Forest, Wildlife, and Climate News

Editorial: Leave timber management to foresters

By Andy Martin, Wallowa County Chieftain, 12/24/2008 [here]

Judge doesn’t consider fire danger

For nearly two decades, the vast majority of the logs that keep the handful of Oregon lumber and plywood mills still around in business come from private forest lands, or state forests.

A meager 8 percent of the trees come from federal forest lands, despite the fact the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies control nearly 60 percent of the forests in Oregon.

While logging on national forest land has become next to impossible because of the Endangered Species Act and other laws, a few timber sales get past the heap of anti-natural resource use regulations. The Forest Service has the authority to approve small logging projects on sites less than 1,000 acres with a quicker environmental study. Known as “categorical exclusions,” the sales are possible under a 2003 policy adopted by the Bush administration as part of the Healthy Forests Initiative.

Environmental groups, however, have found a way around the policy that allows wise use of Oregon’s natural resources by filing lawsuits in a California federal court where judges are more likely to ignore sound science, the threat of catastrophic wildfires and the impact of forest policy on local communities and economies.

That’s what happened earlier this month when U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell halted timber sales already under way in Wallowa County. The judge ruled in favor of the Sierra Club, which sued the Forest Service to stop the logging.

Why is a judge with no experience in forest management deciding how our natural resources should be used when professional foresters are recommending the opposite?

We asked incoming Sen. Jeff Merkley that very question.

“Senator-elect Merkley believes we need to bring the stakeholders together and implement a policy that will send saw logs to the mills, create good jobs and improve habitat in second growth forests,” his spokeswoman, Julie Edwards, told the Wallowa County Chieftain. “While we cannot comment on this specific court case, we need to get away from a forest policy that is decided through the court system and instead chart a path that will allow for sustainable harvests on second growth forests while protecting old growth areas.”

We will be watching with interest to see what Merkley does to help Eastern Oregon’s timber industry and the communities that depend on mills and logging, including local governments and schools, which aren’t able to collect any property taxes on those vast stretches of federal forest land. We hope he’ll explain, in detail, how he would increase timber harvest and keep judges like Burrell from idling chainsaws and logging trucks.

We’d also like Merkley to put on a pair of boots and visit some of the forests in Eastern Oregon and Wallowa County, including old growth forests, and take a look at the fire dangers and need for thinning. He should visit western and central Oregon forests, too, and see how deer and elk habitat could also be improved through more timber harvest and all those shut-down mills could provide thousands of jobs if we made better use of a renewable resource that can be better managed while still protecting rivers, wildlife and wilderness areas.