Clinton Backs Repeal of Logging Provision

Looking to ease the most contentious environmental issue facing him this campaign year, President Clinton on Saturday called for repeal of a controversial provision in federal logging law that has allowed timber companies to charge back into old forests that had been put off limits.

The president made his remarks as he flew here from Long Beach. They reflected an effort to put himself back in the good graces of an important constituency deeply angered by an earlier decision. It was one that led to wide-scale cutting of federally owned timber--much of it in majestic old forests--that has been damaged by fire, wind, disease and insects.

The issue has galvanized environmentalists like no other in recent years, turning national forests into sites of protests and arrests. And Clinton’s decision to seek a solution to the debate reflects the great importance attached to it.

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Loggers look on the trees as a salvation--however temporary--from their declining fortunes, and argue that the “salvaged” trees are a small percentage of the lumber they will take from national forests this year.

Thus, the logging debate has become the focal point of the ongoing clash over the nation’s environmental and economic well-being.

Clinton--during a conversation with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) aboard Air Force One--did not rule out all logging of the damaged trees, but said he advocated repeal of legislative language that allowed cutting in old-growth forests. This midway course reflects administration efforts to navigate toward a policy that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, said that “the president feels very strongly we have to act to protect fish and wildlife and old-growth habitat.”

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McCurry also said that the president called for legislation settling questions dealing with the sale, for cutting, of forests that had been put on hold five years ago for environmental reasons. He said Clinton raised the possibility of opening other, less sensitive land for logging or of buying out existing contracts, now in abeyance, on the trees.

And, McCurry said, Clinton called for an overall reexamination of the entire timber salvage program, to take into account the “legitimate concerns the industry has” over gaining access to valuable trees.

Most of the logging has taken place in the Pacific Northwest and in Northern California, sending vast new amounts of timber to market. But some is occurring in other pockets across the country.

The issue involves more than simply the loss of the trees--some of the oldest, grandest stands in the country. Many are in extremely isolated regions, and reaching them--and bringing out their trunks--requires construction of mud roads.

The clear-cut land that the loggers leave behind lacks sufficient growth to hold soil on often-steep slopes. Some already has turned into eroded acres of mud. Critics say that in some cases, this has destroyed the forest homes of marbled murrelets and spotted owls, both listed as threatened. It also has, they say, begun filling once-pristine streams with silt that chokes fish.

The issue flared up last summer after Clinton signed budget legislation that offered help for flood victims in California and for survivors of the bombing in Oklahoma City. Attached to it was language allowing loggers access to dead and dying trees and, in one paragraph, the old timber from which loggers had been blocked for environmental reasons after the U.S. Forest Service had released them for sale five years ago.