New Approaches on the Forests

For a century, the national forests have yielded bountiful profits to oil companies, miners, loggers and livestock ranchers at great cost to both the federal treasury and the environment. The source of this largess is the Congress, especially Western senators who have profited handsomely from campaign contributions by those industries.

That is beginning to change, thanks to the willingness of the Clinton administration to challenge the old culture of Western land management. President Clinton’s point man is Mike Dombeck, the most progressive head of the U.S. Forest Service since the agency’s founder, Gifford Pinchot. Clinton and Dombeck have imposed an 18-month moratorium on construction of logging roads and halted approval of new mining claims along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains.

Still, the Forest Service is stuck with a money-losing timber sales program that is expected to cost roughly $200 million in the next fiscal year. Efforts to eliminate logging subsidies have failed narrowly in the past. This week, the Senate can strike a modest but important blow in favor of the environment and the taxpayer.

A Senate committee has boosted the administration’s timber harvest budget by $32 million, to $229 million. Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.) will offer an amendment on the Senate floor that would trim the outlay back to the original request. He also wants to cut the road subsidy program by $1.6 million.

The Senate should adopt Bryan’s amendment and signal that federal logging subsidies are nearing an end. That action is timely, as foresters now are planning the best use of resources in California’s Sierra Nevada. The demands of the future clearly favor more recreation use and less timber cutting.

The Senate can also finally fulfill a 34-year-old congressional commitment to preserve the nation’s best and most environmentally sensitive lands. Congress promised in the 1965 Land and Water Conservation Act to dedicate offshore oil revenues for land purchases but has routinely diverted much of this money to other programs.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is proposing that the full $900 million be appropriated for its original purpose--not the 26% now set aside in the Interior appropriations bill.

If we want to preserve our natural heritage for future generations, we must do it now. The Senate can take major steps in that direction this week by adopting the Bryan and Boxer proposals.