Bush’s Forest Safety Plan Kindles a Debate

As the Bush administration spells out an aggressive new fire prevention strategy that would increase logging on public lands, the U.S. Forest Service is preparing to auction off tens of thousands of acres of marketable timber left standing in areas that have already burned.

Nearly half of that timber is in California’s Sierra Nevada, where 30,000 acres in remote national forests are on the auction block this year. The area is currently subject to strict limits on logging under a plan developed during the Clinton administration to protect old-growth trees and wildlife habitat.

On Thursday, President Bush unveiled a proposal to make it easier to remove trees and brush from fire-prone forests by making it more difficult for opponents of the logging to use environmental laws to delay or cancel the projects.

Until now, the Forest Service has been required to consider objections to plans such as those underway in the Sierra, but that avenue of appeal would be restricted if Congress goes along with the administration’s proposals.

Proponents of cutting trees in fire-damaged forests, a practice known as salvage logging, say it is a good way for the Forest Service to make money from wood that might otherwise rot, and use some of the proceeds to replant and restore a thinner, more balanced forest where fires will be less likely to burn out of control.

“If there is something of commercial value that can be taken without any environmental damage, then the proceeds can be reinvested to restore the land,” said Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist who, as the Bush administration undersecretary overseeing the Forest Service, is putting salvage logging on a fast track.

“If we have to rely exclusively on appropriated [tax] money, we’ll never get this thing done,” Rey said.

Conservationists regard salvage logging as the ecological equivalent of mugging a fire victim. Salvage sales, they say, allow timber companies to cut many trees that survive the flames in areas far removed from towns or cities that could be threatened by wildfire.

And, foes of the practice contend, the contracts seldom require timber companies to remove the very fuel that stokes wildfires--the smaller trees and underbrush for which there is little or no market.

As a result, conservationists say, burned-over forests are further weakened by depriving them of their most fire-resistant trees as well as large standing snags and fallen logs that shelter wildlife and restore nutrients to the forest soil.

“The Forest Service is using fire as a Trojan horse to get into our forests,” said Brian Vincent, an activist with the American Lands Alliance in Nevada City who is battling the sales in the Sierra Nevada.

“They’re using all kinds of explanations, like restoration, salvage, thinning, fuel reduction. But when you take the ribbons and bows off the box, it’s still a timber sale.”

Although salvage logging received only passing mention in the Bush plan, the administration already has been pushing such projects. Among them is a 41,000-acre auction in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest that was delayed by a federal judge in December because the administration had sought to preempt a public-comment period.

In California, if the salvage plans are carried out, at least 250 million board-feet of timber--enough to fill 50,000 log trucks--will roll out of nearly every national forest in the Sierra, from Lassen south to Sequoia, some of it cut from fragile watersheds and the high elevation habitat of endangered spotted owls, northern goshawks and Pacific fishers. The work is scheduled to begin this fall.

Both the administration and its critics agree that many forests, including some that have burned recently, are tinderboxes.

And both sides blame decades-old policies of quickly suppressing fires and allowing unchecked growth of younger trees and shrubs amid wider-girthed old stands. One day, they hope, naturally occurring fires that do not flare out of control will do nature’s housecleaning.

Where they disagree is whether commercial logging has any role in returning forests to a more healthy, fire-resistant state.

The advocates say that without thinning, the burned-over forests are more likely to burn again.

“Left to its own devices, most of the forests will shrub over and they’ll stay that way for decades,” said Mike Landram, regional silviculturist for the U.S. Forest Service in California. “That’s fine if we want our forests to be shrub fields. But what we have said is we favor old forests, and we don’t have enough old forests.

“If the delays continue, then the net result is the American people get to have all these large stands of dead wood, and the alternative way of getting it removed is your tax dollars,” Landram added.

While salvage may help clear out dead wood, the vast majority of the money it generates goes into planning further salvage sales, according to congressional reports.

For example, timber companies paid more than $2 million to salvage 18.5 million board-feed of timber from the 1999 Pendola fire in Tahoe National Forest, according to the Forest Service. Of that sum, $235,594 was spent on reforestation, and the Forest Service spent nearly $300,000 of additional tax money to clear out smaller fuels and replant new trees.

“If we can use a timber sale to offset some of the cost, why wouldn’t we do that and save the taxpayers’ money?” said Steve Eubanks, forest supervisor for the Tahoe National Forest, where about 9,500 acres of timber are being considered for salvage logging this year.

“Why would we not take advantage of trying to offset some of the costs by doing that?”

The timber industry, meanwhile, has grown increasingly impatient at the prospect of having to fight to cut even the dead wood left from a fire.

“That whole concept of mugging a burn victim is ludicrous,” said Tom Nelson, director of forest policy for Sierra Pacific Industries, a top participant in Forest Service salvage sales in California.

Leaving dead logs behind just creates the conditions for the next fire, Nelson said. “It’s still out there, it’s still fuel and the brush is going to grow up under it,” he said.

“Instead of spending $17 million to put out a fire that destroys the habitat, why not spend the money to get in and thin it? You get the products and you save the habitat. There’s nothing pretty about the aftermath of a wildfire.”

When you get down to the details, there’s nothing pretty about the way salvage logging is done, according to those fighting companies like Sierra Pacific.

Chad Hanson and Rachel Fazio of the John Muir Project, an environmental group in Cedar Ridge, Calif., have marshaled biologists and silviculturists to their cause. They have bypassed “No Trespassing” signs in order to walk nearly every acre of the largest proposed salvage projects to gather evidence to support their appeals in three Sierra forests.

The pair have infuriated forest rangers and logging companies, and weathered accusations of environmental terrorism.

“It’s not about [forest] health. It’s not about protecting communities. It’s about profit,” Hanson said during a recent session of what he calls “ground-truthing” salvage plans. “Let’s not sit there and say it’s about protecting communities that are five, 10, 20 miles away.”

In the woods, they point out massive trees marked for harvest that have green crowns and barely a scorch mark at their base. Smaller trees that were severely scorched are not marked for cutting. These are the real culprits, Hanson and Fazio contend, that become the kindling that fuels wildfire and carries it high into the crowns of taller, older neighbors.

Even in severely burned areas, the two said they have found evidence that spotted owls have returned to perch on dead trees, which often provide nesting cavities and hiding places for other species as well.

On a backwoods logging road of the Tahoe National Forest, Hanson and Fazio conducted their own inspection last month. Hanson knelt before a freshly cut ponderosa pine felled as a potential hazard to loggers in preparation for salvage operations. All around it were supple green limbs hacked from the trunk. Hanson counted the rings, losing track at 360. Fresh sap oozed from the pink cambium, the membrane that transports a tree’s nutrients just inside the bark, which measured 5 inches thick in most places. The fire had burned its way less than an inch into the bark.

Hanson and Fazio made similar discoveries in three other Sierra Forests they visited this summer.

“This tree probably has seen at least half a dozen fires more severe in its lifetime,” Hanson said, pointing to a lightly scorched red fir that predates the Declaration of Independence.

The tree stands on a swath of the Lassen National Forest that will be logged unless the Muir Project’s appeal prevails.

“We see this over and over again,” Hanson added. “They just don’t think anyone will go out and check.”

Arguing tree-by-tree is crucial to both sides in the salvage battle. If enough of a stand can be declared dead--more than 75%--loggers can cut much bigger trees. That rule applies to healthy forests governed by the Sierra Nevada Framework, which was developed during the Clinton era and covers 11.5 million acres of federal land in the Sierra.

When it was adopted last year, the framework plan was hailed as a landmark attempt to promote habitat preservation in a dozen national forests in the Sierra, particularly on 4.5 million acres of old-growth forest that is ideal for endangered species like the spotted owl.

The outcome of the battle over salvage logging in the Sierra forests may turn on the meaning of the word “dead.”

The Forest Service follows guidelines that declare a tree dead based on a percentage of scorched needles in its crown, or if the heat killed the cambium inside the bark.

Environmentalists say the guidelines allow some trees that have a good chance of survival to be cut down. The Forest Service counters that its predictions of which trees will die are 75% to 80% accurate, and it is willing to live with that outcome.

“Right now there are more trees dying by far than what the Forest Service is harvesting. There’s plenty of dead trees out there. The idea of running out of dead trees is ridiculous,” said Nelson of Sierra Pacific Industries.

Nonetheless, faced with arguments that many trees can survive even severe scorching, Forest Service officials in the Tahoe National Forest banned any salvage logging of trees that still show green needles. Other forests, including the neighboring Eldorado, have not followed suit. Each forest is free to tailor its own plan.

Caught between forest antagonists, many Forest Service veterans are anxious to find a middle ground.

“Really, all this business is, is trying to make the kind of forest we want to be there,” said Landram, the Forest Service silviculturist.

“We’re in the middle of a great national debate over what the forests are for.”