Clinton Asks for ‘Landmark’ Conservation of Forests

In one of the most sweeping wilderness protection measures of the last century, the Clinton administration on Monday proposed setting aside 58 1/2 million acres of roadless national forest--banning commercial logging and new road-building in much of the nation’s remote back country.

In an expansion of the U.S. Forest Service’s original proposal, the plan calls for imposing new logging restrictions throughout the national forest system.

“There are certainly landmark events in the history of conservation--this clearly is one of those,” said Deputy Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons, who oversees the Forest Service.

About 14.7 million roadless acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest are included in the plan, as are more than 4.4 million acres in California--mostly in the northern Coastal Range and along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada--9.3 million acres in Idaho and 6.4 million acres in Montana. A final decision on the proposed policy is due within a month.

The Tongass, America’s largest national forest and its last significant old-growth temperate rain forest, would not be protected until after 2004, however, in a bid to help southeastern Alaska’s reeling timber industry.

Timber Officials Warn of Fires and Insects

Officials for the timber industry said they also hoped that the Forest Service’s policy would be eased by a possible Republican administration. Under the current prescription, commercial logging in the nation’s roadless forests would be cut by nearly 85%, to about 32 million board-feet a year.

Industry spokesmen predicted that wilderness areas would fall victim to unchecked wildfires and insect infestations unless roads can be built to battle them. They also said the nation would see its reliance on foreign forests, which has doubled over the last eight years from 20% to 40% as a source of American wood products, grow even more.

“They’re absolutely condemning the national forests to rot and burn,” said Michael Klein of the American Forest and Paper Assn. “This year, we had the worst wildfire season in 90 years--more than 7 million acres burned. That’s 47,000 acres a day during fire season. And I think that’s going to look like a picnic compared to next year, now that they’ve codified benign neglect.”

But Forest Service chief Michael Dombeck said the agency now would be able to set aside the gridlock over forest policy and concentrate on fire hazard reduction, especially in areas where wilderness backs up against communities. And he said spending money to maintain existing roads will provide better recreational access to national forests than would building new roads.

Conservationists long have maintained that road-building is the single most devastating threat to wilderness areas: Roads break up the large swaths of habitat crucial to the survival of many wildlife species. They set off patterns of soil erosion that choke wild trout and salmon streams. And they open pristine wild lands to the potentially damaging incursion of high-impact visitors.

Proposal Bans All Commercial Harvests

The Forest Service’s original proposal would have allowed some commercial timber harvesting to continue in the national forests, as long as no new roads were built to accommodate it. But the alternative unveiled Monday bans all commercial harvests and restricts logging to “stewardship” purposes. These stewardship harvests would be allowed to improve habitat for endangered species, to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires or to “restore ecological structure.”

That is in keeping with Vice President Al Gore’s pledge during the presidential campaign to allow no commercial logging in roadless areas.

But environmental groups worry that a Republican administration could allow widespread timber harvests under the stewardship exemption. “I can imagine a scenario in which a hostile administration opens up a loophole large enough to drive a logging truck through,” said Ken Rait, spokesman for the Heritage Forests Campaign in Oregon.

Conservationists say they will seek to have that exemption tightened and to have the four-year delay in protecting the Tongass moved up before the Agriculture Department, overseer of the Forest Service, issues its final rules.

Industry officials are equally worried that if George W. Bush wins the presidency, it will prompt the Clinton administration to tighten the rules even further. Already, conservatives in Western states are chafing under President Clinton’s recent designation of 11 national monuments totaling more than 4.6 million acres.

“What we see in this final proposal is a virtual wilderness designation on almost a third of our national forest . . . as this president scrambles to create a legacy,” said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, an Oregon-based consortium of timber companies west of the Great Lakes.

Southeastern Alaska’s majestic stands of old-growth spruce, cedar and hemlock have yielded up to half of all the timber cut from roadless areas in the U.S. in recent years.

And the state’s Republican congressional delegation has battled fiercely to maintain a supply of federal timber to be harvested by the region’s struggling industry. Two mills that relied on Tongass wood recently have closed.

Environmentalists throughout the country have fought to save what’s left of the Tongass, whose 43 million acres already are laced with more than 4,000 miles of logging roads. An earlier draft of the roadless area policy would have exempted the Tongass entirely.

“It’s definitely a marked improvement,” Matt Zencey of the Alaska Rainforest Campaign said of the four-year protection delay. “But there’s still no good reason to discriminate against the nation’s largest national forest that most needs protection for its roadless areas.”

Alaska conservationists fear that up to half a billion board-feet could be cut from the Tongass before 2004 under the current forest management plan.

But industry officials, who insist a reliable harvest is the only way to maintain a viable year-round economy in southeastern Alaska, say they would likely be able to cut only about 320 million board-feet.

Most of the Tongass roadless areas already were set aside under the forest’s own management plan, and the 400,000 acres that were not “were critical to the timber program that’s left,” said Jack Phelps of the Alaska Forest Assn. “For them to come back now and include those areas . . . that’s a big hit for us.”

The Forest Service plan calls for a variety of measures to help the region ease away from timber-dependent jobs.

18 National Forests in California Covered

In California, the 4.4 million acres to be protected cover 18 national forests.

The California areas include the San Joaquin roadless area east of Mammoth--long eyed for expansion of a major ski area--along with several roadless regions next to the Trinity Alps and Marble Mountains wilderness areas in Northern California and two popular roadless areas, the North Fork Stanislaus and Eagle, near Yosemite National Park.

“My belief is that our priorities have never been clearer,” Dombeck said. “I was out for a walk last night, and I was thinking to myself, what is it, about 240,000 miles to the moon? We’ve got 380,000 miles of roads in the national forest system. If seems like that’s almost enough.”