COLUMN RIGHT/ ALAN CHARLES RAUL : Stop Hiding Behind Courts on Logging : What’s needed is executive and legislative policy-making.

On Friday, the President will hold his promised Timber Summit. Loggers, mill workers and the so-called timber-dependent communities will face off against their main competition for living space in the Pacific Northwest--the northern spotted owls, the marbled murrelets and the Snake River Sockeye. If only the wildlife were willing to compromise.

Timber sales off the national forests in Washington and Oregon dropped last year to about 385 million board feet, after averaging over 4 billion board feet a year for the previous decade. The sharp decline has caused the price of lumber used for home building to skyrocket to $474 per thousand board feet, up more than 80% in the last six months. Since it takes about 15,000 board feet to build the average 2,000-square-foot house, the cost of a new home may be forced up by as much as $4,000. Still, the most important human statistic is the more than 30,000 jobs lost to the region’s timber industry.

In this “jobs versus environment” fight, the protected species and sub-species have been winning hands down.

They have the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws in their corner. Court case after court case proves that the use of federal land to preserve habitat for fish and wildlife trumps any other purpose for the land.

Are these consequences really intended by Congress and the President? Do the political officials in Washington (D.C.) truly mean for unelected judges to decide these delicate questions, especially where there is so much merit to both sides?

But judges are not paid to compromise. They issue blanket injunctions because they operate in a binary system of total winners and total losers. Under today’s environmental conservation laws, fish and wildlife will consistently win big in court, even where reasonable compromises are conceivable. That is a balancing job for policy-makers. The Timber Summit is the chance to take this debate out of the courts.

President Clinton should listen to biologists in Portland and economists and loggers and conservationists. Then, he needs to lead the way to a balance between the environment and the economy.

“Balance” was the environmental watchword of the last Administration, but without some, the outlook for the Pacific Northwest is more litigation and less employment. The President has to get Congress to stop hiding behind lawsuits and injunctions. Judges and biologists should not be deciding how much timber to harvest and how many jobs to save in the Pacific Northwest. Congress should be.

While the 4 billion board-foot level has properly been relegated to the history books, the status quo of 385 million board feet is absurdly unbalanced. It is an outcome only a court could produce.

It need not be this way. In last year’s landmark decision involving the Forest Service, the Supreme Court put the lawmakers on notice that it is Congress’ choice, not a legal imperative, to put federal judges in charge of timber/wildlife policy. The justices easily rejected an environmental challenge to the 1990 appropriations bill that ordered the Forest Service to harvest a specified amount of timber and adopt a particular conservation strategy.

Normally, this would not be a grand constitutional issue, but here, Congress’ decision directly contradicted a judge’s injunction in a pending owl lawsuit. The Supreme Court concluded that Congress always retains the power to step in, make policy and change the law, even if a federal judge has already expressed a different view. The trick will be to get Congress to use its power.

To break the logjam, the President must recognize that the timber/wildlife issue is like health care--what it needs is a little presidential policy-making and a new law on Capitol Hill. Congress can take back the policy-making role any time it wants. But if Congress does not, the federal judges will continue to apply existing law to ban any balance between competing economic and environmental goals.

Here is how the President can strike a deal with the owls:

* Mandate logging at half the historical level, around 2 billion board feet a year.

* Require federal agencies--and create incentives for private owners--to manage land as multidimensional ecosystems.

* Establish serious monitoring procedures to develop detailed data on the region’s biodiversity.

* Insist on an overall conservation strategy that helps protect all vulnerable birds and fish, not just the species or sub-species on the brink of extinction.

A law with all of this may not be ideal bioscience or ideal economics, but it will be decent policy. All we need is a few wise owls to make it happen.