House OKs Increase in Logging to Cut Fire Risk

Despite opposition by virtually every major environmental group in California, the House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a plan to reduce the threat of wildfires in the Sierra Nevada by increasing logging across three national forests.

The plan, which could help break a long and bitter stalemate over the management of western U.S. forests, is the brainchild of a coalition of small-town citizens--including a couple of environmental activists, a retired airline pilot, a tire store owner, a homemaker, several loggers and two county officials--that met regularly over the past five years in a back room of the local library in Quincy, Calif.

Members of the group set aside strong differences over forest policy out of a common desire to devise a strategy to cope with the growing danger of catastrophic fire in a heavily forested five-county region of northeast California.

That area encompasses Lassen, Plumas and Sierra counties, as well as parts of Tehama and Butte counties.

Under the Quincy plan--which now goes to the Senate--logging would target the most flammable areas of the forests, typically dense stands of small trees and underbrush in the Lassen and Plumas national forests and part of the Tahoe National Forest.

The plan also would allow some clear-cutting and create a network of quarter-mile-wide fire breaks. But it would spare the largest, oldest trees and leave untouched 147,000 acres of wilderness that is currently unprotected. And it would provide funding for restoring parts of the forests that have been damaged by reckless logging in the past.

“I am ecstatic. It’s truly heartening that Congress would take us seriously and they care as much about the forests as we do,” said Susan Baremore, a resident of nearby Shingletown and member of what has become known as the Quincy Library Group.

In Washington, meanwhile, the home-grown forest plan was being touted as a tribute to consensus-building rarely found in the fractious world of environmental politics.

“It’s a lesson for us all when a local community, environmentalists, timber interests and others can come together and solve a very contentious issue,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

Indeed, the issue of prescriptive logging--thinning forests to prevent fires--has been one of the most divisive environmental matters dealt with by Congress in the past several years.

Most national environmental organizations have argued that the logging industry has used the threat of fire as an excuse to plunder forests, cutting big trees and leaving behind the small, unmarketable timber that is most flammable.

They have expressed similar misgivings about the project approved by the House, saying it could double the amount of logging in the three forests.

“The Quincy plan is an experiment that should not be undertaken on such a broad scale,” said Jay Watson, regional director of the Wilderness Society in California. “No one knows if it will be effective in controlling the spread of wildfire or if it will just open the floodgates to a lot of other groups that want to dictate ill-advised policy on public lands.

“This was a very dangerous precedent.”

The broader concern of the national environmental groups is that such local compromises will lead to an erosion of federal environmental protection laws.

But others saw the compromise as a way to resolve the stalemate over forest policy that has tied the hands of the U.S. Forest Service, the agency responsible for regulating commercial logging and protecting plants and animals in the forests.

“What Congress is finally doing is giving the Forest Service a clear signal to concentrate on the fire danger,” said Linda Blum, an environmental consultant and member of the Quincy group.

Many in Congress believe that the Quincy legislation, if approved by the Senate, will influence forest policy across the West, where many national forests have been devastated by drought and disease and now pose a serious fire hazard.

“It is our hope that the Quincy consensus will be a model for broader solutions,” said Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento) one of the sponsors of the legislation.

“The Quincy Library plan may be just the breakthrough in forest policy that a lot of people have been hoping for,” said a spokesman for Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican and the leader of his party’s environmental wing.

There is no timetable yet for the legislation to move to the Senate. But Feinstein, who is sponsoring it there, said Wednesday that she does not anticipate strong opposition, given the near-unanimous vote in the House and White House support.

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Though the national environmental groups were unhappy, the Quincy legislation sets a welcome precedent for local groups that are trying to exert more influence in other western states over the management of nearby national forests, wilderness areas and other public lands.

These groups have been willing to tinker with national environmental laws in the process of tailoring their own solutions to decades-old disputes.

For example, in the northern Rockies, a coalition of local environmentalists and loggers in eastern Idaho and western Montana are promoting a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to nearby national forests that would waive some of the protections afforded the bears under the federal Endangered Species Act so that problem bears could be killed.

The proposal, like the Quincy forest plan, has aroused the ire of the Sierra Club and a number of other environmental organizations.

“The nationals have discovered grass-roots democracy and they don’t like what they see,” said Mike Jackson, a lawyer and longtime environmental activist who helped found the Quincy Library Group.

But some of Jackson’s allies in past environmental campaigns see the situation differently.

“The idea of ceding authority over land that belongs to every American to parochial interest groups is not acceptable,” said Paul Spitler of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, one of the organizations that has been fighting the Quincy Library Plan.

Spitler’s environmental group was one of 20--including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council--that almost succeeded in persuading the White House and key House members to oppose the Quincy legislation.

Two years ago, the Clinton administration rewarded the Quincy group’s efforts with a $4.7-million planning grant. As recently as Tuesday, however, administration officials worried that the pending legislation could exempt the Quincy plan from environmental regulations that protect wildlife such as the California spotted owl.

But a flurry of last-minute amendments before the House vote Wednesday emphasized the primacy of existing environmental laws and eased White House concerns.