Tiptoeing back into the woods

OREGONIAN
August 10, 2007

The Bush administration is increasing public-lands logging, but it must strike the right balance with other forest values

I't is unfashionable in the Northwest to say anything good, ever, about federal timber policy. But the Bush administration is right, in a broad sense, to increase logging in the region's public forests.

Of course, there are caveats. The sweeping proposal the Bureau of Land Management rolled out Thursday that could open more than 2 million acres of western Oregon to some logging should not be adopted unless it properly protects salmon streams, old-growth forests and threatened wildlife species.

Even so, federal forests not only can stand more commercial logging, but would benefit from it in many circumstances. Much of the forest is dangerously overstocked with second-growth trees and is only one lightning strike or cigarette butt from catastrophe.

Yes, the devil is in the details of every timber sale. But if you look at what's happening on the ground, the U.S. Forest Service, at least, is focusing on the kind of thinning projects that are widely supported.

The Oregonian's Michael Milstein reported Thursday that the Bush administration is pumping millions of dollars into accelerating logging on Forest Service lands. It's a welcome investment not just in the forests, which need thinning, but also in rural communities, which can use the economic activity.

It is true that over time the Bush administration has displayed an unhealthy interest in logging old-growth trees and has spent too much energy and money trying to pry open the region's last remaining roadless areas to commercial logging.

Generally, though, when you look around the region, that's not what's going on now. Few Forest Service sales are drawing appeals. The Bureau of Land Management's new logging plans may prove more contentious. But so far, the administration's push for timber harvest is far from a return to the bad old days of unchecked and unsustainable logging.

As Milstein reported Thursday, even the newly accelerated logging on Forest Service lands will amount to less than 20 percent of the commercial logging that occurred in the 1980s.

The Northwest ought to welcome the investment in thinning projects on public forests. We just wish the Bush administration would make the same kind of investment in recreation and other forest activities that are also vital to the Northwest, especially its rural communities.

Funding for recreation on federal forests in Oregon and Washington has dropped nearly 25 percent since 2003, and the Bush administration is proposing a further cut next year, Milstein reported. The Forest Service has responded by closing some recreation facilities and reducing maintenance of others.

By increasing spending on logging while reducing it for recreation, the Bush administration is pitting one forest value against the other. Anyone who lived through the shutdown of public-lands logging in the 1990s knows how that ends. The people of the Northwest will accept more logging on federal forests -- but not at the cost of their clean water, their fish and wildlife or their favorite recreation.