U.S., Activists at Loggerheads Over Timber Harvesting in Idaho

Government lawyers confirm that the Forest Service has cleared helicopter landing pads and marked 86,000 trees for logging in Idaho before completing the environmental reviews required for actual cutting.

But they reject conservationists’ contention that the activity in remote, steep mountains of the Boise National Forest prematurely commits the agency to logging the 44,000-acre tract, which would violate the National Environmental Policy Act.

Forest Service officials are completing the required wildlife surveys and environmental impact statements now, the attorneys say.

And they say that the federal lawsuit filed by the Idaho Sporting Congress is a good example of the “obstructionist” tactics used by environmentalists to delay harvests until the wood has rotted and lost its value for timber-starved local mills.

“They are extremely litigious. They have filed probably 10 of these lawsuits in the last year,” said Deborah Hill, assistant U.S. attorney in Boise, Idaho.

Furthermore, the government says the lawsuit was filed too soon--before the plaintiffs completed administrative appeals to the Forest Service.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, say they may already be too late to stop the logging.

They say the 3-inch-wide blue stripes of paint ringing the trees are the writing on the wall--that clearly a decision has been made to cut the trees without regard to the impact on elk, bull trout and other wildlife.

“You don’t go out and plaster all the trees in a roadless area with blue paint and deface a de facto wilderness unless you plan to cut the trees,” said Ron Mitchell, director of the Idaho Sporting Congress in Boise.

The case, expected to go to trial this spring, offers a glimpse into the complicated, politically charged world of U.S. forest policy.

More detail began unfolding in a congressional hearing room last month as the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests launched a series of workshops to determine support for changes in the process. At issue are timelines, environmental impact statements, administrative appeals, public comment periods, legal standing and deadlines for lawsuits.

Basically, there are two camps--those who want to speed up logging on national forests and those who want to slow it down.

The subcommittee chairman, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), advocates the former. He is pushing a proposal designed to streamline the process but concedes that any substantive changes probably will take years.

The most recent logging controversy dates to July 1995, when President Clinton signed into law what Vice President Al Gore later called the “biggest mistake” of the administration’s first term--the salvage-timber rider.

That legislation--pushed through Congress by Craig, Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) and others--exempted salvage logging from regulations protecting fish and wildlife.

The measure was promoted as a way to curb the threat of wildfire by allowing removal of diseased, dead and dying trees from national forests.

Critics say it created loopholes that allow no-rules logging of healthy trees as well.

The outcry in the environmental community was so great that Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman changed the rules last summer to slow salvage logging, especially in roadless areas like those at issue in Idaho.

The proposed Deadwood timber sale was out, then in, then out of the salvage-logging program due to changing definitions of what would qualify. It is now supposed to be subject to the same kind of environmental review required for any other non-salvage sale.

Environmentalists say the tract is an ecologically significant roadless area with groves of 200- to 300-year-old Ponderosa pines.

“This sale involves nothing but old-growth trees under the guise of cutting to stop insect infestations. They have targeted about every big tree in there,” Mitchell said.

The government puts it a different way, describing the land as “vast areas of dense, mature-overmature forests . . . vulnerable to catastrophic forest fires.”

At issue in the lawsuit is whether the Forest Service has violated NEPA (they call it NEE-puh) by marking the trees before completion of environmental analyses.

In court papers filed late last year, the Justice Department said the Forest Service had already spent more than $450,000 and 21,000 man-hours on the project, flying crews into the forest to scope out the area and mark trees that would be logged if the timber sale goes through.

“The fact that they are striped with paint does not necessarily mean they will be harvested,” the documents said.

Mitchell said environmental impact statements are supposed to lay out ecological effects for consideration before a decision is made.

“If they spend the resources before that time, NEPA doesn’t make any sense. It is just an exercise,” he said.

The Forest Service maintains that the trees must be marked so agency scientists and the public can envision the impact of logging if the sale is approved.

“It is not at all unusual to allow this kind of visual inspection,” Hill said. “They can’t do it from maps alone.”

Mitchell disputed that, saying the Forest Service typically limits itself to mapping when offering a view of a proposed sale to the public.

“Nobody is going to go out and individually inspect 80,000 trees,” Mitchell said. “We know what the hillsides are going to look like with the trees. We know what it is going to look like without the trees.”

That contention is supported by a former Forest Service worker in Hood River, Ore., who now helps run an environmental watchdog group for government workers.

“They are preordaining that sale by doing that marking,” said Jeff DeBonis of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

“We were never allowed to do that,” said DeBonis, who worked 13 years planning timber sales for the Forest Service in Idaho, Oregon, Montana and New Mexico. “For them to say this is normal procedure is absolute bull.”

Timber industry leaders and environmentalists are watching the Deadwood case closely.

“If the court rules that you have to have NEPA completed before you mark the sales . . . we’ll let all the stuff rot in the forest,” said Frank Gladics, vice president of the Independent Forest Products Assn. in Portland, Ore.

“The preservationists love the stall mode,” said Gary Garrison of the Northwest Timber Workers Resource Council in Kettle Falls, Wash. “They like nothing happening. That means they win.”

Todd True, an attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Seattle, said he hadn’t heard of other situations where helicopter landings had been cleared or trees marked to such a large extent before completion of environmental reviews.

“The basic rule is you do not commit the resources. If you are spending money on the project, that builds momentum behind the project,” True said.

The Forest Service has completed a draft environmental impact statement for the sale, but because it is a draft it does not represent a formal action and is unavailable for public review.

Mitchell said the agency should have produced a separate environmental impact statement before cutting trees to make room for helicopter landings.

But the government says that would in effect be a precedent-setting EIS within an EIS.

“That is a real obstructionist stance. That has been their consistent approach,” Hill said.