Redwood Deal Is Just a Start

A big-ticket item in Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to direct some of the budget surplus toward environmental improvement is the state’s promised $130 million to buy 7,500 acres of virgin old-growth redwoods in the Headwaters Forest. With $250 million in federal funds already available for the state-federal purchase, the long, bitter effort to save this unique Northern California tract can finally end happily.

But protection for these grand trees, the largest old-growth grove still in private hands, will be a pyrrhic victory if government officials do not force Pacific Lumber to slow the frantic pace of timbering on 192,000 acres of forest it owns adjacent to the old-growth Headwaters tract. That logging has already caused damage to local streams and hillsides that will take decades to repair.

In 1996, when Pacific Lumber, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and state and federal officials concluded weeks of tense, closed-door bargaining to save the Headwaters redwoods, the deal included environmental protections for the company’s other, vast holdings nearby. Specifically, Pacific Lumber agreed to draft a habitat conservation plan for those adjacent lands that would comply with the federal Endangered Species Act.

Progress toward that plan has been painfully slow, and after almost two years only a five-page “agreement in principle,” not the detailed conservation plan required, has been produced. Moreover, that general agreement, negotiated with the Department of the Interior, contains weaknesses that could cause even more environmental damage.

Meanwhile, Pacific Lumber has been cutting so rapidly near the Headwaters Forest, including trees on steep hillsides, that mudslides have inundated homes and silt and gravel has washed into local rivers, significantly reducing the number of salmon and trout that spawn there. The company is logging under valid state timber harvest permits that now incorporate terms of the recent “agreement in principle.” Yet surely the logging practices so damaging to land and aquatic species are not in the spirit of the Headwaters deal. Nor can they really be within the letter of federal species law.

Gov. Wilson, nearing the end of his term and eager to improve his environmental record, can make a difference. The governor should use the funds he’s promising as leverage to prod state and federal officials to set rigorous protection standards for these forest lands and to ensure that Pacific Lumber makes good on its promises to meet them.