Back on the Deschutes in Oregon, Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony plans to use the tools provided by Healthy Forests to implement his next big project, a 32,000-acre thin outside the Metolius Basin. He expects little or no opposition, because the plan will be consistent with the Sisters Community Wildfire Protection Plan.
With the streamlined process, "it may take us a year instead of two" and cost $125,000 to plan the project, he says. In contrast, planning the 15,000-acre Metolius Basin project took two years and cost at least $500,000.
The new project won’t trigger the same intense citizen involvement, Anthony says. Still, he believes the time invested in winning trust on the Metolius was well spent. "We went slowly for a few years, taking the time to do a huge community involvement process," he says. "That has paid off in terms of a lot more trust and confidence in the work we are doing, and a lot less controversy. If we started cutting big trees, the controversy would boil up again. But we don’t intend to do that."
Two paths diverge
If parts of Healthy Forests are slowly winning acceptance among skeptics, however, controversy is at a boil over a new piece of logging legislation. The Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Brian Baird, D-Wash., now appears to be on a fast track to pass the House.
Introduced in November, the bill is designed to speed the salvage logging of trees damaged by wind, insects or fire. It employs the same tools Healthy Forests uses to expedite forest health projects: shortcuts on appeals, an easing of the NEPA requirement that agencies consider a range of options, no outside endangered species review.
Baird, whose sponsorship of the measure has outraged environmentalists, defends it as "a responsible, common-sense bill" that will help fund scientific research into the effects of salvage logging (HCN, 2/6/06: Study questions value of post-fire logging).
But the Walden-Baird bill promises to be even more controversial than Healthy Forests. While foresters generally agree that thinning, prescribed fire and other tools can increase a forest’s vigor and help it withstand wildfire, there is scant scientific evidence of environmental benefits from post-fire salvage logging.
The headlong rush to pass the bill before the November elections is reminiscent of the president’s push, three years ago, to pass the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. (Bush has been notably silent on the bill, but David Tenny, with the Agriculture Department, calls it "very encouraging.") But before it acts, Congress might want to pause and consider what lessons can be learned from the administration’s most ambitious salvage-logging experiment to date.
The Biscuit Fire salvage project in southwestern Oregon started out as a proposal to harvest a modest amount of charred timber and restore land damaged in the half-million-acre blaze that swept through the Siskiyou Mountains in 2002. The Bush administration dramatically expanded the project’s size, opening the burned forest to logging all the way to the edge of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.
But the Biscuit Fire project blew up in the Forest Service’s face. (HCN, 5/16/05: Unsalvageable). To date, the agency has lost between $9 million and $10 million on the project, according to a recent study. While the agency projected 372 million board-feet would come off the Biscuit, it has produced only 66 million board-feet, generating almost no revenue for the restoration projects the logging was supposed to pay for.
Ultimately, the Bush administration chose conflict over consensus. It chose to make a political statement, rather than get some real work done in the ailing Western woods.
Kathie Durbin, author of Tree Huggers and Tongass, writes about public lands from Portland, Oregon. HCN Editor Greg Hanscom contributed to this report.
Sidebars
Slim margins
Loggers say forest-restoration work, which involves the thinning and cutting of small, skinny trees, doesn’t bring in much money
National Fire Plan vs. the Healthy Forests rule changes
The National Fire Plan, the Healthy Forests Initiative and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act are explained and compared
High Country News in your inbox!
All is not "doom & gloom" as this article implies on national forests. As I am familiar with the Willamette NF (westside forest in Oregon & adjacent to the Deschutes NF), some facts are in order:
The net annual growth on the 1.7 million acre Willamette forest is estimated to be about 500 million board feet on about 1.1 million acres. There are no growth estimates for the remaining 600 thousand acres as this is in wilderness or other set aside areas. During the previous decade or more, less than 50 million board feet has been harvested annually, so growth exceeds harvest levels by 10 to 1. The acreage of mature & Old-growth forests are increasing!
The majority of volume harvested is from second growth thinnings (40 to 50 years old) & some mature partial cuts (generally trees less than 150 year old LEAVING THE LARGE RESIDUAL TREES). Currently there is an estimated 508 thousand acres of Old-Growth that will probaly never be cut.
Clearcutting is generally used as a tool for production of elk forage. and, although an appropriate silvicutural sytems for westside forests, is no longer used due to the negative political issues.
In terms of salvage logging, on the 90 thousand acre B&B fire that burned on the Willamette & Deschutes forests in 2002, of the 4000 acres of non-wilderness acres that burned on the Willamette N.F., ONLY 88 acres were harvested
The era of road building is about over. More roads are being closed than are constructed. The majority of new roads that are constructed are short tempoary roads on level terrain & they are ripped & seeded & "put to bed" post logging. Given the fecundity of this forest, all evidence of logging is rapidly obscured by vegetative growth. Routinely, hundreds of acres of forests are thinned or partial cut in the viewsheds of major highways. To the public, these "logged" forests, blend in with the adjacent unthinned forests.
I agree that there are a myraid of dismal environmental issues that are occurring daily but on the Willamette N.F & many other forests, there are reasons to be optimistic.