Title: OT:FW: [globalnews] Enviros Cut Deal With Bush's Master of Chainsaw Politics, Unions Support Him
Note from Jane: I put the OT in the header for those of you who complain. But in reality, if you can get past my husband’s intro, you will see this is about our forests, ultimately for all of us. (JS)
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I was struck last night by a TV moment about two minutes after Bush’s State of the Union Speech. A rightwing pollster was interviewing a focus group and drilling into the Democrats in the group. “You saw your Democratic leaders give the President a standing ovation, rising to applaud again and again, Hillary Clinton on her feet, why do you still oppose the President on war in Iraq?” The confused Democrats said, essentially, “I don’t understand why Hillary was on her feet applauding Bush’s war plans. I don’t have confidence in the Democratic Party leadership. They are no longer an opposition party.”
So true so true. Here’s more evidence, as if more was needed, that Bush’s plans depend in large part on the support of the Democrats in Congress. They are behaving like Democrats in Texas, who supported Bush’s agenda when he was Governor. The difference is that in Texas, Republicans are a dominant majority party and Bush got more than 60% of the vote his last election. So for the Texans it was about survival. But nationally, the Republicans are NOT the majority party and Bush was not even elected with a majority of the votes.
Read on, and see how gutless Democrats, self-serving hardhats and squabbling enviros gave Bush’s team the opportunity to destroy our national forests.
The Democratic party is irrelevant. The only way to oppose Bush is outside the Democratic party leadership structure. The Sixties are returning. The only power in America capable of reversing our course toward Total Imperial Warfare and environmental disaster is people power. Think about that and then DO something.
Curtis Lang
Moderator
GlobalNews
.....................................................
Seattle Weekly
Published December 11 - 17, 2002
Chainsaw Politics
Some environmentalists think the way to deal with Bush forest policy is to
cut a deal that involves cutting a lot of trees.
BY ANDY RYAN
One thing you gotta say for the Great Satan: He really loves his work.
In his cluttered command post at the Department of Agriculture, overlooking
the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., Mark Rey--Old Scratch himself, in the
minds of many tree huggers--is reviewing his first 13 months as steward of
America's forests.
He's been incredibly busy.
"Every time there's a change in administrations, you're going to see a
change in policy," says Rey, explaining a slew of regulatory actions that
have the greens breaking out bells, books, and candles--and fighting among
themselves. "That's what elections, after all, are about."
At 50, this bespectacled former Eagle Scout and Cub Scout den leader is as
reviled as any man in the enviros' pantheon of demons since the troubled
reign of James Gaius Watt, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior.
Not surprisingly, Rey, a consummate inside-the-Beltway player, is among the
most respected officials in Republican-dominated Washington.
"Mark is one of the most intelligent, articulate, and experienced people I
have ever had a chance to work with," Rey's former boss, Sen. Frank
Murkowski, R-Alaska, has said.
"He is without question . . . the most knowledgeable person I have ever met
on the U.S. Forest Service," concurs Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.
"Mark is the high priest of stump worship. He never met a tree he wouldn't
cut," counters Bill Arthur, director of the Sierra Club's Northwest office
in Seattle. "The timber executives ponied up a million dollars for Bush's
election campaign, and Mark Rey intends to make sure their investment is
richly rewarded."
The nation's pre-eminent timber lobbyist in the 1980s and early 1990s, Rey
received the grudging admiration of his opponents--the kind of deference
accorded a worthy, if wily, adversary. As a Senate Republican staffer and
putative author of the infamous Salvage Logging Rider of 1995, which
rekindled the Northwest's bitter timber wars, he became despised.
Now, as U.S. undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and
environment, responsible for 45,000 government employees and 191 million
acres of public forests and grasslands, Rey is truly feared. So feared, in
fact, that some Northwest environmentalists, as we'll see later, have been
cutting their losses by trying to cut a deal with the devil. By agreeing to
support thinning of younger trees, they hope to preserve the little
remaining old growth--the ancient forests the Northwest is famous for. Not
everyone in the green community thinks the swap is a good idea, and the
debate has become acrimonious.
ARMISTICE OVER
From a green perspective, the terror over the rule of Rey is not without
foundation. On Inauguration Day 2001, the administration of President
George W. Bush embarked on a methodical, far-reaching agenda of policy
changes and out-of-court settlements, attempting to roll back or rewrite
conservation measures dating to the Nixon administration.
"Clearly this administration has a pro-business, anti-environment point of
view, from the chief executive on down. And they set the tone. It's
unfortunate," says Mike Dombeck, U.S. Forest Service chief under President
Bill Clinton.
"Every acre of old-growth forest we lose is one that we're not going to see
again for several generations. The question is, is this worth it over the
long haul, when we look at forests not in election cycles but in decades
and even centuries? I just think we're stepping back to the 1970s."
In fairness to Rey, much of this "anti- environment" stuff started months
before he joined Team Bush, and much is officially outside his portfolio.
But even more than his colleagues, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton
and Attorney General John Ashcroft, Rey has become a lightning rod for
green disdain.
On their short list of great wrongs, conservationists say the administration:
*Delayed adoption of the much- proclaimed Roadless Area Conservation Rule,
Clinton's attempt to protect 58.5 million forest acres, or about one-third
of the national forest system's total area. Then, in a bit of legal
deviltry, enviros allege, Ashcroft's Department of Justice shirked its
responsibility to defend the rule in court against a timber-industry
challenge.
*Introduced the Healthy Forest Initiative, seeking to increase logging in
the name of fire control, while exempting some forest planning from review
under the National Environmental Policy Act. Part of the initiative,
apparently unrelated to fire control, would increase logging in old-growth
forests of the Northwest.
*Settled another timber-industry lawsuit behind closed doors following a
feckless legal performance by the Justice Department. When the sawdust
cleared, the administration had agreed to abolish a key requirement of the
Northwest Forest Plan, the brittle armistice credited with bringing a
degree of peace to Western forests for the past eight years.
*Put up a really feeble "sue-and- settle" defense to another industry
law-suit, resulting in the abandonment of critical habitat designations for
19 species of threatened or endangered salmon and steelhead, including
Puget Sound chinook, Hood Canal summer chum, and Lake Ozette sockeye.
*Is revising regulations under the National Forest Management Act,
effectively reducing protection for wildlife, avoiding compliance with key
environmental laws, and taking much of the science out of forest management.
"I'm interested in trying to make some changes that are going to be lasting
and meaningful," says Rey, in his characteristic soft, precise monotone.
Those changes, he adds, will require bipartisan support on Capitol
Hill--support that appears to be building. "Most notably," says the
undersecretary, "Congress hasn't passed legislation to strike anything down
that we've tried to do. So--using the converse of support as an indication
of at least some degree of agreement--I guess we're doing pretty well there."
TIMBER-INDUSTRY CHALLENGES
Depending on whether you liked the direction environmental protection was
headed under Clinton, things could get much worse.
Fearing "another sweetheart deal between the Bush administration and the
timber industry," nine environmental groups intervened in July against a
pair of forest-products-industry lawsuits that could shiver the very
timbers of conservation law.
A decade ago, northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets were listed as
threatened under the Endangered Species Act--important listings that helped
bring logging on federal forests to a virtual standstill.
The Clinton-brokered Northwest Forest Plan allowed logging to resume by
providing what a federal judge called the "bare minimum" required to ensure
the survival of owls, murrelets, and other wildlife. In last summer's
lawsuits, the timber industry challenged the protected status of the owls
and murrelets and the habitat designated under the Endangered Species Act
as necessary to keep the birds alive.
If the new lawsuits are successful, the Northwest Forest Plan itself, not
to mention the critters, could be headed for the tepee burner. And that
would be bad news for the owl. As Seattle Weekly has reported (see "Spotted
Owls on the Outs," Sept. 5), northern spotted owl populations appear to
have dropped significantly over the past decade, with local declines
ranging anywhere from 12 percent to 53 percent.
Citing the government's apparent unwillingness to defend against other
industry lawsuits, Kristen Boyles, an attorney at the Seattle office of
Earthjustice, a national environmental-law firm, says citizen groups have
been forced to play the role usually reserved for the Justice Department.
"It's been a pattern of sue-and-settle between the Bush administration and
industry," says Boyles. "We need to be in these lawsuits to speak for the
owls, murrelets, and people of the Northwest. The Bush administration has
made it clear it won't."
"There is clearly a coordinated effort by this administration to do away
with environmental protections on national forests," says Mike Leahy, an
attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, across town from Rey's office in
Washington.
Last month, the Defenders filed a lawsuit of their own, seeking to force
the Forest Service and its parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, to
turn over records of contacts between officials, including Rey, and the
timber industry.
Prompting the lawsuit was a leaked agency draft of new regulations being
considered for national forest planning. At least eight of the draft
regulations, Leahy says, are identical to items on a wish list presented
two years ago in testimony before a Senate committee by the American Forest
and Paper Association, Rey's former employer.
The Defenders say the draft regulations make a mockery of the planning
process for each of the 175 national forests and grasslands under Rey's
jurisdiction by exempting not only individual timber sales but entire
forest plans from scientific review.
"The overall intent is obviously to make forest plans essentially
irrelevant, giving local forest officials free rein to manage public
forests however they wish," says Leahy. "It's the old 'trust me, I'm from
the Forest Service' approach that brought us the endless clear-cuts the
agency is famous for.
"Protections, processes, and guidelines for managing national forests were
put in place for a reason--because the timber industry and the Forest
Service were hammering the hell out of the public's forests. Rather than
embracing the progress in forest management over the last two decades,
however, the Bush administration wants to throw out everything we've
learned about how to better manage forests and return us to the old days
when logging was king."
UNANIMOUS CONFIRMATION
All of this name calling--this Lucifer of Lumber stuff, the green Web pages
devoted to defaming him, this petty, partisan sniping--is distasteful to
Rey. But more to the point, it is irrelevant to a man who has thrived for
the past 26 years in a world of relative collegiality, compromise, and
collaboration--Congress.
"To the extent that groups on either side of the divide are eventually
going to want to engage one another, to move their interests forward,
that's going to require some degree of civility and comity--that's
c-o-m-i-t-y"--he spells it out slowly, absolutely deadpan--"among themselves."
Although Rey might never be Superhero of the Forests, he does get plenty of
respect in his own neck of the woods. A 1997 article in Washington's
National Journal, for example, named him as one of the 100 most influential
decision makers in the city.
"Rey's strength in shaping timber issues comes from his well-nurtured
contacts within the federal agencies, with the media, with labor unions,
and within the timber industry," the magazine wrote. "While with the
[forest-products industry], Rey was instrumental in building a political
alliance with the logging worker unions in the battle to open up new
federal lands to logging."
At his July 2001 confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on
Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry--a cakewalk--Rey pledged "bipartisan
collaboration in overseeing the stewardship of America's soil, water, and
forest resources" and to respect the role of Congress in developing
natural-resource policies.
Seven big environmental organizations submitted letters expressing "grave
concern" about Rey's appointment, but they fell short of outright
opposition. More telling, though, were the endorsements from organized
labor--unlikely allies to the Bush administration. The United Brotherhood
of Carpenters and Joiners, the International Association of Machinists and
Aerospace Workers, the National Education Association, and the National
Federation of Federal Employees all weighed in with support.
Senate Budget Committee member Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and one of the
greens' best hopes to protect old-growth timber, also sent a message of
support for Rey's nomination, regretting he couldn't make the hearing.
The only note of caution in the senatorial lovefest was a halfhearted
attempt by committee chair Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, to pin Rey down on his
support for Clinton's Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Rey said he'd be
happy to work with Harkin to protect America's roadless values, but the
legality of the rule itself was under consideration by the U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals.
"We'll have to see what the courts do with it," he told Harkin. The hearing
ended with Rey's unanimous approval by the committee; two months later, the
full Senate confirmed his appointment--again, unanimously.
On the job for a little more than a year now, the undersecretary hopes his
collaborative, work-with-Congress style of doing business will be more
successful than that of his predecessors, whose big mistake was trying to
go it alone.
"I was working for Republican members of Congress on the Hill during most
of the Clinton administration," says Rey. His eyes are brown and intense,
his face adorned with a salt-and-pepper goatee and handlebar moustache.
Back then, Rey says, Democrats wanted to make everything a partisan
issue--good politics, maybe, but not conducive to resolving issues. "I
think my predecessors, perhaps with good reason, decided to write off a
Congress controlled by the other party, to see how far they could push the
edge of the envelope administratively. And they were very adept at it. They
were among the best and brightest in the environmental community from
whence they came. They were experts in environmental and administrative
law--some of the smartest people that I know. And they did a pretty
thorough job of pushing, within the confines of existing law, the envelope.
"But the result that you have to live with," of failing to line up
congressional ducks, failing to win political support for administrative
policies, "is that some of those initiatives aren't going to be sustained
after you're gone.
"The Roadless Rule is a perfect example. I didn't change the Roadless
Rule--it was struck down by a court."
'WAIT FOR THE JUDGE'
Within hours of George W. Bush's swearing in, and nine months before Rey
assumed the helm at the Forest Service, the new administration took
astonishing steps to undo what Clintonites had hoped would be their
most-lasting environmental legacy, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
Issued just two weeks before Bush's inauguration in 2001, the rule sought
to end new road construction and logging on 58.5 million acres of
"inventoried" roadless areas within the national forest system. The Forest
Service's public process for the new rule began in January 1998 and
involved 600 meetings around the country. The result: 1.6 million letters
and faxes--the largest public response ever to a federal environmental
policy. A Forest Service analysis of public comments found 97 percent of
respondents in favor of implementing the Roadless Rule.
Nevertheless, responding to lawsuits filed by the state of Idaho and the
Boise Cascade forest-products company, a federal judge in Idaho issued an
injunction blocking the rule's implementation. Appealed by
environmentalists, but not by the Justice Department, the case now is
before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"There wasn't too much mystery about what was going to happen, in my mind,
with that particular rule-making," Rey says. "A court had struck down the
Carter administration's efforts to do a single rule-making to resolve the
roadless-area [issue] and a Nixon administration effort to do the same
thing. And they struck down the Clinton administration effort for
essentially the same reason."
But the problem really might have been less about legality than it was
about agenda. Senate researchers, who reviewed more than 20,000 pages of
records from the Department of Agriculture, concluded that the new
president's women and men never had any intention of letting the new rule
go into effect--and took extraordinary steps from their first days in
office to kill it. (For details, see www.senate.gov/
~gov_affairs/envrollbacksreport.pdf.)
The policy unmakers worried about political fallout from scrapping the
popular rule outright, documents show, until an alternative solution
occurred to them: wait "for the judge to make a final ruling that the rule
is illegal and comply with the court order." According to a handwritten
note on the back of a memo in files belonging to Rey's predecessor, the
administration opted to "let judge take rule down."
"Their position in court was scandalous --scandalous!" says attorney Niel
Lawrence, forestry project director for the Natural Resources Defense
Council in Olympia. His harshest criticism is for John Ashcroft's Justice
Department. The same agency, under Clinton, cleared the rule after
reviewing its legality.
"It is entirely appropriate for a new administration to look at the
possibility of whether it wants to have the same policies and same rules as
its predecessors," Lawrence says. "It is not appropriate--it is not
conscionable--to try and work that effect out of the public eye, without
going through any kind of public process to explain why it wants to change
course."
MAN AGAINST THE PLAN
As forest fires raged throughout the West last summer, President Bush
unveiled the Healthy Forests Initiative. The legislative proposal,
immediately attacked by greens as a ruse to increase logging of healthy
trees, purports to "prevent the damage caused by catastrophic wildfires by
reducing unnecessary regulatory obstacles that hinder active forest
management."
In the same speech, the president expressed "strong support" for the
Northwest Forest Plan but with strong qualifications. Noting that the
annual 1.1 billion board feet of timber promised by Clinton has never
materialized--last year's cut, for example, was less than 100 million board
feet--Rey says the plan is "broken."
"The question," says Rey, never a supporter of the plan, "is what options
are available to fix it? One option is to see if there is some will to go
to Congress and say, 'Let's see if we can work out a better approach.'
There is some interest, at least on the part of some members of the
Northwest delegation, in exploring that."
"It absolutely is not broken!" says University of Washington professor
Jerry Franklin, his voice rising. Leader of the team of biologists that
wrote it, Franklin says the plan has "done exactly what the law required it
to do."
"The law required a scientifically credible, legal--within existing
law--plan for managing the national forests in the Northwest," Franklin
says. "It did that. It closed the court cases, it got [logging] activities
going again, and--very powerfully--it became the rock on which we gained a
lot of regulatory stability on the state and private lands."
By shifting the burden for protecting wildlife from private lands to
federal forests, Franklin says, the plan made it possible for big
companies, like Weyerhaeuser, to have more certainty about what would be
allowed on their lands.
"So that makes it terrifically successful. It was successful legally; it
was successful getting national forest management out of the courts--for at
least a while--and it was successful bringing regulatory stability to the
Northwest, or at least a degree of regulatory stability."
The politicians' timber-harvest promises might have even come true,
Franklin says--but then Mark Rey wrecked everything when, as a staffer for
Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, he helped write the 1995 Salvage Logging Rider.
Known to greens as "Logging Without Laws," the infamous Salvage Rider
temporarily suspended environmental laws, ramped up logging of old
growth--and re-energized the conservation movement. "The Salvage Rider put
the enviros back into the trenches and put everything back into the court,"
Franklin says. "It ended the truce that had been created by the Northwest
Forest Plan," resulting in lawsuits and civil disobedience and a new green
goal of zero cut on national forests.
The ray of hope in the woods these days, Mark Rey says, is a growing
consensus between industry and some environmental groups on a solution that
could break the gridlock and increase the timber harvest from public lands.
"There are groups that would like to protect all of the available old
growth and are not so much concerned about some of the second-growth areas
that have been put off-limits to harvesting under the plan," Rey says.
"That simple reality, by itself, is the basis for an alternative approach,
should there be an interest and a desire on the part of Congress to do that."
GREENS AT LOGGERHEADS
Out in the much-debated Northwest woods, along the Mountain Loop Highway on
Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest--as the murrelet flies, about 55
miles northeast of the Space Needle-- is a second-growth forest of Douglas
firs, hemlocks, and cedars--part of the Skull Thin timber sale. It is an
example, perhaps, of the new accord Rey thinks can be reached between
loggers and some conservationists.
Last summer, Bellingham-based Northwest Ecosystem Alliance (NWEA) showed
uncharacteristic support for logging by orchestrating opposition to an
out-of-state green group's lawsuit against Skull Thin and two other
proposed commercial thinning sales.
Activists from several small Western Washington green groups say the
Northwest Ecosystem Alliance asked them to join in a letter to the Forest
Conservation Council of Santa Fe, N.M., requesting that the three
Washington sales be dropped from a lawsuit targeting 25 timber sales around
the nation. The Forest Conservation Council contends all of the sales
mentioned in its suit are uneconomical and should be canceled.
That effort to smooth things over, part of an attempt by the Northwest
Ecosystem Alliance to demonstrate a willingness to work with the Forest
Service rather than be obstructionist, set the stage for an acrimonious,
continuing debate among greens over the future of forest management.
"NWEA's scientific field staff reviews every timber sale on these forests,
and we challenge a lot of them," says Mitch Friedman, the Northwest
Ecosystem Alliance's executive director. "If we wanted to split hairs, we
could challenge them all, but we prefer to use the carrot as well as the
stick. The fact is, these specific sales showed a lot of progress in the
right direction. If NWEA wanted to file a suit in New Mexico, we'd first
give the courtesy of consulting our allies down there to coordinate
strategy and message."
Northwest co-plaintiffs on the Forest Conservation Council lawsuit include
Friends of the Earth of Seattle and the Oregon Natural Resources Council.
John Talberth, director of conservation for the Forest Conservation
Council, says the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance's attempt to pressure his
organization into dropping Washington timber sales from the lawsuit amounts
to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
"The idea that conservationists should focus on saving the tattered
remnants of our ancients forests and sacrifice the rest is an anachronistic
strategy that's been abandoned long ago by the vast majority of forest
activists across the nation," Talberth says. "I think that the few groups
left still clinging to that strategy must find some political or financial
benefit. Maybe there are funders or foundations that like to see this view
put forward.
"While I respect and welcome diversity of views and strategies, those who
actively undermine groups taking strong positions cross the line of
civility and, frankly, undermine their own future. Eventually, these
tactics will come back to haunt them when their members find out they're
not the frontline defenders of the forest they make themselves out to be."
CUTTING A DEAL
Made curious by the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance's request that they
pressure Talberth to drop his lawsuit, grassroots activists this fall began
asking about the long-term goals of NWEA and its coalition partners.
They were outraged by what they learned.
The Old Growth Campaign--13 conservation groups in Washington and
Oregon--had been holding talks with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, author of
legislation to protect old-growth timber on the west side of the Cascades.
As part of those talks, the Campaign provided Wyden with their own
"conservative" estimates of how much logging volume might be achieved
through Northwest thinning sales--as much as 800 million board feet a year,
they projected--in exchange for protecting old growth.
While there is general agreement among greens that the region's forests
have been horribly damaged by years of logging, there is also widespread
disagreement about what, if anything, should be done to repair the damage.
Some believe the forests should be left alone to heal themselves. Others
support the view of U.W. prof Franklin, who thinks cautious, learn-as-we-go
thinning, on a case-by-case basis, in certain types of forests, could
accelerate development of wildlife habitat.
But critics of the Old Growth Campaign's support for wide-scale commercial
thinning say there is no science to support such a plan--which they say has
more to do with logging than restoration.
Providing politicians with estimates of possible harvest volumes, says
longtime Washington forest activist Bonnie Phillips, who played a leading
role in the 1989 spotted owl lawsuit that brought about the Northwest
Forest Plan, "is terribly naive. It shows how little they [the Old Growth
Campaign] understand about politics. They also don't understand the wedge
they have now provided to the Bush administration--specifically Mark Rey.
If Rey can show that some environmentalists are willing to sit down and
work a deal with industry, he and others who support higher logging levels
can more easily try to marginalize the rest of the environmental community,
which continues to be deeply concerned with the high cut levels under the
Northwest Forest Plan."
"It is appalling that the Old Growth Campaign appears willing to sacrifice
maturing second-growth forests, including spotted owl foraging and
dispersal habitat, for some increased old-growth protection," says Chad
Hanson, director of the zero-cut John Muir Project and a national director
of the Sierra Club. "These ecosystems would be utterly devastated, and
remnant old-growth forests would be fragmented from one another. That
anyone would attempt to call this destruction 'restoration thinning' is
intellectually insulting."
Northwest Ecosystem Alliance's Friedman says the thinning figure developed
by the campaign is not a hard target, but a back-of-an-envelope calculation
to inform a discussion of what might be available.
"Mark Rey has, from his first day, had the authority to push logging on a
million acres of old forest and a couple million acres of plantation on the
west side [of the Cascades]. We haven't added a single acre to this
universe. Our choice was simply between wringing our hands against all
logging or offering plantation thinning as a positive alternative to
clear-cutting the old stuff. The former would have had less risk to our
purity, but the latter has less risk for the ecosystem. I'm comfortable
with that."
Peter Nelson, policy director for Biodiversity Northwest, a Seattle
conservation organization which belongs to the Northwest Old Growth
Coalition, says political reality--the ascendancy of Republicans, the
willingness of Northwest Democrats to forge a timber deal, and Senate
testimony from scientists that restoration thinning could produce
significant commercial timber volume--forced them to the bargaining table.
"I don't see another responsible course of action," Nelson wrote to members
of the Old Growth Campaign's Internet discussion group.
"Our campaign, in the middle of the old-growth policy debate in the Pacific
Northwest, was acting intelligently when we ran these 'back of the napkin'
numbers" that estimated how much timber could be provided through thinning.
"How else could we react . . . ? Not seek out our own numbers to inform
ourselves? Ignore the policy conversation (which, mind you, will continue
to occur whether we as a movement engage or not)? I don't see another
responsible course of action. For those critics, please advise an
alternative course."
Says the Sierra Club's Bill Arthur: "Frankly, back-of-the-envelope
calculations scare the hell out of me, because that's what invented the
1.1-billion-board-foot number for the Northwest Forest Plan--which also
doesn't have reality to it.
"If you're a fish in the river, you don't care if the silt of your spawning
ground comes from an old-growth timber sale, a thinning sale, a salvage
sale--all three of them kill you. So, thinning, even though it may not be
destroying old-growth forest, is still a type of logging--it still requires
building roads, soil-disturbing activities, a lot of the negative impacts
of any timber sale.
"I think it is definitely premature to be talking about broad-based
thinning programs as some kind of trade-off to protect old-growth forests.
Should we be protecting old-growth forests? I think the scientific jury is
in on that, and yes, we should. There's probably very little cause to
continue any kind of logging of old-growth forests. But that doesn't mean
we need to, or have to, trade a questionable broad-based thinning program
for that."
Northwest Forest Plan author Franklin, though a supporter of cautious
restoration thinning, is apprehensive about the direction politics seem to
be heading under the Bush administration.
"I'm worried as much about some of the environmentalists as I am about Mark
Rey," says Franklin. The centerpiece of the Northwest Forest Plan, he says,
is protection of second-growth stands of trees that one day will replace
the logged-off old growth. That second growth is known as late successional
reserves.
"I've been afraid all along that some in the environmental community are
actually prepared to walk away from the late successional reserves with the
goal of, 'OK, we'll trade off the young growth stands for the remaining old
growth,'" Franklin says. "And if that was done in a way that damages or
destroys the integrity of the late successional reserves, that would be a
lousy trade-off."
Freelance writer Andy Ryan has worked as an environmental reporter and
national political correspondent for the now-defunct Miami News, as a
securities analyst specializing in the forest-products industry, and as a
communications consultant to state and local governments, private
businesses, and environmental groups. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
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Timber, Please
On the southern flank of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, where the
Wind River flows into the Columbia, folks in the hamlet of Carson, Wash.,
would be thrilled to see Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey
succeed in squeezing more timber from public lands--8,888 more truckloads,
please. That 40 million board feet is what's needed to add a shift at the
High Cascade mill, third-largest employer in economically challenged
Skamania County.
Until the mid-1990s, High Cascade purchased 95 percent of its logs from the
Gifford Pinchot, but that all changed under the Northwest Forest Plan. Less
than 5 percent of the company's wood supply now comes from the federal
forest; the rest must be trucked or floated from as far away as Idaho.
Jim Mickel, president of family-owned High Cascade--one of the last mills
in the Northwest capable of processing large-diameter logs--says it's very
unlikely the company will ever again be interested in bidding on old-growth
timber. The markets for products made from old trees have dried up, and the
risks of incurring the wrath of green activists are high. But a steady
supply of second growth would be great for business.
"All through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the harvest off the Gifford Pinchot
was in excess of 400 million board feet per year," says Mickel. During the
past three years, only three timber sales--totaling just 3.5 million board
feet--were offered.
In spite of the short timber supply, High Cascade has refused to fold its
tent: Since the mid-1990s, the company has invested about $20 million
upgrading its Skamania County facilities, Mickel says.
"With as much capital investment as we have, we really would like--and it
would make economic sense--to operate the mill for two shifts each day to
make the return on invested capital much more comparable to most
manufacturing businesses.
"In terms of employment, that probably means another 50 family-wage jobs
that would be added. And in our labor market"--Skamania County unemployment
last year was 11.1 percent, well above the state average--"that's a
significant event."
Andy Ryan
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