Forest Service’s Logging Policy

The destruction of our national forests through over-cutting is an important issue to us here in Southern California, even though it has often been perceived as a more northern concern. Many of us are watching with great interest what is going on at the Forest Service.

While we applaud the new sensitivity to such concerns as biodiversity, ancient forest and old growth and the preservation of these invaluable national treasures, deeds speak louder than words, and we are waiting to see what changes will actually take place in the Forest Service’s timber management policy.

The buzzwords new perspectives and new forestry sound appealing to us in the environmental community, but it remains to be seen what will really happen. We should see some evidence of these changes soon, as timber management plans for fiscal year 1991-’92 will be announced in the next month or so.

It is important to note that apparently we are finally seeing an appreciation of the health of the ecosystems in our national forests as a whole, and not just focusing in on individual species such as the spotted owl or the marbled murrelet.

Perhaps most people are unaware that the same sort of devastation that has ravaged the forests of the Pacific Northwest has been happening right here in south central California, less than 200 miles from Los Angeles. As much as 50% of the timber base in the Sequoia National Forest has been fragmented by the timber industry through clear-cutting, with the support and subsidy of the Forest Service. These are public lands, and are under a congressional mandate to be managed by the Forest Service according to the concept of multiple use, meaning that equal attention is to be paid to watershed, recreation, wildlife, range, mining and timber activities without impairing the land.

The impact of a decade of heavy logging is startling, and our local forests have clearly been cut down at a much faster rate than they can ever hope to recover from. (Forest Service plans for timber sales in fiscal 1990-91 called for a “harvest” of 122.8 million board feet, almost twice the actual cut from the previous year.) Logging practices are supposed to be managed on a sustained yield basis, but much of the Sequoia National Forest, which is supposedly held in trust for all Americans, has been sacrificed at an alarming rate to the local timber industry.

JOHN VIGRAN

California Ancient Forest Alliance

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