BLM broke environmental law, appeals court rules

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management violated environmental law when it sold old-growth timber in southwestern Oregon without considering the cumulative harm that so much logging was having on northern spotted owls and salmon.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed the ruling of U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene, despite the fact that the trees in the Mr. Wilson timber sale had already been felled.

The panel sent the case back to Hogan with orders to have BLM revise the environmental assessment to take a “hard look” at past and future logging in nearby areas.

George Sexton, conservation director for Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, a plaintiff in the case, said it was too late to save the 400-year-old trees, but he hoped the ruling would make BLM stop cutting so much old-growth when much of the U.S. Forest Service is focusing on logging in less controversial second-growth stands.

“I think BLM has decided who butters their bread, and they are connected at the hip with the timber industry,” Sexton said. “I don’t see BLM ever reaching the point where they decide to hear the public’s desire to see old-growth forest protected and move into a less controversial second-growth thinning program until they log all the old growth or the law is changed.”

BLM did not immediately return telephone calls for comment.

In the majority opinion, Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote that BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider seven other past and future timber sales in the West Fork of Cow Creek watershed and what that would do to habitat for the threatened northern spotted owl and salmon.

The ruling noted that BLM’s environmental analysis was based on broader looks at the impacts of logging that did not specifically address the harm caused by past, present and future logging.

It added that the BLM decided to log despite the fact that the environmental analysis found that four timber sales in the area would remove up 1,000 acres of old-growth habitat, and that future logging would remove some of the last old-growth in some sections.

The timber sale was an area designated for logging by the Northwest Forest Plan, which reduced logging on federal lands in western Oregon, Washington and Northern California. In a dissenting opinion, Judge A. Wallace Tashima agreed with Hogan that because the trees had already been cut, the case was moot.

But Goodwin wrote that if that were the case, BLM could just rush through logging projects before conservationists could get to court.