Salvaging the Biscuit: Environmentalists,industry sqaure off over plan
author: Register Guard Editorial
 e-mail: ofreg@hotmail.com
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Controversy over Biscuit Salvage continues
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February 9, 2004
Salvaging the Biscuit: Environmentalists, industry square off over plan
A Register-Guard Editorial
When the U.S. Forest Service asked for feedback on its proposal to log and replant trees in portions of Southern Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains that burned in the Biscuit Fire of 2002, it got more than it bargained for.
By last month's deadline, the Siskiyou and Rogue River National Forest received more than 23,000 comments on the agency's environmental review of seven alternative approaches, including Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy's preferred choice of logging 518 million board feet on 30,000 acres of the 500,000 acres that were burned in the fire.
The volume of responses is hardly surprising, given the high stakes involved. The recovery project will establish a precedent for future fire salvage efforts across the nation and will have a huge impact on the stunningly diverse, delicate and beautiful Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion.
The issues are complex, but the core question is easy to frame: What should national forest managers do with lands burned by a forest fire? Should they back off and let nature take its course? Should they move aggressively to log broad swaths of the burned area, potentially boosting the local economy and providing revenues that can be used to give the forests a head start on recovery? Or is there, as many believe, including this newspaper, a responsible and more acceptable middle ground?
Environmental groups and the timber industry have squared off over the Biscuit recovery plan, with each side mustering scientists and economists wielding studies and statistics to support their arguments.
Conservationists argue that the preferred plan calls for excessive logging and replanting that will increase fire hazards and create artificial landscapes in one of the most ecologically distinct forests in the West. They also say Conroy's plan would make the Biscuit burn the latest victim in the Bush administration's systematic efforts to eliminate the Clinton-era roadless rule.
Timber industry officials, along with many local officials in Southern Oregon, argue that the proper response is a no-brainer: Burned logs should be harvested to benefit the economy, enhance recovery and reduce the danger of future forest fires. They complain that the slow pace of federal decision making has allowed timber to rot and has diminished the economic benefits of harvesting it.
As Forest Service officials work their way through the public feedback, they should pay particular attention to comments submitted by Jerry Franklin, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington and one of the nation's most highly regarded experts in his field.
Franklin was the principal author of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which created a network based on old growth forests, known as late successional reserves, to protect habitat for the northern spotted owl and other species on national forests throughout the region. Over the years, Franklin has earned a reputation for honesty and candor - one that has won him the sometimes grudging respect of many on both sides of the Biscuit debate.
Franklin makes a convincing argument that aggressive logging in the Biscuit region isn't necessary to reduce fire danger and could actually threaten old-growth reserves for decades to come. More than two-thirds of the land that the preferred plan targets for salvage logging lies in old-growth reserves, where nature, not logging and restoration efforts, is supposed to call the shots. As Franklin notes, this network of reserves was created much larger than it had to be for wildlife habitat for the precise purpose of sustaining large fires and then allowing them to naturally recover.
It's easy to forget that Western forests evolved with wildfires and can recover as they have for centuries on their own. Human intervention can speed recovery, but it also can inadvertently misdirect and undermine it. Re-creating natural forests is still a job left largely to nature.
Meanwhile, the economics of logging the Biscuit burn are looking more questionable as time passes. Even logging proponents concede that much of the timber has now lost much of its value to decay, and a preliminary report by Forest Service scientists last week shows there may be nearly a third less timber within the burn area than the agency had originally anticipated.
Given these hard realities, Conroy should abandon his preferred plan, which calls for five times more logging than the Forest Service proposed last spring before the industry-friendly White House took an active interest in salvage planning. Instead, the supervisor should select one of several alternatives that call for significantly lower timber harvests ranging from 96 million board feet to 133 million board feet.
Unlike the preferred plan, these alternatives prudently restrict logging to parts of the national forest where timber sales normally would be permitted. They would protect the tens of thousands of acres within the Biscuit Fire's boundary that are part of a national inventory of roadless lands.
These roadless areas should be allowed to recover on their own, as they have since the dawn of time, even if their official status remains in question pending appeal of a federal judge's ruling last summer that overturned the roadless rule. While natural recovery can take decades longer, it's the only way to ensure that these areas, some of which are prime candidates for expansion of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, will retain their natural landscape and biological diversity.
By selecting an alternative that provides reduced levels of logging and protects roadless areas, the Forest Service can still provide some salvage logging, while protecting the bulk of a region of extraordinary natural richness and beauty.
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homepage: http://www.wildforest.org
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If you surreptitiously say "boosting the local economy and providing revenues that can be used to give the forests a head start on recovery", as if either proposition were true, people might believe they are true.