U.S. Proposes New Type of Logging

Trumpeting a promising but largely unproven idea, the Forest Service Thursday proposed a logging plan for a remote area of southwestern Oregon that is based on sustaining the forest’s complex ecosystem.

The 23,000-acre Shasta Costa Creek region of the Siskiyou National Forest, much of it old growth, would become a prototype for the Forest Service’s program to promote harvesting by such unorthodox methods as leaving behind a “messy” terrain of live and dead trees and leftover natural debris. Such a landscape could generate forest life ranging from fungi to vertebrates.

“We’re working as nature’s ally here--studying an entire ecosystem to mimic natural events and patterns in our resource management,” said forest supervisor Mike Lunn in a statement. But environmentalists who were included in an unusual collaboration with the agency and with industry representatives earlier in the planning process said that they would need time to study the final environmental impact statement.

Jim Britell of the Audubon Society in Oregon said the new process, with attractive elements like consensus building and the so-called “kinder, gentler forestry,” could be misused “to lull the public into accepting busting into” pristine areas to build roads, cut timber and begin recreational projects.

Because parts of the Shasta Costa Creek area are home to the northern spotted owl, the Forest Service cannot implement a final management plan until it offers a satisfactory owl protection proposal to a federal judge in Seattle, who last May banned all timber sales in critical owl habitats. The protection plan is due by March, 1992. A further complication is that scientists are divided over the effects on the owl of the proposed new methods.