Forest Service to Scrutinize Limits on Sierra Logging

A new regional chief reviewing the Forest Service’s sweeping protections for the Sierra Nevada will visit logging sites, ski resorts and grazing pastures to decide if the 11.5-million-acre plan is too restrictive.

Timber industry leaders are hopeful--and environmentalists fearful--that Regional Forester Jack Blackwell will scale back protection measures that took nearly a decade to develop.

“There’s no question in my mind he will take a good look and come up with the right decision,” said Phil Aune, vice president of the logging industry’s California Forestry Assn. in Sacramento.

But environmentalists see the timber industry as eager to take an ax to the Sierra Nevada framework.

“They are looking at the review as a way to take the framework apart and give them back a timber program,” said Jay Watson, western regional director for the Wilderness Society in San Francisco.

For his part, Blackwell said he has no preconceived ideas about the plan for parts of 11 national forests stretching 460 miles from the southern Sierra north of Los Angeles to the northern Sierra near Oregon.

But the 30-year Forest Service veteran acknowledges he’s worried the plan might not have paid enough attention to economic effects on rural timber towns or the threat of catastrophic fires.

Logging levels under the plan will decline significantly and efforts to remove dead and dying trees to reduce fire risks in old-growth forests would face tougher environmental guidelines than in the past.

“I want to see whether the thing is actually workable and can be implemented,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell said he shares some of the same concerns about the Sierra plan that Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth and others voiced about the “one size fits all” approach that the Clinton administration adopted for 58 million acres of roadless areas in national forests.

“I think the chief is right to say we need to make these ultimate decisions forest plan by forest plan,” Blackwell said. “I don’t believe it worked to try to do one environmental impact statement across the entire U.S. and come up with 58 million acres and be site-specific about it.”

Likewise, in the Sierra “it is a long, long way across 11 national forests from north to south. There is a tremendous change in elevation gradients and climates,” Blackwell said.

“Can one set of standards and guidelines apply to all those conditions? I don’t know the answer, but we are going to be looking hard at that,” he said.

The framework document took more than three years and $12 million to complete. It had been in the works in various forms since the early 1990s when the agency was forced to respond to environmental legal challenges over the protection of the California spotted owl.

“The Sierra is one mountain range,” said Watson, who previously worked to protect old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. “If the 11 forests are left to their own choices, it is bound to fail.”

Watson said the real issue is that the plan does something environmentalists have been urging for years: “It removed logging objectives as a distinct goal.”

“It says now that if timber can be produced as a result of reducing the risk of wildfire, then so be it,” he said. “But don’t wake up on Monday morning and start asking how we are going to meet our timber quota.

“Sometimes the Forest Service has to be told what it can and cannot do because they’ve abused the forests through loopholes over time. We’ve gotten to this point because of those abuses of the past.”

During peak logging years in the 1980s, the 11 national forests in the Sierra produced about 1 billion board feet of timber a year. A board foot is one foot square by one inch thick. It takes about 10,000 board feet to build a typical single-family home.

Over the last 10 years, the average has dropped to about 300 million board feet, Forest Service spokesman Mark Mathes said.

Under the Sierra framework, the levels fall to 191 million board feet the first five years, dropping to about 108 million board feet annually after that. Of the 11.5 million acres, 4 million would be protected “old-growth” areas.

The Bush administration adopted the plan Dec. 28 but announced three days later that it would conduct a yearlong review after heated criticism from the timber industry, ranchers, private property owners and ski resorts.

Leaders of the California Forestry Assn. were among those who criticized the Bush administration initially for not voiding the plan and returning it to the agency to be redone.

“But we’re encouraged by the review. Many of the things they are looking at are the things we’ve been talking about since the decision was announced,” Aune said.

“It’s obvious the current decision does not provide the best solution for reducing catastrophic wildfires. And economic considerations will be elevated into the decision,” Aune said.

Blackwell said he’s particularly sensitive to the effects on rural communities dependent on federal timber to feed struggling sawmills.

Blackwell said the best example he’s heard of problems with the rigidity of the framework comes from ski resort operators within or bordering national forests. They complain about the ban on logging any trees larger than 20 inches in diameter in designated old-growth areas, he said, and many of the resorts are bordered by such trees on three sides.

“They are saying, ‘If we jump through all the hoops of expansion and go through the master planning and the . . . process and get an environmental impact statement and run through all the state and local planning requirements--if we do all of that and it all finally shows that we could expand a lift or increase a run, we’re still surrounded by these 20-inch trees and your plan doesn’t allow us to cut one.’

“They say they are totally boxed in and can never expand. I don’t know if that is true or not. I don’t know if there is any wiggle room,” Blackwell said.

“We could sit in some sterile room somewhere and talk about that, but I’d sooner go out to some typical ski area somewhere that is in some owl habitat and stand at the bottom of the hill with a broad spectrum of people, including some wildlife experts, and try to answer some of these questions.”