Commentary : Truth Is Out: Law Raises Fire Risk : Logging: Feinstein’s ‘Quincy’ law allows more cutting in huge, dangerous swaths.

Few boasts roll more readily from the lips of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) than those concerning her role in consummating the supposedly impossible dream of environmental politics: brokering harmonious compromise between the timber companies and their traditional green antagonists. Last October, Feinstein finally maneuvered through Congress a piece of legislation known as the Quincy Library Bill.

Quincy? It’s a timber town on the Feather River in the California Sierra. It has a library, and in this building in Quincy, beginning in 1993, some local citizens hunkered down with government officials and timber and environmental groups. Their goal was to see if common ground could be reached on such issues as the protection of roadless areas, reduction of fire risk in the adjacent national forests and provision of a sure supply of logs to the local sawmills.

As often happens with such efforts, the compromise that they finally reached failed to win unanimous acclaim. The local sawmill operators, already in poor shape, noted that the prime beneficiary of the library group’s logging plan was the giant Sierra Pacific Industries, second largest landholder in the U.S. Environmentalists fastened on the fact that the Quincy compromise gave Sierra Pacific the go-ahead to log swaths of public forest land in the name of fire prevention.

The fire protection plan envisaged corridors through the trees of the sort one sees underneath high-tension wires, only in this case the corridors were to be a quarter of a mile wide, thus setting the stage for huge clear cuts, totaling 60,000 acres a year. Furthermore, Sierra Pacific was to get 9,000 acres of mature forest per year as lagniappe.

The Quincy compromise was swiftly acclaimed as a model of what enlightened consensus could produce, in contrast to the polemics and litigation of sterile enviro-combat. Feinstein duly made haste to reap a political harvest from the Quincy compromise, putting up a bill that she cosponsored with a robust friend of the logging industry, Rep. Wally Herger (R-Marysville).

The mere fact that Feinstein and Herger felt it necessary to turn the Quincy recommendations into law was a giveaway as to what was truly afoot. New legislation was necessary because the Quincy proposals would violate important environmental laws already on the books, laws that the timber industry had been trying to shoot down for years. Soon Feinstein found herself on the defensive, assailed by critics who pointed out that she was backing a sweetheart bill for Sierra Pacific.

Feinstein fought back, asserting that the Quincy plan “would not radically increase logging activities as opponents claim, it would simply replace current logging with a more intelligent, planned approach, aimed at developing a more fire-resilient landscape.”

In 1997, Feinstein failed to drive through the Quincy bill. Her green opponents persuaded Sen. Barbara Boxer to withdraw the support she had pledged to her California colleague. But a year later, major green groups such as the Sierra Club found it politic to mute their opposition to the Quincy bill. Through it went, a triumph for Feinstein.

The law passed into the hands of the Forest Service for assessment of what will happen when it is implemented. The conclusions are scarcely flattering to those--Feinstein among them--who argued that the bill was not only environmentally benign but a model for future compromises.

Under pre-Quincy logging plans in the Lassen, Plumas and Tahoe national forests, the Forest Service has been selling about 125 million board feet a year. Under the Quincy plan, the service will be able to sell 319 million board feet a year. To sell that much volume, the Forest Service will have to put up for cutting not just small overgrown thickets of forest that some ecologists term fire risks, but old-growth groves that are home to the California spotted owl and other rare wildlife species. To haul out that timber, the Forest Service would have to build more than a hundred miles of new logging roads in the three forests.

The actual coup de grace to the pretensions of the Quincy compromise and to Feinstein’s claims for it is delivered by the Forest Service in its environmental impact statement, which says that the quarter-mile-wide clear-cuts would actually “increase the intensity of wildfire” and “would be ineffective in reducing wildfire hazard without ongoing maintenance. The proposed action would not provide funding for maintenance.”

This is an astounding admission: that a law purportedly designed to reduce fire risk actually increases it. Furthermore, the only way of decreasing this newly increased fire risk is to douse, now and for the foreseeable future, the 60,000 acres of clear-cuts with vast amounts of herbicides lethal to wildlife and fish.

Moral: Win-win solutions aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be. Now wait for the lawsuits and a rustling in the forest as Feinstein distances herself from her pyrotechnic project.