Give National Forests a Break

President Clinton should move promptly, as promised, to staunch the environmental damage that Congress caused last year by continuing to subsidize road building by timber companies in our national forests. Though such roads may indeed offer economic benefit by making it easier to take timber out, they despoil forests and their wildlife habitats.

Clinton is expected to suspend work on logging roads in the hope that government officials will develop a new policy to rein in the taxpayer expense and forest watershed damage caused by the more than 400,000 miles of logging roads already cut.

The new policy would apply mainly to roadless areas in national forests of at least 5,000 acres, although some smaller areas adjacent to national parks or other protected lands may be included. The Angeles National Forest would fall under a road-building moratorium, but it is not a prime logging area and work there has been minimal.

Clinton will make a mistake if he exempts from the moratorium both the wild lands of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascade Mountains, as he reportedly intends. By omitting these areas, he hopes to placate powerful members of Congress who seek fewer, not more, logging restrictions, the same lawmakers who torpedoed efforts to lower the existing federal subsidy for new logging roads.

Exempting either forest is unwise, but given the physical difficulties of logging in the Tongass with or without roads, the greater threat is to the old-growth groves in the Pacific Northwest. These trees and the wildlife sustained by them are ecologically fragile and further compromised by congressional action that permitted so-called salvage logging and its attendant road building. A wise president would ensure protection of these forests.