Sierra Club Votes to Oppose Logging on Federal Lands

Reflecting the environmental community’s increasing polarization over management of national forests, the Sierra Club membership has gone on record opposing all commercial logging on federal lands.

The new policy, adopted 2 to 1 in a ballot referendum of the group’s more than half a million members, marks an important turning point for the nation’s oldest conservation organization--a group that historically has been a moderate advocate for environmental protection.

Racked by the same tumultuous debates that have driven the nation’s political stalemate over logging on public lands--jobs versus timber, hard-line advocacy versus real protection for the most crucial of resources--more than 66% of the members who voted elected to adopt a tough position in opposition to all private logging on federally managed lands, including national forests.

The position puts the Sierra Club in league with some of the nation’s most strident environmental groups and sets the stage for tougher bargaining in Washington over the future of federal forest lands. It reflects the growing anguish among environmental activists over political and legal setbacks that have loosed chain saws on thousands of acres of federal forest that previously were protected.

Advocates of the new policy, which will shape the organization’s lobbying position on federal timber policy but leave intact the possibility of bargaining on the local level, said it reflects widespread public dissatisfaction with management of the national forests and a growing concern that the environmental movement has become too oriented toward compromise.

“I think it signals a new era of environmental activism. It’s especially significant coming from a large, national environmental group like the Sierra Club,” said Chad Hanson, a Eugene, Ore., activist who drafted the new policy.

“This is not a popularity contest. We’re not in this to try to please the timber industry or the forest service. Our job is to speak for the ecosystems and fight for their defense as passionately and forcefully as we are able,” Hanson said. “I think that we have been doing less than that in a number of circumstances. I want to try to return to that as an organization.”

The U.S. Forest Service is releasing about 4.5 million board feet a year of timber harvests in national forests. In addition, substantial new tracts were opened up as a result of a salvage logging provision passed by Congress last year that releases an additional 4.5 million board feet of dead and dying timber over a two-year period and thousands of acres of healthy timber sales previously held up by environmental challenges.

Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas, in an interview Monday, said the service is obligated by law to manage federal lands in response to an array of interests. “The Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act makes it clear that production of timber is one of the authorized multiple uses,” Thomas said.

“Besides that, there is a need, I think, if you’re an ecologist, to look at what forest health means. It is a tool that we would use in manipulation of vegetation for a number of other reasons besides production of timber: forest health, wildlife habitat, fire prevention. Also, there are a considerable number of people in the U.S., particularly in isolated, rural communities, that are somewhat dependent on the timber produced by the Forest Service for their livelihood.”

The new Sierra Club policy had been soundly defeated in a ballot referendum two years ago. Opponents said it promotes a position that has little or no chance of becoming law and weakens the group’s ability to fashion constructive compromises to protect crucial forest assets.

In large part, they said, the issue pitted large, urban Sierra Club chapters and those in the East against rural, western organizations most often confronted with the realities of timber-dependent communities near national forests.

“Those of us who didn’t think it was a good idea are the ones who are kind of face to face with loggers and are trying to figure out a middle road where we can achieve our goals of protecting roadless areas and old-growth forest while at the same time permitting some continuing level of commercial logging so that these folks still have a good livelihood,” said Mark Pearson, southwestern Colorado activist and chairman of the Sierra Club’s Rocky Mountain Ecoregion Task Force.

“We have got to get real, we have got to understand that our forests are almost gone. All we’ve got left are these little islands of national parks,” said Martin Litton, one of the primary original backers of Redwood National Park and an unsuccessful board candidate this year representing the hard-line faction within the Sierra Club.