Chopping the Forest Service

Only a triumph of irrationality explains the response of some congressional members to the Clinton administration’s moratorium on logging roads. Through federal largess, timber companies have already cut 400,000 miles of roads in public forests in the past few decades, making it easier to drag out felled trees. The companies get lucrative taxpayer subsidies for these roads, and then their logging trucks move on to new forests, leaving maintenance to the U.S. Forest Service. Agency budget cuts in recent years and the fast pace of road construction have created huge repair backlogs.

The Forest Service chief says the majority of logging roads in national forests are in such bad condition they accelerate soil erosion, contribute to landslides and increase silt in forest streams, making the water inhospitable to fish and disrupting wildlife migration. In other words, this crosshatch of roads has weakened the health and productivity of the public forests.

President Clinton announced the road-building moratorium in January at the behest of Forest Service leader Mike Dombeck. Congress, under pressure from members from northwestern and Mountain states, repeatedly has failed to address the problem. The 18-month “timeout” will block new construction primarily in roadless areas of at least 5,000 acres. The moratorium is intended to give lawmakers another chance to come up with a more responsible policy for road building. Clinton has coupled this moratorium with a proposed 20% increase in Forest Service funding for next year to rebuild or plant over decrepit roads and to restore national forest watersheds.

Both steps are prudent, but apparently they are not seen that way by some in Congress who regard federal forests as the exclusive domain of the timber companies who operate there. To punish Forest Service officials for trying to do their jobs, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Resources Committee, recently announced, “We’ll keep cutting their budget back until they squeal.”

Young and some of his colleagues in the House and Senate have now begun their campaign of intimidation, even ordering Dombeck to estimate the cost of shuttering his agency. Forget monitoring for sustainable forestry practices, disease and erosion control or wildlife and habitat preservation, activities depended upon by the loggers as well as the preservationists whom Young ridicules.

Someone might want to tip off the representative: Shutting down or starving the Forest Service is not in the best interests of either his timber company constituents or the public.