Tree Beetle Fight Undercut Groups Ask Feds For Injunction Against Harvesting

Less than 24 hours after the U.S. Forest Service announced it would battle the Douglas fir beetle with chain saws, a coalition of environmental groups went to federal court to block that move.

If they are successful, there won’t be any logging on 4,000 acres around Hayden Lake this summer, where the Forest Service has an emergency waiver to start dropping trees before the public comment period ends and any appeals are resolved on the final logging plan.

Monday, the agency announced it would cut between 130 million and 176 million board feet of timber in North Idaho and Eastern Washington in response to a beetle outbreak that it says is killing trees and exacerbating fire danger.

The Lands Council, Ecology Center, Idaho Conservation League and Hayden Lake resident Jules Gindraux filed for the injunction Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Missoula.

The emergency exemption “excludes public discourse, it excludes public involvement,” said Lew Persons, executive director of the Lands Council. And the fact that the Forest Service has been marking trees for logging for several months has “the taint of a false process (and) smacks of a predetermined outcome.”

He acknowledges the Forest Service has promised to remove 150 miles of logging road as part of the timber sales. That’s insignificant considering the thousands of miles of logging roads in the forests.

“They are going to cause more damage `fixing it”’ through logging, he said. “If they have to cut trees to do restoration, they will never catch up.”

Dave Wright, supervisor of the Idaho Panhandle Forests, said the legal challenge is counterproductive considering watershed restoration and road obliteration are going to be a condition of most of the logging contracts.

Any delay means the beetle-killed trees will start to dry, crack and decrease in value. That means less money for such restoration work because the trees will fetch less money.

“We’ve heard from some of these folks repeatedly about the need to reduce roads and improve the water quality,” Wright said. “I’m disappointed people would want to jeopardize that effort.”

While the Forest Service can’t do anything about the beetle outbreak, it can ease the aftermath - mainly the fire danger posed by the dead trees, Wright said. Doing nothing endangers people with homes in the woods as well as firefighters, he said.

The Forest Service didn’t “predetermine” the outcome by laying out out timber sales in advance because it can still change its mind, Wright said.

The timber industry, eager for Douglas fir to feed their mills, expected the challenge. And is disgusted.

“If the notion here is that bark beetles and wildfires have a preemptive right to rampage through the forest over the Forest Service’s right to harvest dead trees to do watershed improvement, I’d like to think the Forest Service will be sustained,” said Jim Riley, head of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association.

If not, “it will be bad for the forest, bad for the environment and bad for the people around here,” Riley said.

“I think the important thing here, if possible, is to not let this issue deteriorate into the traditional polarized environmentalists versus the government issue.”