Court Ruling Revives Timber Sales Environmentalists Hold Out Little Hope Of Stopping Logging Of Old-Growth Trees

After yet another defeat in court, environmentalists said Thursday they hold out little hope they can stop logging on more old-growth timber sales revived by Congress.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the “salvage rider” passed by Congress last year resurrects timber sales going back to October 1989 that earlier were killed in court action because of environmental concerns.

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan found, however, that the salvage rider does not release timber sales originally offered on Northwest national forests before fiscal 1990.

Environmentalists said they would appeal, but the trees were likely to be cut before an appeals court ruling.

“All the odds are stacked against us to be able to stop it,” Patti Goldman, a lawyer for Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Seattle, said Thursday.

Last July, Congress attached a rider to a major budget-cutting bill that suspends environmental laws through this September to speed up logging on national forests. Throughout most of the country, the rider was intended to harvest dead and dying timber to reduce fire danger. In the Northwest, the rider also applied to old timber sales in healthy old-growth that had been dropped for one reason or another.

Hogan’s latest ruling allows logging on 11 timber sales comprising about 60 million board feet of timber that had been stopped in the course of previous court action, such as injunctions.

The sales include the Boulder-Krab and Elk Fork sales on the Siskiyou National Forest east of Port Orford, which the U.S. Forest Service withdrew in 1990 after environmentalists sued to protect salmon in the Elk River.

There was no immediate word from the timber companies that hold the sales whether they would start cutting trees right away.

Hogan rejected environmentalists’ argument that reviving timber sales stopped by previous court action violated the constitutional separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches of government.

The ruling was a painful defeat for Georganne Houtrowl, a member of Friends of Elk River.

“There is no way this could happen except under these lawless conditions,” she said. “What is happening here will have lasting repercussions on the salmon industry.”

The timber is badly needed by mills starved for logs the past four years, since logging was sharply reduced to protect the northern spotted owl, said Jim Geisinger, president of the Northwest Forestry Association. But it is still a far cry from the 1 billion board feet promised by the Clinton administration in its Northwest forest plan, he added.