to proceed with timber sales in areas of the Pacific Northwest near endangered or threatened species. Federal judges earlier halted such sales. It also encourages harvests of salvage timber affected by fire, disease or insects.

Chuck Cushman, chairman of the League of Private Property Voters in Battle Ground, Wash., said millions of acres of forests in Oregon and Washington have health problems.

“Going back on (the law) because of hysterical responses would be crazy,” Cushman said.

Some environmental groups say the salvage program provides cover for logging green trees.

“The Forest Service is calling almost everything a salvage sale,” said Mike Mihelich, a member of the Coeur d’Alene Audubon Society, who is attending the congress.

“Because of the rider, you’re probably going to have chain saws cutting green trees in a roadless area,” said Mark Solomon, executive director of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council in Spokane.

Forest industry representatives and private property groups defended the policy change.

“Our industry’s unique problem is that we’re the only industry whose raw material inspires poetry in people,” said Luke Popovich, a pollster with the American Forest and Paper Association. “But our industry is not guided by public opinion polls. It’s a business, and it depends on raw materials from public lands.”

Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Falls and Moscow, Idaho, hosted four of the 87 nationwide meetings since last August that laid the foundation for the conference.

Delegates spent most of Wednesday in a Washington, D.C., hotel ballroom trying to reach agreement in roundtable discussions.

Naomi Pace of the National Wildlife Federation cautioned environmentalists that the public is tiring of extremist rhetoric.

, DataTimes