Dubious honor goes to Ag official

SPOKANE – The local Sierra Club chapter Tuesday gave its Dead Swan Award to Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, alleging his forest policies are responsible for floods that spread heavy metals across the Inland Northwest.

As undersecretary for natural resources and environment, Rey oversees the U.S. Forest Service. For nearly two decades prior to his appointment, Rey was a lobbyist for the timber industry.

Forest Service policies on timber cutting have caused floods that wash toxic mining wastes across the region, the Upper Columbia River Sierra Club chapter contends.

“Mark Rey – first as timber lobbyist and now as undersecretary – shares responsibility for the toxic floods of the Coeur d’Alene,” Dr. John Osborn, a Spokane physician and the group’s conservation chairman, said in a release bestowing the dubious honor.

In a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office, Rey called the award a baseless attack. “Generally speaking, I’ll take responsibility for anything that happened on my watch,” he said, noting that forest policies the Sierra Club objects to had been approved by his predecessor.

The group’s award is named for tundra swans that migrate through the Coeur d’Alene River Basin each spring, and feed in wetlands contaminated with lead from past mining activity. Lead paralyzes the swans’ ability to swallow and they slowly starve to death.

Wastes from more than 100 years of silver mining in northern Idaho’s Silver Valley have flowed into Lake Coeur d’Alene, the headwaters of the Spokane River. The waste flows down the river into Washington and eventually to the Columbia River.

During the 1980s and early 1990s Rey was a lobbyist for the timber industry. He then served as a staff member with the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which helped set national forest policy.

Rey was sworn in as undersecretary of agriculture on Oct. 2, 2001, and has worked to increase levels of logging in the national forests.

The conservation group accused Rey of reversing protections for 58 million acres of national forest roadless areas.

The Sierra Club chapter’s award comes on the heels of a Bush administration announcement of new rules allowing local forest managers to approve logging without formal scientific review.

“Mark Rey has his hand on the chainsaw,” Jeff Holmes, hunting and fishing program coordinator for the Sierra Club, said in the group’s release. “His decisions cut into every national forest. But the poster child of damage is the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.”

Logging roads and clearcuts have led to flooding that has wiped out the region’s trout spawning streams, the group contends.

“The resulting floods carry mine wastes that harm the Spokane River fishery as well,” Holmes said. “Mark Rey is targeting the river’s few roadless areas, all that remains of an intact watershed, and final refuge for fish and wildlife.”

The floods carry toxic metals into Washington state by way of the Spokane River. In 2000, the Spokane Regional Health District posted signs on Spokane River beaches warning of public health risks from lead and arsenic. In 2001, the Health District warned the public not to consume any fish caught between the Idaho line and Upriver Dam near Spokane.

The Dead Swan Award has been given twice before.

Former Sen. Slade Gorton received one in 1999 for his efforts to help a Texas mining company that was trying to build an open pit cyanide leach gold mine in the mountains of Eastern Washington.

In 2002, Washington Gov. Gary Locke and Ecology Director Tom Fitzsimmons received the award for agreeing to cede control of the Silver Valley Superfund cleanup from the EPA to a commission created by the Idaho Legislature.