The Logger’s Ax: No Wild Swings : Clinton should hold firm against amendment that threatens forests

In the early days of his presidency, Bill Clinton productively approached the volatile issue of forest management by breaking with the tired “jobs versus owls” rhetoric of past years. Through his 1993 Forest Summit he showed he understood both the need to preserve dwindling federal forests and the painful dislocations that new limits on logging would cause. He led by talking with all sides and instituting programs to retrain displaced workers. But now, locked in battle with congressional Republicans, Clinton seems to be in danger of abandoning that principled approach.

Last month he rightly vetoed a congressional recisions bill that was loaded with special-interest riders. One of them, the deceptive “Emergency Two-Year Salvage Timber Sale Program,” in essence would have ordered the U.S. Forest Service to sell as much as 3.2 billion board feet of “salvage” timber from national forests. It would have allowed logging of trees killed by windstorms, fire, insects or disease and permitted selective thinning of forests to control forest fires. The legislation, pushed hard by timber companies, also would have forced the Forest Service to sell twice as many trees as it felt appropriate. Further, these sales would have been exempt from environmental review and public comment. Worst of all, the language was so vague that virtually any tree, living or dead, standing or fallen, could have been defined as “salvage,” even the dwindling stands of old-growth redwoods in California’s national forests. For these reasons Clinton should stick to his guns as congressional Republicans seek to include this nasty amendment in a compromise recisions package. The President reportedly is considering accepting it.

Even the staid Sunset Magazine highlights a special report entitled “The Crisis in Our Forests” in its current issue. Sunset doubts that stepped-up salvage operations would markedly improve forest health or prevent the spread of wildfires.

The salvage amendment has nothing to do with cutting wasteful government spending but everything to do with wasteful cutting. The President must hold firm--the amendment must go.