Forest Service Backs Off Plan to Test-Log 2 Forests in Sierra

The U.S. Forest Service is retreating from a much-criticized plan to heavily cut parts of two Northern California forests in order to study the effects of different logging levels on the California spotted owl.

Acknowledging that they did not have sufficient public backing to proceed with the work in a timely fashion, forest service officials in California on Tuesday said they were redesigning the study.

“I think we lost the understanding and support of folks,” said Bernie Weingardt, deputy regional forester for resources. “We’re having to back up and redesign it.”

The study would have encompassed 600,000 acres, most of it in the Plumas and Lassen national forests northeast of Sacramento. It had raised the ire of the Quincy Library Group, a coalition of loggers and environmentalists that complained the work would interfere with a congressionally authorized pilot project underway in the same national forests.

A member of the Quincy Library Group, George Terhune, said the forest service appeared to be taking a “good step in the right direction.”

“This administrative study was simply not consistent with their legal requirement” for implementing the pilot project, he said.

The study, announced last year as part of broader regulations dealing with the 11 national forests in the Sierra Nevada, called for three levels of logging over a broad landscape. They would have ranged from light timber cutting to creating a concentrated series of small forest openings, along with the removal of trees as much as 34 inches in diameter.

The intent was to determine what effect the different logging intensities had on the California spotted owl, which has been in decline in parts of the Sierra.

“We truly don’t know the effects of activities on the owl,” said Weingardt. “How much can the owl stand before you are affecting it?”

But the Quincy group complained that in some places the experiment would log too lightly to reduce the risk of wildfire, and in other places it would involve such extensive cutting that it would harm the environment and drive away owls.

Weingardt said members of his science team were drawing up a new study design and he did not know exactly what they would suggest. But he added that the new project would probably be smaller and would fit in with already approved logging and forest thinning projects.

In the meantime, the Quincy group is pursuing a lawsuit it filed last month against forest service regulations adopted for the entire Sierra Nevada range two years ago.

The Bush administration is revising the regulations to allow more logging of larger trees. But the Quincy group claims the changes don’t go far enough and leave in place a forest thinning program that doesn’t remove nearly enough to reduce fire danger.

“It is a beginning of opening up the forest,” attorney Michael Jackson said of the pending revisions. “But the pace of it is so slow.”

The 64-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, has raised the concerns of environmental groups who worry it may become a vehicle for further dismantling forest protection in the Sierra Nevada.

“At this point we’re very concerned the administration might use the lawsuit to cut a deal with the timber industry. That is essentially what they did in a similar lawsuit in Utah last week,” said Eric Antebi, national press secretary of the Sierra Club.

Several environmental groups are expected to seek to intervene in the case, which would give them legal standing to participate in any settlement talks.

“I would assume that’s the strategy” -- to negotiate protections away, said Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society. “But we’re not going to let that happen.”