Federal Forest Decisions Favor Environment Craig Bill Attacked, Epa Steps In For Salmon

Environmentalists appear to have edged timber interests 2-1 in a week of significant decisions for Pacific Northwest forests.

From the Clinton administration to the federal courts, the decisions and declarations clearly favored environmentalists over the timber industry.

Clinton administration officials told U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, they hate his 100-page proposal for overhauling national forest management, in a letter released Friday.

The Environmental Protection Agency settled a California case that potentially means logging, development and grazing interests across the country will have to prove they are not muddying waters significant for salmon survival.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., meanwhile, ruled the timber industry can sue over logging limits set by the Clinton administration to protect the spotted owl habitat on national forests.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who oversee the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service respectively, authored the letter to Craig.

Craig invited the discourse after press reports incorrectly stated that some members of the Clinton team favored parts of Craig’s draft measure.

Craig’s proposal leaves virtually no piece of existing forest management or environmental legislation untouched. It also limits citizen appeals and changes open meeting laws when those laws apply to forest planning.

Any legislative overhaul should not be one that “limits the public’s involvement in managing public lands, compromises environmental protection of natural resources, restricts the ability of land managers to respond to new information and changing conditions, increases the cost and complexity of land use planning, and essentially sets the stage to transfer the public lands from federal ownership,” the Glickman-Babbitt letter said.

Current land management laws are sound, the letter said. Any changes in management should be accomplished administratively according to six principles in the letter, Glickman and Babbitt said.

Mark Rey, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Friday that Craig is neither surprised nor discouraged by the letter. “We know they have some problems with the draft,” Rey said.

A redraft of the proposal likely will mirror many of Babbitt and Glickman’s principles, “however, we are at the point where a general statement of principles is no longer an indication of progress toward a solution,” he said.

The Clinton team has long promised to make changes it claimed to have identified five years ago. “If all that needed to be done to fix this was administrative measures, why hasn’t it happened?” asked Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist.

Meanwhile in California, the EPA received a federal judge’s approval to develop water pollution standards affecting logging, ranching and development. The agreement grew out of a lawsuit over the so-called “non-point” sources of pollution, filed by fishing and environmental groups in the fight to protect declining salmon runs.

The settlement applies only to Northern California and the EPA has 10 years to make the rules. But the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which negotiated the settlement, predicts the standards eventually will apply nationwide.

That could present a significant headache for Idaho, which already is afoul of EPA rules for identifying and cleaning up polluted rivers and streams. After decades of dragging its feet, Idaho is under federal court order to accomplish those tasks, first established in the 1972 Clean Water Act.

The only clear victory for the timber industry this week is a muddled victory at best, analysts say. The Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals made a ruling that essentially allows the timber industry to challenge logging reductions on federal lands in Washington and Oregon.

The Clinton Administration made those cuts in timber harvests three years ago as part of a plan to protect the endangered spotted owl.

The industry charges that the administration held illegal closed meetings that prevented it from getting all of the relevant information about logging and owls. The result was unnecessarily low logging quotas, the timber industry argues.

If the industry files suit and wins, the results could be mixed for the Inland Northwest.

Allowing more logging on national forests in western Washington and Oregon would drive down the price of timber in Eastern Washington, North Idaho and Western Montana, said Richard Haynes, a Forest Service economist. That’s because as supply increases, price tends to drop.

It also means private timberland values also would drop, Haynes said.

Paul Ehinger, a forest products consultant, isn’t opening the champagne. “Getting a favorable ruling beats a kick in the seat of the pants, but it doesn’t produce a lot of timber immediately.”

No matter what the court ruling, the Clinton administration won’t allow more logging, Ehinger said. “You have to have an organization from the top down that wants to lift them.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

, DataTimes