Owl Protection Measures Could Backfire : Environment: Policies to protect habitat in Sierra Nevada might help fuel devastating blazes, loggers and forestry officials say. Some environmentalists contend the claims are a ploy to gain harvesting rights to old-growth trees.

With a dry spring heralding the onset of another drought in the Sierra Nevada, forestry officials fear that a policy intended to protect the old-growth habitat of the California spotted owl may have the opposite effect, heightening the risk of catastrophic fire.

As the biggest, most marketable trees in the national forests are put off limits to logging, sawmills are disappearing and with them the financial incentive to clear out the deadwood and dense stands of small trees that are turning the Sierra into a giant tinderbox.

“We’re sitting on dynamite,” said Richard Standiford, a forest management professor at UC Berkeley who was retained by the U.S. Forest Service to analyze the impact of the owl policy.

“It’s ironic, what’s happened. We’ve cut down on the timber harvest because we didn’t want the forests devastated. Now we’ve got no one to clean out the fuel load, and we’re facing the possibility of another kind of devastation.”

Jerod Verner, a wildlife biologist and the Forest Service’s ranking expert on the California spotted owl, echoed Standiford’s alarm. “It is a matter of deep concern to us,” he said. “If something isn’t done about the incredible buildup of the fuel load, we’re going to face major losses.”

With nearly 10% of the state’s population living in the 15-county region of the Sierra, Verner said, “We’re not just talking about protecting the forest. There are a lot of people living up here now.”

The fire danger is highest on the dry east side of the northern Sierra from Truckee to Susanville.

Seven years of drought, 75 years of fire suppression, and a killer insect infestation have clogged the forests with dying trees and deadfall, creating a fuel load as lethal as many veteran forest service officials have seen in their careers.

Logging practices also are to blame. Dating back to the Gold Rush, the timber industry’s historic preference for cutting the big trees and leaving the small ones contributed to today’s dense, brushy conditions.

In more recent times, the industry had helped reduce the forest “fuel load” through commercial salvaging of dead and dying timber. But now timber companies say they can’t get by on salvage operations, not without more access to the large, live trees favored by the California spotted owl and protected by the year-old owl policy.

Forestry officials acknowledge the policy contributes to the fire threat by limiting the amount of dead trees and woody debris that can be removed from the forests. Owls roost on the snags and their prey nest in the downed wood.

“This stuff can promote the spread of fire and presents a large hazard to firefighters,” said Sue Hasari, a Forest Service fire management expert. “So there is something of a trade-off here between owl safety and human safety.”

The California spotted owl is not a threatened species, unlike its cousin, the Northern spotted owl, which created so much controversy in the coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest. But studies show the California owl’s birthrate is not increasing.

In California, the Forest Service had hoped to safeguard the owl’s habitat while granting the timber industry enough access to the forests to keep the mills operating and the fuel load under control.

The policy prohibits cutting trees 30 inches in diameter or larger and calls for retaining 40% of forest canopy in owl nesting areas and establishing 300-acre perimeters around known nesting sites.

“Our vision was that the timber industry would be treating more acres, but more lightly (sparing the big trees) and doing a lot of thinning that would get at the fuels problem,” said Verner, the principal architect of the policy.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. Environmental groups have fought successfully to put more land off-limits to logging than was contemplated under the policy. Many timber companies say they can’t afford to retool old mills to accommodate the smaller trees.

Understaffed and underbudgeted, the Forest Service has not been able to work quickly enough on pending forest sales to keep modernized mills in fresh timber.

“This is a very wrenching transition period,” said Matt Mathis, a public affairs officer with the Forest Service regional office responsible for the Sierra. “Everything is not working out the way we would have planned it.”

The biggest challenge facing the agency, say officials, is coming up with money enough to make the forests safer from fire.

For years, environmentalists have complained that the public was subsidizing the cost of timber sales in national forests. Fees paid by the industry often were not enough to pay for roads and other expenses. But fees did help pay for the cost of clearing flammable debris from the forests.

Now, with the timber industry in retreat, Verner said, the public may have to foot an even larger bill. The Forest Service estimates the task of clearing out flammable growth from the Sierra could cost at least $100 million. The work would have to be repeated every decade or so.

“Our budget probably couldn’t deal with the problem in one national forest,” Verner said. (There are 10 national forests in the Sierra.) “The public is going to have to think about making a pretty big investment up here.”

From the start, the owl policy has been a hard sell. While the timber industry argues it is tantamount to a logging ban, many environmentalists feel it is not enough. Some of them also dismiss the dire prediction of fire as timber industry propaganda.

“The threat is being hyped by the timber industry to try to get access to more old trees,” said Sammi Yassa, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Yassa represented environmentalists on a technical assessment team that advised the Forest Service on its owl policy.

Yassa said the fire threat is greatest on 3 million to 4 million acres of younger, smaller timber--spots where the timber industry is less interested in logging because trees are smaller and less valuable.

Shortly after the policy was adopted, the NRDC and other groups tied up millions of acres of previous timber sales, arguing they should be disallowed, retroactively, under the new policy. The Forest Service suspended the contested sales and now is reviewing them.

The NRDC also petitioned the Forest Service to place more acreage off limits to logging, in order to protect the habitats of the Sierra red fox, the marten and the Pacific fisher--a member of the weasel family--all of whose numbers may be decreasing.

The timber industry, meanwhile, has filed suit over the plan, contending it has accelerated the trend in mill closures, job losses and declining revenue in timber dependent communities.

Because of the owl policy, timber company spokesmen say they can’t get the financing to convert their mills because they can’t guarantee lenders of a sufficient supply of smaller, less valuable logs to make their operations profitable.

“As the trees get smaller, the economics get more marginal, and you had to have access to more trees,” said Tom Nelson, a forester with Sierra Pacific Industries.

But, so far, logging companies have not gotten the access they needed, Nelson said. “The area you can log just got smaller,” he said.

Standiford, who analyzed the economic impact of the owl policy and previous environmental restrictions, came to a similar conclusion. Timber harvests have dropped by two-thirds since the mid-1980s, he said, from 1.5 billion board feet a year to less than 500 million.

About 75% of national forest land in the Sierra is now off-limits to most commercial logging, he said, adding that “local mills will survive only if they can get their supply from other places.” He was referring mainly to privately owned forest land in and outside the Sierra.

In the year since the policy was announced, 10 sawmills in the Sierra have closed or given notice. The most recent, a 100-year-old mill in Camino, a tiny community 50 miles east of Sacramento, is shutting down after spending $30 million to convert to a small log operation, said Henry Alden, the mill’s chief forester.

“The supply is gone,” Alden said. “The Forest Service was offering us a chance to bid on 2 1/2 million board feet, enough to keep us running for five days.”

The closures are having an impact on local communities.

The Forest Service’s studies project a loss of $176 million in yearly personal income in Sierra Nevada counties as a consequence of the owl policy and predict that timber industry employment in the Sierras will be cut by one-half to one-third.

But Standiford, who directed the studies, says only a handful of Sierra counties are truly timber dependent. “Most counties in the Sierra are pretty well diversified,” he said, adding that jobs in the timber industry account for less than 5% of overall employment.

The exceptions include Lassen, Plumas and Sierra counties, areas dependent on timber revenues for much of their school and road maintenance budgets. In the last year alone, they saw those revenues decline by 50% to 60%.

“Those counties are going to hurt the way the Northwest did,” Standiford said, referring to communities in Oregon and Washington affected by a federal court order that prohibited logging in old-growth forests.

As if things weren’t bad enough, many of California’s hardest-hit communities lie on the dryer side of the Sierra. They are among the places facing the greatest risk of fire.

In towns like Quincy, surrounded by the Plumas National Forest, where lightning has one of the highest ignition rates in the Sierra, resident environmentalists are less likely to minimize the threat of catastrophic fire.

“Around here, people aren’t just talking about forest fires,” said Michael Jackson, a lawyer who has spent much of his career representing the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. “They are talking about the fire, the one that burns clear from one end of the Sierra to the other.”