Salvage Logging Exemptions

Your editorial “The Logger’s Ax: No Wild Swings” (June 22) was on the mark in condemning the salvage logging exemptions approved by the 104th Congress.

What was missed in this hard-hitting editorial is the searing hypocrisy behind this GOP effort to establish logging without laws on the national forests. On the one hand, you have the new majority in Congress seeking greatly expanded salvage logging under the guise of improving “forest health” and reducing the risk of wildfire. The fact is that salvage logging has little to do with restoring a forest’s ecological integrity. We cannot pretend that we can log a forest back to health when years of abusive logging greatly contributed to the decline of forest health.

On the other hand, the Interior appropriations subcommittee, the same committee that dreamed up the salvage rider, has recently moved to zero out all funding for natural fuels treatment that would reduce the threat of wildfire and improve so-called forest health.

JAY THOMAS WATSON

Regional Director

The Wilderness Society

San Francisco

Your editorial was filled with misstatements. Among them:

“Preserve dwindling federal forests”: Our national forests are growing 60% more wood each year than is harvested.

“Sell as much as 3.2 billion board feet of ‘salvage’ timber”: More than 8 billion board feet of salvage timber was proposed to be sold through fiscal 1997.

“Dwindling stands of old-growth redwoods in California’s (national forests)”: There are more than 250,000 acres forever preserved of the largest, oldest groves, plus the Redwood National Park.

Your photo caption was “U.S. Forests: At Risk”: They are at risk, but not from salvage logging. In the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, 6.5 million acres are dead or dying from insects, disease, fire or overcrowding.

STUART H. JONES

Claremont