Forest Service Expected to Deal Blow to State Loggers : Environment: New restrictions to protect owl would be departure from protection of timber industry.

Logging in California’s vast network of national forests has plunged nearly 40% since the 1980s and is expected to drop further as federal officials respond to public pressure to be more environmentally sensitive.

Most of the decline has been traceable to court-ordered logging restrictions designed to protect the endangered northern spotted owl, whose habitat extends from Washington to the northernmost forests of California.

But the U.S. Forest Service is expected this month to voluntarily impose additional restrictions on logging throughout much of the Sierra Nevada range that could have greater impact in the state.

The action would be aimed at preventing a subspecies of the northern spotted owl from reaching endangered status. It would be widely viewed as a sharp departure from the Forest Service’s traditionally protective relationship toward the timber industry.

Ronald E. Stewart, who heads U.S. Forest Service operations in California, indicated but would not confirm that he plans to implement the recommendations of a scientific team that studied ways to save the paler California spotted owl, whose range extends from Southern California to Shasta County.

“We’re kind of entering into a new era,” Stewart said in an interview. “We ought not to wait for a species to get listed (as endangered) before we deal with it.”

Environmentalists and timber industry representatives said they have little doubt that Stewart will embrace the substance of the scientists’ report. His decision will remain in effect for at least two years while further studies are performed. It is subject to administrative appeal.

The issue is seen as a key test of the Forest Service’s recently pledged commitment to manage forests as ecosystems rather than tree farms. At stake is the future of timber production in many of the national forests that occupy one-fifth of California’s land and account for most of the lumber produced in the state.

“The changes will be path-breaking in terms of logging in the Sierra,” said David Adelson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Counsel’s forestry project. “You will not see any more of the clear-cutting if this proposal goes through.”

The changes also are expected to cost jobs. Richard Standiford, who teaches forest management at UC Berkeley and serves as chairman of a state-federal team assessing economic impacts, said that between 1,700 and 3,400 loggers and sawmill workers could lose their jobs, along with 4,000 to 8,000 others whose livelihoods depend on money spent by the timber workers.

Annual timber revenue from the Sierra could plunge from $134 million to between $35 million and $70 million, Standiford said. Because a quarter of that money is shared with California counties where logging takes place, county receipts could decline from $33 million a year to as little as $9 million. Hardest-hit counties would be Plumas, which gets 22% of its school budget from Forest Service payments, and Sierra, which gets 13% of its school budget.

The path toward decision on the California spotted owl began in 1991 when Forest Service officials in California, who were being threatened with environmental lawsuits, adopted a strategy to avoid a legal morass such as the one surrounding the northern spotted owl. They did not want courts to dictate the extent to which the California owl should be protected.

Stewart required forest officials to assess the probable effect on California spotted owls before a timber sale could be approved.

Scientists were sent to see if they could find owls on proposed logging sites and to make a count. “Our biologists had to learn how to hoot,” said Julie Allen, the Forest Service’s land management planner at Sequoia National Forest.

In the Sierra, they found 1,250 sites, most of them believed to house a pair of owls. But, without historical data, they were unable to determine whether the owl population was declining or not.

Nonetheless, they concluded that continued cutting of the large old trees favored by the bird would endanger it.

Scientists want to completely preserve nesting areas by banning logging within 300 acres surrounding nests.

In nearly two-thirds of the timberland in Sierra national forests, loggers would be prohibited from taking the most lucrative trees--old ones of more than 30 inches in diameter.

In some areas, featuring timber stands preferred by owls, loggers would also have to leave a canopy of trees covering at least 40% of the ground area.

In areas that owls seldom select for nests, loggers would have to leave the biggest trees and at least 30% of the “basal area”--a measure of the combined cross-section of all trees.

These areas still could be intensively logged, with as few as eight trees left on an acre.

Scientists said the restrictions would turn forest cultivation practices for the last 100 years upside down. Instead of taking the largest trees, loggers would be encouraged to take the smaller ones.

Estimates of the precise impact of the proposed restrictions vary. But Louis Blumberg, a forestry expert with the Wilderness Society, said that logging on national forest lands in California could be cut to at least half the levels of the 1980s.

The cutbacks so far have the timber industry reeling. A third of the state’s 100 sawmills have been shut or swallowed up by larger competitors. And the industry has turned to Australia, South American, Central America and even Siberia for new sources of logs.

“It’s been a drastic, drastic fall-off,” said William Dennison, president of the California Forestry Assn.

But because there is a substantial time lag between timber sales and the cutting, the full impact of the decline has not yet been felt at the state’s sawmills. “The real tough impacts will probably be felt this spring and summer,” said Jim Crane of the California Forestry Assn. “We have some (sawmill operators) telling us they can get through May or June.”

Timber industry interests see the California spotted owl decision as a shortsighted effort to protect one species. They say it would produce uncertain impacts on other species and relies on poor timber management techniques. For example, they say that growth of seedlings would be hampered because big trees protected under the plan would cast too much shade. “It’s tunnel vision for the owl,” Crane said.

But to environmentalists, Stewart’s decision is seen as an important regional test of the Forest Service’s 3-year-old philosophy called New Perspectives. This philosophy encourages the agency to show greater sensitivity toward the environment, and to loosen close ties to the timber industry dating from the post-World War II home building boom that triggered a huge demand for logs from public lands.

“What you have is a profound story of a major American institution in the throes of very radical change,” said consultant Bill Shands, who is studying the implementation of New Perspectives for the agency.

The main cause of the statewide decline in logging is turmoil over the future of the northern spotted owl in northern California forests. The court injunction to protect those owls accounts for more than half of the statewide falloff from timber harvest levels of the late 1980s.

Prospects for a rebound in these northern forests are slight. A judge has said he will lift the injunction once the Forest Service comes up with an acceptable plan for preservation of the owl. A congressionally appointed panel of academic experts has suggested that such a plan would involve a 50% decline in logging there.

Logging in the Sierra’s national forests has plunged in part because of Forest Service decisions, many made under pressure, to reduce the land area deemed capable of producing trees for harvest.

For several years, critics have contended that the Sierra forests, which account for nearly two-thirds of the state’s timber from public lands, were being overcut. A 1990 assessment by the California Policy Seminar, consisting of state and University of California officials, said “it is likely that within decades--not centuries--the habitat destruction we are causing will lead to a massive wave of extinctions.”

At Sequoia, the land deemed capable of producing trees for harvest was reduced from 400,000 acres to 237,000 acres as part of a 1990 mediated settlement of a lawsuit brought by environmental groups. The Forest Service agreed to remove some roadless and streamside areas from its timber base, along with steep and rocky areas with relatively few trees.

“We said: ‘OK, let’s stop pretending here and get real. Let’s do our (tree) farming on the farmland,’ ” said Sequoia’s silviculturist, Bob Rogers.

Once Stewart makes his decision, the Forest Service will have wide latitude in implementing it.

Officials declined to provide figures on the anticipated decline in timber cutting.

But Standiford said the Forest Service estimates that logging in the Sierra could be anywhere from 328 million board feet to 639 million board feet--down from 1.1 billion board feet in the late 1980s.

The wide range is attributable to variables such as how often--every 50 or every 150 years, for example--the Forest Service plans to cut new trees in an area.

Forest Service scientists say that in making their recommendations, they hope to thin out the forests’ thick stands of smaller trees, which have flourished because of the agency’s success in preventing fires.

Fire prevention has been too successful, they say. As a result, the small trees would provide too much fuel in a fire and serve as a hazard that could threaten the big trees where the owls live.

The Decline of Logging

The amount of timber cut and sold each year from national forests in California has declined dramatically in recent years.

The primary cause was the court-ordered protection of the endangered northern spotted owl. Declines are likely to continue if the U.S. Forest Service seeks to protect the California spotted owl, shown here.

Figures are in billions of board feet* 1987 Timber sold: 1.59 Timber cut**: 2.01 1988 Timber sold: 1.95 Timber cut: 2.17 1989 Timber sold: 1.49 Timber cut: 1.98 1990 Timber sold: 1.50 Timber cut: 1.72 1991 Timber sold: 0.88 Timber cut: 1.31 1992 Timber sold: 0.57 Timber cut: 1.15 * There are 12 board feet in one cubic foot.

** Cutting figures often exceed sales because they include timber sold in previous years.

Source: U.S. Forest Service