Timber Control Deal Wins Support : Oregon-Washington Bill Gains; California Talks Begin

A compromise measure to ease the Pacific Northwest timber crisis by mandating larger harvests in a way designed to reduce the loss of vital wildlife habitat was approved by a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday.

The compromise, hurriedly introduced by Sens. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) and Brock Adams (D-Wash.), grew out of an industry-environmental summit that tried to end a stalemate over federal forest management in Oregon and Washington.

Meanwhile, industry and environmental leaders in California have launched a similar, but secret, negotiating effort to resolve conflicts in California.

Disappointment Cited

Environmentalists said they were disappointed with the Hatfield-Adams compromise for Oregon and Washington, but said it offered a reasonable foundation that could be improved with amendments as it works its way through Congress.

Chief among their concerns is the weakened protection afforded to the main element of the controversy: virgin, or old-growth, forests.

The Hatfield-Adams compromise mandates the sale of 10 billion board feet of timber from U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land over the next 14 months. But it would allow logging of any old-growth trees “if . . . necessary.”

In the past, industry sought only to log old-growth stands smaller than 300 acres. Environmentalists wanted to restrict logging to groves of fewer than 80 acres. The compromise would allow harvesting on all old-growth, beginning with smaller stands first.

Old-growth is controversial because it is coveted both by environmentalists and loggers. Environmentalists say it is critical habitat for spotted owls and other rare and potentially endangered species; loggers say the timber is desperately needed to keep mills running until other logs are available for harvest in the next century.

California environmentalists, loggers and state officials met for the first time Monday in San Francisco, but unlike their colleagues in Oregon, they chose to conduct their negotiations in secret.

‘Much in Common’

A three-sentence statement said only that the participants--Trust for Public Lands, Wilderness Society, Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, Environmental Protection and Information Center, California Board of Forestry, Fibreboard Corp. and Blue Lake Forest Products--agreed they “had much in common” and that they had agreed to meet again at an unspecified date and location.

Absent from the meeting was Pacific Lumber Co., the largest private owner of old-growth redwood forests in the world and the focus of most of the legal action in California.