Misbegotten Setup Cries Out For Reform Let Foresters Decide We Still Need Wood And Can Log With Care.
One salamander, two salamanders, three salamanders … 2,801 mushrooms, 2,802 mushrooms, 2,803 mushrooms …
Imagine the U.S. Forest Service crews, padding through the woods in white cloth booties, counting the living things that might be disturbed if loggers come in and cut down some trees. Imagine a federal judge poring over the survey results, acre by acre.
This is the direction management of national forests is headed. These treasured lands have become a battleground for epic litigation.
Meanwhile, logging has stalled in one of world’s most productive tree-growing regions, where clearcuts rapidly become lush forests again. To satisfy the need for wood, Americans now must look abroad, where logging commonly causes far more ecosystem damage than U.S. rules would allow.
This month, U.S. District Judge William Dwyer halted nine timber sales in the national forests west of the Cascades. He found the Forest Service failed to comply with a 1994 federal plan that was supposed to allow logging to resume while protecting rare forms of life that share the forest with the trees.
Activist groups whose goal is the cessation of logging sued to block the timber sales. They weren’t satisfied that the Forest Service spent $8 million a year trying to comply with the mandate for analysis of potential logging areas. Of course, the Forest Service must comply with regulations. It must log with ecological sensitivity. But a lone federal judge, sitting in a big city and reading affidavits is not well positioned to manage forests or evaluate what’s occurring in them. Dwyer simply is being used to achieve an obstructionist agenda.
The issue is whether logging should continue in national forests. If if should, on-the-ground foresters must be empowered to make decisions and get on with it.
The nation does need a generous supply of wilderness and recreation land. It also needs wood, a renewable material unlike steel and gravel, which must be mined.
And Congress needs to scrutinize the laws that have replaced forest management with courtroom obstructionism.