U.S. Considers 80% Increase in Sierra Logging

The U.S. Forest Service is considering a policy that would increase logging in the Sierra Nevada by as much as 80%, easing restrictions put in place to protect the California spotted owl and the older trees that the species prefers.

Allowing more trees to be cut would provide jobs to hard-pressed Sierra towns and ease the danger of wildfire, without jeopardizing animal and plant species that have been dwindling, Forest Service officials in California have concluded.

But the new policy, which was to be proposed publicly today, is encountering serious opposition from environmental groups. Release of the proposal may be held up so the policy can be further reviewed by Clinton administration officials in Washington, Forest Service sources said.

The proposal would abandon a 1993 strategy to protect the spotted owl and its old-growth forest habitat. Logging has been steadily curtailed--and the biggest, oldest trees placed off limits--since government scientists reported that the loss of Sierra old growth was threatening the California spotted owl’s survival.

The new logging policy is being considered despite recent studies by Forest Service scientists and other government experts that the Sierra’s owl population is still declining at a rate of at least 5% a year and that only 15% of the old-growth forests are intact.

Timber industry representatives are hailing the plan to allow more logging in the Sierra--and the taking of some large old-growth trees--as a long overdue return to common-sense forestry.

“This is a significant improvement,” said John Hoffman, vice president of public affairs for the California Forestry Assn. “It does not bring back the harvest levels of the 1980s, but it certainly restores a balance between environmental and practical considerations.”

The Forest Service’s proposal to ease limits on logging almost certainly will reignite the debate in environmental circles about the depth of the Clinton administration’s commitment to forest protection.

“Forest protection clearly is Clinton’s Achilles’ heel, and this will pinch even more,” said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s executive director. The Sierra Club this year called on the federal government to not allow loggers to cut any more trees in national forests.

In May, the administration interceded to prevent the release of a Forest Service plan that would have allowed more logging in the Sierra, but not as much as the latest proposal.

At the time, White House representatives said they wanted any new logging policy to take into account the results of a comprehensive, congressionally mandated study of the Sierra environment. That study, released in June, found that a variety of plants and animals in the Sierra were on the road to extinction and cited heavy logging as a main culprit.

“I can see no scientific justification for cutting more trees, especially large trees,” said R.J. Gutierrez, a Humboldt State University wildlife biologist under contract with the Forest Service to study the owls.

The Forest Service proposal would allow sizable logging increases in the Sierra--80% over 1995 levels and about 50% more than what was cut in 1994. More important to the timber industry, it would allow harvesting of old-growth trees now out of bounds.

Insisting that the largest trees in the forest--those more than 40 inches in diameter--would still be protected, Forest Service officials argue that the new formula would spare most of the habitat of owls and other creatures that depend on old growth.

But critics, including scientists who contributed to the recently completed congressional study of the Sierra, say that Sierra old growth consists of complex clusters of mature trees of varying age and size that the Forest Service plan does not protect.

“I have seen no indication that they have a strategy explicitly identifying old-growth reserves and showing how they intend to keep them intact,” said Jerry Franklin, a University of Washington professor of forestry who coauthored the section of the Sierra study dealing with old-growth forests.

The forest plan would mean about a 50% increase in jobs and nearly 400% more revenue for Sierra counties, according to a Forest Service analysis. A quarter of the revenue that the Forest Service receives from commercial logging in national forests goes to the counties where the forests are.