Rules Chop Activists’ Bid to Buy Forests

Mitch Friedman thought he’d finally beaten the Forest Service when he showed up at a U.S. timber auction with cash in hand to buy centuries-old trees.

An ardent environmentalist, Friedman has spent most of two decades on the front lines protesting logging in national forests. He’d helped organize lawsuits and administrative appeals to try to block clear cuts, citing violations of laws protecting fish and wildlife.

This time, he decided on a new tack: Buy the trees for $15,000 and set them aside in his own little public forest reserve.

He never dreamed Forest Service rules won’t allow it.

“A checkbook won’t get you in. You need a chain saw,” said Friedman, who heads the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance in Bellingham, Wash. “Right now, our public forests are being managed like an exclusive club.”

Regulations prohibit the sale of the publicly owned timber to anyone who does not intend to cut the trees. Friedman has petitioned the Agriculture Department to repeal the prohibition on private sales.

He also traversed Capitol Hill recently seeking support for changing the national forests’ logging rules.

“The big question here is whether the Forest Service wants to open up the process or keep the excuse that the regulations force them to log regardless of whether it loses money, harms the environment or other considerations,” he said.

The Forest Service cited the rule last year in rejecting Friedman’s top bid--$15,000--for the Thunder Mountain timber parcel in north-central Washington’s Okanogan National Forest.

The second-highest bidder, AA Logging of Twisp, Wash., won the right to log the tract on condition it match Friedman’s bid. The site south of the Pasayten Wilderness Area was logged last summer, producing about 3.5 million board feet of spruce, sub-alpine fir and lodgepole pine.

The harvest was limited to trees killed in a 1994 fire or those likely to die from insects that attack fire-damaged trees. The alliance contended that cutting down the trees would jeopardize wildlife habitat and stream conditions.

Joining Friedman in his fight are the Southwest Center for Biodiversity, which tried to buy national-forest trees in Arizona last year, and the Oregon Natural Resources Council. Their petition says the government should accept the bid that is “most advantageous to the nation.”

“We can’t see any reason why the Forest Service shouldn’t go for this,” said Mark Hubbard of the Oregon Natural Resources Council based in Eugene, Ore. “If a person or public interest group would give them easy money and not take the trees, [it] seems like a no-brainer.”

Jim Lyons, the Agriculture Department undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, said the proposed rule change is “an interesting idea.”

“It is an idea worth considering, especially if the resource and the taxpayer are better off in the long run,” Lyons said.

But Chris West, vice president of the Northwest Forestry Assn. in Portland, Ore., said his group opposes changing the rules.

“Bidding on a government contract is the same whether it is harvesting a timber sale or building a plane or painting a building,” West said. “If you don’t intend to do the work, the contract should not be awarded to you.”