Don’t Log In Roadless Areas, Group Urges Environmentalists Seek Moratorium On Five Proposed Idaho Timber Sales

Environmentalists, scientists and university researchers urged President Clinton on Wednesday to declare all roadless tracts of national forests larger than 1,000 acres off-limits to logging and road building.

Despite the administration’s earlier pledges to avoid logging in roadless areas, at least 50 logging projects are in the works across the country in pristine stands of national forests where there are no roads, the Western Ancient Forest Campaign said in a new report.

Ten of the proposed timber sales are in Oregon, seven in Colorado and five in Idaho. Others are at various stages in Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Montana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.

Clinton should declare a moratorium on such logging at least until the U.S. Forest Service can complete an inventory of its lands and adopt a comprehensive plan for managing them, the environmentalists said during a news conference at the National Press Club.

“There are few places that have not been paved over or bulldozed for roads. We are losing these places even before we can inventory them,” said Dominick DellaSala, director of U.S. forest conservation programs at the World Wildlife Fund.

There are 378,000 miles of logging roads in national forests - eight times more miles than the entire U.S. interstate highway system.

In the 1970s, the Forest Service began identifying roadless areas greater than 5,000 acres. A small portion of those lands have been protected, but the vast majority of them remain unprotected under existing forest plans, said Steve Holmer of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign.

The roadless areas are especially critical to grizzly bears, lynx, salmon, trout and other species that require large tracts of undisturbed habitat, the activists said.

“Most of the good forests are gone. What we are battling over here are the scraps,” said Chuck Pezeshki, a mechanical engineering professor at Washington State University who has studied the impact of logging roads on landslides in national forests in Idaho.

Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck had no immediate comment Wednesday. But he said in an interview Monday that the agency is in the process of developing a new policy - expected before spring - for roadless areas as well as for the maintenance of existing logging roads.

“I understand that road-building into roadless areas is the most contentious,” Dombeck told The Associated Press.

The value of roadless lands is increasing as their supply decreases, he said.

“The single most permanent thing we do from a landscape change is probably roads. We need to be very careful and very sensitive,” Dombeck said.

“There are a lot of roads that aren’t needed anymore. There are roads that are bleeding sediments into streams and badly need maintenance.”

The Forest Service estimated in 1979 that it had about 80 million acres in roadless conditions.

But there has been no estimate since, and environmentalists have projected those lands are disappearing at a rate of at least 1 million acres a year.

They pointed to comments in the past year by Assistant Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons, who identified roads as the primary cause of water-quality problems in national forests, and by Dombeck, who told Congress in February that given the public’s suspicion of federal logging programs, timber sales in roadless areas should be avoided.

“Yet, subsidies for new logging roads into these pristine areas will continue next year,” Holmer said.

An Agriculture Department spokesman said at least two of the timber sales on the list of 50 have been put on hold and are in the process of being canceled - the Slide Hollow timber sale in the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee and the Long Draw timber sale in the Okanogan National Forest in north-central Washington.

Clinton said last month he is anxious to establish a new policy on logging roads and roadless areas.

“These last remaining wild areas are precious to millions of Americans and key to protecting clean water and abundant wildlife habitat and providing recreation opportunities,” the president said.

xxxx