Suits Target Sierra Logging Plan

The state attorney general’s office and a coalition of conservation groups filed back-to-back lawsuits this week to block a Bush administration plan to increase logging and scale back wildlife protections in the Sierra Nevada.

The lawsuits, filed Monday and Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, are yet another salvo in a nearly 15-year fight over federal management of 11.5 million acres of national forest that run the length of the range.

The Bush administration last year dropped a strict set of forest protections adopted under President Clinton, saying they prevented the Forest Service from aggressively thinning dense growth that fuels wildfires and from harvesting commercially valuable trees that would help pay for the fire prevention work.

The Bush plan tripled logging levels in the Sierra’s 11 national forests, weakened habitat protections for rare species such as the California spotted owl and Pacific fisher, and allowed the felling of trees up to 30 inches in diameter.

In his lawsuit, Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer attacked the rollback as an arbitrary move that lacked scientific or legal justification. “The Bush administration just tossed that plan,” Lockyer said, calling the Bush revisions “this new pro-timber company plan.”

Lockyer, a Democrat, said he has invited Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger to join the lawsuit. “We have informed his office, and hope they will wish to participate. We haven’t heard back from him.”

Although Schwarzenegger defended the Clinton plan during his election campaign and vowed to fight the Bush revisions, since taking office he has been silent on the matter.

Regional Forester Jack Blackwell expressed disappointment in the legal challenges.

“I believe we have got a well-crafted plan,” he said. “I’m very comfortable this plan is rooted in the latest science.... I feel so strongly that we’ve got to get on with thinning the forest and do all we can to prevent these catastrophic wildfires.”

Including this week’s filings, there are three lawsuits seeking to overturn the Bush revisions. The California Forestry Assn., a timber industry group, challenged them in December for not placing sufficient emphasis on timber production.

Moreover, there may be more administration alterations in the works. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service and set in motion the rollback, is reviewing the new Sierra blueprint and could demand more changes.

In a teleconference jointly arranged by Lockyer and the environmental groups, several forest experts criticized the Forest Service’s plan to allow the cutting of larger trees in the Sierra, saying their removal actually could contribute to the wildfire threat by opening up the timberland, making it drier and hotter.

“It’s very arbitrary, and it’s high,” University of Washington forest resources professor Jerry Franklin said of the 30-inch diameter logging limit. In some places in the Sierra, he added, a tree that big “will be several centuries old.”

Franklin and Duke University ecology professor Norm Christensen said the experts agreed that the Sierra needed widespread thinning to lessen the threat of devastating wildfires. But the focus, Christensen said, “should be on the stuff that burns” -- brush and smaller trees.

The debate over Sierra management has been going on since the early 1990s, sparked by concern over the decline of the California spotted owl and continued by a huge, congressionally mandated study that found the range’s health had been seriously compromised by more than a century of logging, grazing, development and suppressing the natural cycle of wildfire.

“Nearly 15 years later, [we’re] still at an impasse,” said California Forestry Assn. President David Bichel. “And in the meantime, we’ve watched forest health decrease.”