Chopping by the Rules

California’s present Forest Practices Act was crafted as a reasonable alternative to the costly and cumbersome process of developing a formal environmental impact report for each logging project. This compromise evolved from negotiations with the industry after a Humboldt County judge shocked the timber officials a dozen years ago by reaching the reasonable conclusion that logging had an effect on the environment and thus was subject to the California Environmental Quality Act.

The resulting compromise law declared that a logger’s timber harvest plan filed with the state Board of Forestry would serve as the functional equivalent of an environmental impact report. It would include input from state fish and game officials and other agencies about whether, for instance, a particular project would lead to the sort of erosion that could damage streams and fish spawning, or threaten wildlife habitat. The environmental requirements were streamlined into an efficient one-stop permit procedure. The loggers went back to their business and the controversy disappeared.

Now, however, the timber industry is finding even those provisions to be an unacceptable barrier to doing business the way they would like to do business. So the Timber Assn. of California has proposed to the state board a series of new regulations that effectively would gut state rules that guard against environmental damage from logging. One such regulation would officially declare logging to be “paramount” among all competing uses in timber-production zones. Another would make it more difficult for other state agencies, such as the Fish and Game Department, to request additional environmental information from the timber companies.

The request clearly is an effort to bypass recent court rulings that say the law requires the state Department of Forestry and lumber companies to provide more environmental data on proposed harvest plans. The judge said the state had been virtually rubber-stamping aggressive clear-cutting plans from Pacific Lumber Co., which has accelerated the cutting of old-growth redwoods in part to finance the junk-bond buyout of the firm. The last time Pacific cut redwoods so energetically, notes an article in Fortune magazine, was in 1906 to rebuild San Francisco after the earthquake. At such a pace, Pacific’s old-growth redwoods will be gone in three years, one former Pacific official said. Others say it will take 10 years.

Three years or 10, it is not the role of the state of California to put the environment at risk in order to expedite logging. If anything, state rules should be strengthened, not weakened. The timber association proposals should be promptly rejected.