Window for Logging Policy

The U.S. Forest Service moratorium on new logging roads came out of a yearlong and largely partisan debate. One of its provisions bans road building in roadless forests for the next 18 months, a prohibition that protects nearly 33 million acres of public land. Now Forest Service officials will have time to review the lucrative subsidies that have allowed logging companies to cut some 400,000 miles of road through public forests to move their timbering equipment in and felled trees out.

Fewer than half of these logging roads meet safety and environmental standards, and the upkeep on this vast network is provided by taxpayers, a burden that is out of hand. Forest Service officials say the agency has an $8.5-billion backlog of road repairs.

The Clinton administration’s timeout will give Congress and the forest agency a chance to permanently retool federal policy and encourage logging activities that do not burden the public coffers. That decision will affect 14 of the 18 national forests in California and roughly one-sixth of the 191 million acres of federal timberland.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Resources Committee, has railed at the policy as a threat to the Northwest’s timbering industry. Perhaps as a result, the ban in its final form unfortunately excludes 15 million roadless acres, including large sections of Alaska’s pristine Tongass National Forest.

Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck should use this 18-month breather to craft a permanent policy that protects all roadless areas and ends the giveaways that have made cutting new roads cheap and easy for loggers but costly to the public.