Bill and Dianne Go to Tahoe

On July 26, President Clinton will descend upon Lake Tahoe and there he hopes to sign a law whose very name should send chills down the spines of friends of nature: the Quincy Library Group Forest Restoration Act. At Clinton’s elbow will stand the midwife of this awful legislation, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

At stake is some of the last intact forest in the Sierra. These beautiful stretches of Douglas fir, the last prime forest habitat in California, are falling victim to that most deadly of all procedures, the consensus process, from which principled opponents of environmental destruction are by definition excluded.

On July 9, the House passed a bill that will double the amount of logging on three national forests in the Sierra near Lake Tahoe. Known as the Quincy Library Group bill, it is the ultimate symbol of how the consensus process works and how eager Congress is to follow its dictates.

The bill was crafted by a group of conservationists, timber industry reps and pillars of the Quincy community, a small town in the western foothills of the Sierra. After five years of mutual back scratching, the Quincy group developed its own timber management plan for three nearby national forests: Lassen, Plumas and Tahoe. Fear of fire was central to the planners’ strategy. They knew that fire is the abiding dread of the gambling magnates and prosperous homeowners around Lake Tahoe. Playing on these fears, the group said that the only way to prevent a costly inferno is to push through an accelerated logging program.

Under the cloak of consensus building, the Quincy plan is nothing more than an excuse for companies like Sierra Pacific Industries to log more than 70,000 acres a year of Douglas fir with scant legal constraint.

The excuse comes in the following guise: a need to carve a network of firebreaks inside the three forests. These “firebreaks” are no less than 440 yards across, clear-cut avenues that will fragment some of the last contiguous habitat in California. In other words, the plan will produce a major ecological disaster, particularly for wildlife that depend on unbroken expanses of forest.

Anyone scrutinizing a map of the proposed logging network will find something surprising: Many of the firebreaks follow ridge tops. Since fire travels uphill, this is an odd way of containing them. But most of the profitable timber left on the western slopes of the Sierra tends to run along these ridges, because everything else has long since been cut.

The Congressional Budget Office reckons that this firebreak logging program will cost the taxpayers about $83 million a year. That’s the subsidy it will take to put through 300 million board feet of timber sales a year. The Forest Service is ordered to raid other accounts, such as wildlife management and recreation, to foot the bill. The profits from the timber sales will go to companies such as Sierra Pacific and Collins Pine, not the Treasury.

The Quincy bill had been kicking around for about a year, had been attacked by nearly every environmental group and seemed doomed. But suddenly it found its way to the floor of the House where it passed 429 to 1, the lone dissenter being Ron Paul, the Texas libertarian who denounced the bill as a looting of public assets and the below-cost selling of timber from federal lands--which it is.

Days before the House vote, the leadership of the big national green groups had been solicited by Feinstein. She told them that the Quincy bill was going to move speedily through the House and then she would maneuver it just as expeditiously through the Senate. She told them that Rep. George Miller, a resolute environmental champion, would work with fellow Californian Rep. Vic Fazio to assure passage in the House. Though Miller had previously denounced the bill as a sellout to the timber industry, Feinstein and the White House twisted his arm. Fazio, rumored to be in line to succeed Erksine Bowles as White House chief of staff, had been on board from the beginning. Feinstein said she needed a commitment from the big green organizations not to sabotage this bill.

Feinstein’s motives appear to be two-fold. She’s running for governor in 1998 and is eager to show that she can look after the interests of the rural lobbies and that she can handle the big environmental groups.

Make no mistake about it. If the Quincy bill goes through the Senate, it will set a terrible model as legislation that claims to protect the forest while it mandates a doubling of logging. As a seasoned congressional staffer said: “This is the kind of bill Congress would love to vote on every day. It’s like the federal highway program, only in this case the pork barrel is clear-cuts instead of freeways.”