Improved Dialogue Needed, Forest Service Chief Contends Agency’s Efforts Tarnished By Salvage Logging, He Says

Efforts to restore the health of diseased and insect-infested forests have been tarnished since Congress allowed salvage logging in national forests two years ago, U.S. Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck said Tuesday.

“The words ‘forest health’ have become unnecessarily value-laden and incorrectly characterized to imply ‘log it to save it,”’ Dombeck told the House Resources subcommittee on forests and forest health.

“If we are to move beyond the divisiveness associated with implementation of the salvage rider, we must begin a more productive and credible dialogue about forest health.”

The rider exempted the logging from environmental regulations to speed up harvest of overstocked, fire-prone timber stands in national forests.

Conservationists alleged the Forest Service abused the process by allowing the logging of live, healthy trees.

U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, chairman of the subcommittee, said easing fire threats is one of her panel’s major priorities this year.

An advocate of salvage logging to remove dead and dying timber, she said nearly a century of fire exclusion has created many crowded, unhealthy forests.

“Rather than the high-frequency, low-intensity wildfires of the past, today’s wildfires are larger, hotter, more lethal to vegetation, more damaging to top soils and exceptionally dangerous to human settlements and property,” Chenoweth said.

Dombeck said about 39 million of the 191 million acres of U.S. national forests are at high risk to catastrophic fires because of a buildup of dead and dying trees.

“We have less of a ‘fire’ problem than we do a ‘fuels’ problem,” he said.

Dombeck, who took over as chief in January, praised a forest restoration plan backed by Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber as the kind of strategy needed to help calm what has become an emotional political debate.

“Forest health is not simply a salvage issue. It is an ecosystem restoration issue with broad opportunities and complex solutions,” Dombeck said.

He said he met last week with Kitzhaber to discuss the plan developed by a panel of scientists two years ago to treat tattered forests in Eastern Oregon.

Dombeck said he already has talked with the heads of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management to find ways to use parts of the plan on a broader scale.

The strategy embraces restoration activities ranging from stream bank improvements and noxious weed management to prescribed fire and thinning of dense stands.

“It also contains a common-sense recommendation that initial forest ecosystem restoration efforts focus on less controversial areas, avoiding riparian, old-growth and roadless areas,” Dombeck said.