Loggers Stripping Forests, Group Says

California’s largest timber companies are “strip mining” the state’s forests while regulators stand by and watch, the environmental group Clean Water Action said Tuesday.

Citing figures from the state Department of Forestry and reports from the East Bay Municipal Utility District and other utilities, the environmentalists said stepped-up logging is fouling water supplies and threatening to force water agencies to install costly filtering systems to correct the problem.

Increased production also is hastening a fundamental change in the industry itself--from using large, old trees to produce high-quality solid-wood lumber to using small, young trees to make particle board and other processed-wood products, according to the environmental group’s report.

The report, released three weeks before voters will decide the fate of three timber-related ballot measures, was discounted as political hyperbole by industry spokesmen.

“It (the shift to particle-board production) is a natural progression from an old-growth-based economy to a young-growth-based economy,” said Shepard S. Tucker, a spokesman for Louisiana-Pacific Corp. in Samoa.

But Patricia Schifferle, author of the Clean Water Action study, said that young-growth forests and the highly automated methods used to harvest them are inconsistent with laws stating that California’s forests be used only to yield high-quality forest products.

“According to the California Department of Forestry, at the current rate of harvest, in 10 years, the industry will virtually run out of all mature trees,” Schifferle said in her report.

State regulators appointed to oversee logging often are loggers themselves, working as consultants or subcontractors for the companies they are asked to regulate, Schifferle said.