Sequoia Plan Trims Timber Cutting

The U.S. Forest Service has backed away from some controversial parts of its plan to manage the Giant Sequoia National Monument, but is still calling for extensive timber cutting in the southern Sierra preserve.

A final management plan released Friday by the Forest Service projects about a third less logging in the monument than initially proposed in a much-criticized draft issued a year ago. It also drops plans to create gaps -- essentially mini-clear cuts -- in the sequoia groves, which the Forest Service had said were necessary to encourage sequoia reproduction.

But under the final plan, enough trees could still be cut in the 300,000-acre monument to fill more than 2,000 logging trucks a year. It also allows the felling of century-old trees up to 30 inches in diameter, including sequoias. And although the Forest Service says controlled burns will be the preferred method of clearing out dense, flammable growth, it actually calls for less prescribed burning than the earlier proposal.

Environmentalists, who had bitterly criticized the draft blueprint, said they saw some improvements in the final decision, but still believed the Forest Service was ignoring monument protections granted under President Clinton.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society. “Some improvements have been made, but some serious problems still exist. It may well be another step in the wrong direction.”

The monument, which contains 34 groves of towering, ancient sequoias, has been caught between competing political visions. It was created by a Democratic president who oversaw a drastic reduction in logging on national forests. It is taking shape under a Republican president who is stepping up logging and energy production on public land.

“I’m hopeful the plan describes a very workable idea that all the communities of interest can find common ground to move forward on,” said Art Gaffrey, supervisor of the monument and the Sequoia National Forest, in which the monument lies. The Forest Service received 16,500 public comments on the draft plan, as well as input from a scientific advisory board.

Gaffrey said the plan was not motivated by a desire for commercial logging -- which is banned under the monument designation. “There isn’t any requirement to produce a product,” he said. “The objective is to provide a healthy, resilient forest to protect the groves and communities.”

The timber cutting will be carried out for ecological reasons, as permitted under the monument rules, he added. “Not a single stick comes off unless it meets” monument criteria of ecological restoration or public safety, Gaffrey said.

But environmentalists are not convinced. “This is a blatant disregard for the [monument] proclamation because it allows for the cutting down of old growth,” said Craig Thomas of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. He complained that reductions in tree cover would harm wildlife and noted that the plan still permitted the creation of forest openings up to two acres in size.

The gap creation was a particularly contentious point of the draft proposal. The Forest Service got conflicting scientific advice on whether the gaps were a good idea. Some experts said they would help spur sequoia reproduction, which has been in decline in the monument.

Others said two acres was an unnecessarily large opening and that clearing gaps would not provide the sequoias with what they really needed in order to reproduce: fire.

Gaffrey said the plan no longer called for the deliberate clearing of forest gaps because “the public wasn’t very supportive and the scientific advisory board wasn’t sure that was called for.” The plan allows for clearings, he said, in case they are an incidental result of other work.

One change praised by environmentalists was a new emphasis on thinning the many dense tree plantations within the monument boundaries.

Planted over the last half-century after logging or wildfires, they can easily burn because growth is thick and of the same size. The final decision calls for thinning 10,000 acres of plantations.

“If there is going to be thinning, it really needs to be in plantations, where reforestation by the Forest Service has left hazardous fire conditions,” said Bill Corcoran, regional representative for the Sierra Club.

The plantation work is a major reason why the projected volume of wood harvested under the plan has dropped to an estimated 7.5 million board-feet a year under the final decision, from 10.5 million board-feet under the draft proposal. Because plantation trees are younger and smaller, they contain less wood, reducing the cut volume.

The volume may be down, but it is still too much for Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project. “This is just a logging plan,” he said, vowing to sue the Forest Service. “We’ll see them in court.”