White House Halts ‘Rush’ Sale of Logging Rights

Under mounting pressure from environmentalists, the Clinton administration retreated at the last minute Friday from a campaign to sell logging rights to as many trees as possible before the sales program expires at the end of the year.

The retreat will save only a small percentage of the trees being cut under the program, however, and environmentalists said the action came far too late.

Of roughly 4.5 billion board feet that the administration said would be cut under the program, the shift will save no more than about 50 million board feet, an administration official said. A board foot is 1 inch thick and 12 inches square.

Nonetheless, the administration, sensitive to criticism of what was coming to be known as a “Christmas rush” on the nation’s forests, halted the final sales of timber in some of the most environmentally sensitive forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The program had gotten so frenetic that the U.S. Forest Service had advertised auctions of logging rights on Christmas and New Year’s eves, as well as on most of the other more conventional business days of the month. Those sales will be allowed to go forward, but any not already announced will be canceled.

The legislation under which the trees were made available to loggers was among the most controversial environmental laws passed by the Congress and signed by President Clinton in the last two years. It allowed logging companies to cut trees in some of the nation’s oldest forests without submitting their plans to review on environmental grounds or without facing court challenges.

The administration’s decision Friday is likely to have the greatest impact in Oregon and Washington state, where some of the most inaccessible--and environmentally sensitive--stands of trees were likely to be sold. Most of the California forests open to logging under the program have already been offered to timber companies.

The program was put into effect in July 1995. It was sought by senators and House members, mostly from the Northwest, and by the timber industry.

They presented it as allowing speedy access to diseased and fire-damaged trees that might rot if time-consuming environmental reviews were conducted before they were sold.

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But opponents have complained, often in noisy protests that have led to arrests in forests throughout the Northwest, that the legislation also permitted loggers to cut healthy trees in thriving forests--building roads into inaccessible lands and clearing hillsides without concern for the landslides and floods that could follow.

As the number of sales being advertised for bid appeared to grow in recent weeks, environmental activists renewed their opposition and set plans to try to swamp the White House and its Council on Environmental Quality with telephoned protests Monday.

In halting the program, even in its final days, “one of our big concerns was there was a public perception of a Christmas rush,” said James Lyons, undersecretary of Agriculture for natural resources. The Forest Service is an agency of the Agriculture Department.

Now, Lyons said in an interview, “there’s no need for that perception.”

But the decision left some of the most adamant environmental critics suggesting that it amounted to little more than “window dressing” because the administration waited until it would have little impact.

While praising the administration for halting the program, Nathaniel Lawrence, a senior attorney specializing in forest issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, said: “It’s unfortunate that this effort comes so late in the game that relatively few sales will be affected by it.”

A timber industry spokesman reacted angrily.

“The administration has appeased a handful of extremists at the expense of responsible management of public forests,” said W. Henson Moore, president and chief executive officer of the American Forest & Paper Assn.