Pacific Lumber to End Moratorium on Old Redwoods : Logging: Environmentalists immediately moved to block cutting in 3,000-acre grove in Headwaters Forest.

Pacific Lumber Co. has told state forestry regulators that it intends to halt a five-year self-imposed moratorium on logging in Northern California’s Headwaters Forest, the world’s largest remaining privately owned old-growth redwood grove.

Environmentalists immediately moved to block the company’s bid to return to the 3,000-acre grove in southern Humboldt County, which has been the focus of a long, bitter environmental battle.

John Campbell, Pacific Lumber president and chief executive, said it acted because “no serious proposal has emerged” for preserving the area. He said the company “cooperated with a variety of organizations, government agencies, and individuals who advocated public purchase.” Campbell said logging could begin “in the near future.”

The company on Thursday notified the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which regulates privately owned forest lands in the state, that it wants to proceed on two fronts to log the area.

It proposed a conventional timber-harvesting operation that would include extending a road into the uncut region, an approach which requires lengthy public review.

In the meantime, Pacific Lumber served notice that it intends to proceed quickly under an exemption to the California Forest Practices Act that allows a company to remove up to 10% of the timber volume in dead, diseased or dying trees.

That is the approach that has alarmed environmentalists because it requires no review during which environmentalists could raise objections. Critics say loggers could act virtually overnight.

“They could be cutting as we speak, or over the weekend,” said Kathy Bailey, Sierra Club California’s chair for state forestry. “These guys have a history of doing this.”

Environmentalists want to preserve the area not only for its untouched 2,000-year-old trees but because it is a nesting ground for the marbled murrelet, a threatened sea bird the size of a robin.

The privately owned land is subject to federal and state endangered-species laws, and environmentalists have lately sought to use those statutes to preserve the old-growth forests. They have also contested Pacific Lumber’s timber-cutting plans in the Headwaters and other areas.

Though the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill last year authorizing federal purchase of the Headwaters Forest, the Senate did not act on the matter.

Environmentalists have criticized Pacific Lumber ever since the company doubled its logging rate on its almost 200,000 acres of timberland after the company was acquired in 1985 by controversial Houston-based financier Charles Hurwitz.

Pacific Lumber spokeswoman Mary A. Bullwinkel said the company had promised state regulators that “before any operations are conducted that can even arguably alter habitat important to protected species, appropriate federal and state fish and game agencies will be consulted.”

The company’s plan prompted the Sierra Club and state Sen. Tom Hayden, chairman of the Senate Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee, to ask state and federal regulators for a stop-work order to prevent any logging under the exemption.