>Hacking Down the Forest
>
>Sunday, October 26, 1997; Page C06
>The Washington Post
>
>THE NATIONAL forests once may have seemed a limitless resource, but now
>they are a dwindling one, and policy should be changed accordingly.
>Commercial logging in the forests needs to become the exception, not the
>rule. That should be especially true with regard to pristine areas not
>logged already.
>
>Unfortunately, Congress and to a lesser extent the administration
>continue to follow policies pointing in the opposite direction. Under
>the false flags of balance, sustainability and the like, they are
>allowing destruction of the forests to go on. Only the pace has slowed,
>but not enough. There are several current examples.
>
>(1) The Forest Service has approved -- but Agriculture Secretary Dan
>Glickman has not yet signed off on -- a new management plan for the
>great Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. The plan would allow
>more logging than required by either the current state of demand for
>timber products or the long-term economic health of the southeastern
>Alaska region. It is almost as if the service, in setting the maximum
>logging levels, had been seeking to entice back into the region a timber
>industry only recently departed and of which the forest is well rid.
>
>Administration officials defend the plan on grounds that it's better --
>is based on better science and is more protective of the forest, the
>species within it, etc. -- than its predecessor. No doubt that's true,
>but it's also the wrong standard. The plan still would do unnecessary
>and irreparable environmental harm. The politics are hard, but the
>secretary should order it cut back.
>
>(2) Congress seems well on the way to passing legislation the president
>will almost surely sign, though he shouldn't, short-circuiting the
>normal procedures and ordering adoption of a particular management plan
>for three forests in northern California. The plan would permit a fair
>amount of cutting. Its virtue from the politicians' standpoint is that
>it was put forward as a consensus proposal by a group representing
>industry and, supposedly, environmentalists in the affected region.
>Supporters tout it as a possible model for a new approach to forest
>management; local consensus becomes the key. But these are national, not
>local forests, and while local views need to be taken into account in
>their management, they need to be managed as other than adjuncts to loca
>l economies. The model appeals to those who would shift political power
>generally from the federal to the local level, but in this case it is
>wrong.
>
>(3) Congress this year came within a whisker -- a vote or two in either
>house -- of cutting funds for further road-building in the forests. The
>road-building program is doubly objectionable -- a subsidy to the
>industry that simultaneously opens up and allows it to enter parts of
>the forests not previously cut. Now, instead of a cut in these funds,
>the Interior Department appropriations bill is said to contain a
>provision whose effect could be to expand the road-building program, in
>that it removes a previous cap. Particularly in the House, the
>administration failed to fight as it should have to limit these funds; a
>greater effort on its part and the vote would likely have come out the
>other way. The president still has leverage over the issue; there are
>other objectionable features to the bill, and there continued to be
>debate within the administration last week about whether he should sign
>or veto it. In a year of so much supposed support for economy in
>government, what better object lesson to cut back than this?
>
>There's an effort now in the Senate to rewrite forest-management law in
>a way that likely would lead to a larger cut each year. The chances the
>bill, by Sen. Larry Craig, will make it all the way into law are pretty
>slim. What ought to occur instead is a tightening of the law in the
>opposite direction. Why, in the name of the conservation in which it
>professes to believe, does the administration not propose that?
>
Tim Hermach
Native Forest Council
PO Box 2190
Eugene, OR 97402
(541) 688-2600; fax 689-9835 or 461-2156
web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org