Saving Forests by Cutting Trees Is Aim of New Policy : Logging: Reducing fire hazard in drought areas is key goal, backers say. Healthy timber will be taken too.

High in the El Dorado National Forest, overlooking Lake Tahoe, lumberman Cecil Wetzel eyed an 80-foot-high ponderosa pine that the federal government won’t let him cut down.

“I’ll be honest with you. I lust after a tree like that,” Wetzel said, estimating its market value at about $7,000.

For three years, Wetzel’s company and the rest of California’s timber industry have been shut out of much of the Sierra Nevada as a result of environmental pressures. Wetzel said he had to lay off 45% of his work force, and across the Sierra, 10 sawmills have shut down.

But the balance of power in the nation’s forests is shifting. Congress has passed a law allowing the U. S. Forest Service to sidestep environmental regulations, barring review of logging decisions and sharply limiting the ability of opponents toblock tree-cutting in the courts.

Dubbed “logging without laws” by critics, its enactment last month marks the first major legislative victory of a Republican-led Congress intent on relaxing many of the landmark environmental laws passed during the last 25 years.

The timber law focuses on ailing national forests such as those in the Tahoe Basin that are full of dead trees--largely the result of drought, disease, insect plagues and past forestry practices. Sponsors of the law insist that emergency measures are necessary to reduce the danger of catastrophic fire posed by huge accumulations of dead and dying timber in forests across the West.

But the law would also allow many of the large, live trees that environmentalists want left alone to be cut from the same forests. Indeed, Congress wants to double the amount of marketable timber that loggers are allowed to salvage from those forests.

There is more at stake than the size of next year’s timber harvest. The new legislation, in effect, repudiates years of environmental thinking about forest health. Advocates of the law take the position that preserving trees isn’t always good for the woods.

According to this theory, there are times when even the removal of cherished old growth--the grandest trees in the forest--is necessary to eradicate blight, let in more sunlight and promote the regeneration of healthy forests. The approach can even mean taking out mature trees that now provide homes for threatened and endangered species, such as the Northern spotted owl.

President Clinton signed the law in July, but nonetheless ordered the Forest Service to abide by all environmental rules in deciding how much timber could be removed. The order has the effect of cutting California’s potential timber harvest under the new law by 30%, enraging the logging industry.

For years, the timber industry has complained bitterly that prohibitions against cutting the biggest, most valuable trees in the forest were costing thousands of jobs, closing hundreds of sawmills and wreaking havoc with the economies of rural, timber-dependent towns.

In recent years, several Sierra Nevada counties have seen timber revenues, which finance school and road maintenance budgets, fall by 50% or more.

Yet it was the weather, more than economics, that provided the impetus for a policy change.

After seven years of drought across much of the West, thirsty, nutrient-starved forests were unable to repel deadly insect infestations. Meanwhile, more and more people were moving to rural communities surrounded by national forests and lending a human dimension to the growing threat of wildfire.

The timber industry argued that legislation was needed to allow massive thinning of forests, to clear out flammable deadwood and to stop the spread of insects to still-healthy trees. But to make it all pencil out, the industry said it also needed unfettered access to more valuable live trees.

The only way to get the job done, the industry maintained, was to set aside burdensome regulations and to prohibit the kind of environmental challenges that had curtailed harvesting of timber in national forests.

“It was the only way we could figure out to move some volume out of the forests before the trees all rotted,” said Don Crandell, vice president of the American Pulp and Paper Assn.

No one denies that the abundance of rotten trees aggravates the fire danger. The Lake Tahoe Basin is a good example of what can happen when too many trees vie for too little sustenance.

“Everybody is alarmed about the situation,” said one local fire official. “You can hear people in the casinos talking about the dead trees.”

Bristling like matchsticks from the mountainsides, about 25% to 30% of the trees rising from the Tahoe Basin are dead or dying, giving the green slopes a sickly brown pallor.

Tahoe’s natural beauty and its popularity as a tourist destination have made it something of a poster child in the campaign to accelerate logging.

“You’ve got a huge wildfire disaster waiting to blow up,” said Neil Sampson, a scientist with American Forests, a Washington foundation that has called for increased logging of national forests.

“You not only stand to lose megabuck houses,” Sampson said, “but the watersheds and wildlife people have been trying to protect all these years by putting the trees off-limits to logging.”

What worries people most is the prospect of 150,000 visitors and residents pinned down by the kind of explosive fire that roared through Yellowstone National Park in 1988.

In Sacramento, the governor’s office regards the situation in Tahoe as serious enough to warrant the formation of a task force to expedite tree thinning on private property. But it’s the condition of the three national forests that occupy much of the 6,000-square-mile basin that has officials most alarmed.

In its South Lake Tahoe office, the Forest Service has a map illustrating the extent of the fire danger. It shows the lake tightly ringed by a series of teardrop-shaped red hot spots.

For the past several years, the Forest Service has been trying to get timber companies to log these hot spots but achieved only limited success.

“A lot of the time we get no bidders,” said John Swanson, a Forest Service fire and timber specialist. “There’s a frustration over wildlife protection, over water quality issues. It’s the perception by people in the business that they have to jump through too many hoops, and that in the end they can’t take enough big, live trees to make a profit.”

In the most responsible hands, logging is a messy business. Access to forests often requires new roads that intrude on wilderness and disturb soil, causing erosion, choking streams and degrading water quality. Even where forests are thinned as opposed to clear cut, serious damage can be done to standing trees by the machinery of modern forestry.

“We have this problem that everything has to be done perfectly or not done at all,” said logger Cecil Wetzel. “You turn anyone loose on 100 acres of forest with chain saws and tractors, I don’t care how conscientious that person is. There are going to be mistakes made.”

The demand for perfection has grown in many rural communities as new residents with no ties to the old timber economy have moved in. Tahoe has spawned its own mini-bureaucracy as groups have formed to monitor the clarity of the lake water or look after the welfare of goshawks, bald eagles, osprey, owls and other wildlife.

One of the area’s most worrisome hot spots, 1,200 acres of overgrown ridge top abutting a handsome subdivision in South Lake Tahoe, hasn’t been thinned, said Swanson, because of a host of requirements that would have made the job too costly. Clusters of trees surrounding goshawk nests had to be left alone. Downed timber had to be airlifted out by helicopter to avoid soil disturbance. An artificial woodland pond, leaking after years of neglect, had to be resealed as a condition of the contract to log the ridge.

“One company bid on the job. But when they realized all that was involved, they backed out,” Swanson said.

But a few miles away from the tree-choked ridge top, a different scene unfolds along a recently logged stretch of lake shore. Local environmentalists say it is evidence that loggers are more interested in taking out big trees than they are in cleaning out the dense brush and debris that turn the forests into tinderboxes.

“Look at that mess,” said local activist Linda Blum, pointing to the piles of brush left behind by the logging crew. “The first thing that happens is all of the beetles crawl out of the slash piles and spread into the live trees.”

According to the Forest Service, another crew will come in sometime in the fall and clear out the brush. But the fire season has already begun in Tahoe. Recently, one small blaze burned for a day on an acre of lake shore just a few miles north of the slash piles that Blum was concerned about.

“The fact of the matter is the timber industry has been doing salvage logging for years, and it hasn’t stoped fires from burning through,” Blum said.

Environmentalists argue that the forests wouldn’t be in such bad shape today if timber companies hadn’t taken so many big trees in the past. In the absence of large, hardy pine trees, they maintain, a dense growth of weaker and shorter fir trees sprouted to compete for nutrients that have become increasingly scarce.

In their view, salvage logging, by continuing to allow the taking of large, healthy trees, will only aggravate the problem.

Yet, Tahoe fire officials insist that salvage logging can reduce the fire danger without denuding forests. They point to Incline Village, a small, well-to-do community on Tahoe’s northeast shore.

A helicopter logging operation there removed most of the dead trees from steep slopes without destabilizing the soil or cutting down many big, live trees. But it cost the community about $1 million to subsidize the job, and for that reason it is not considered a practical option for most of the basin.

“For a timber company to bid on a job, they are going to have to take some live trees,” said Incline’s fire marshal, Gerry Adams. “And there is always the danger that they will take out more trees than they should to make a profit.”

But if the problem isn’t dealt with soon, Adams said, there won’t be enough live timber left to attract any bidders to the basin.

“There are places in the forests up here where there is 80% mortality,” Adams said. “That means no value at all.”