Gore Calls Salvage Logging ‘Biggest Mistake’ Admission Comes In TV Interview Scheduled To Air Tonight
President Clinton’s signing of a controversial salvage logging law that waived protections for fish and wildlife was the “biggest mistake” of the administration’s four years, Vice President Al Gore said.
Gore singled out the miscue involving logging on national forests in an interview with David Frost scheduled to air tonight on the Public Broadcasting Service.
“I think the biggest mistake that we have made involved an issue known in the United States as the ‘salvage rider,”’ Gore said.
“It’s an issue related to timber and it was a mistake that we thought was a very small mistake at the time, but a court decision made it much more significant,” he said.
Gore, who wrote a book on the global environment, said the achievements of which he is most proud over the last years “include turning around America’s environmental policy by giving advice to President Clinton and helping him with a new policy direction which I think is much more in our interest.”
But he acknowledged the logging provision backed by members of Congress who want to speed harvests in national forests was damaging forest ecosystems.
“Luckily, that law will run out on December 31st of this year and we have a better chance of containing the damage and undoing the worst of it,” Gore said in the interview taped on Monday for “… talking with David Frost.”
The so-called “salvage rider” waived the normal environmental protections, including the Endangered Species Act, in order to expedite logging of dead and dying trees in forests where increased fuel loads posed fire threats.
It also ordered the Forest Service to allow logging of thousands of acres of old-growth forests in Oregon and Washington that had been sold to private bidders in 1989 and 1990, but never formally released for cutting due to emerging concerns about threatened birds.
Clinton vetoed the proposal the first time it made it to his desk, but signed it in July 1995 when it was tied to a comprehensive spending bill that included emergency relief for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and California earthquakes.
Environmentalists warned that the language in the rider created a loophole that ordered the logging of healthy, green stands of trees in addition to the dead and dying ones.
Clinton administration officials maintained initially that the environmental waivers were optional and that the government could not be forced to release the old-growth for logging. However, federal judges later ruled the logging was required under the bill.