Logging Fest on Public Land

A century of logging, mining, grazing and other commercial exploitation was robbing California’s most magnificent mountain range of its health and beauty. The pioneering Sierra Nevada Framework, adopted by Congress in 2000, was a hopeful attempt to restore the mountains for the bear, deer, bobcats, hawks, humans -- including reasonable numbers of loggers -- and other species that roam it.

The plan grew out of a study ordered by Congress. U.S. Forest Service scientists and others worked on it for more than a decade, and nearly everyone except the logging companies liked what they came up with. Yet today, the Bush administration is preparing to junk critical protections in the framework and invite the loggers back in. This is a mistake. It’s an insult to all those who worked on the plan. It’s theft of recreational benefits from the millions of Californians who enjoy the 11 million acres of forests administered by the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture.

Forest Service officials claim their new plan is only “a draft of a draft.” But it clearly follows the pattern set by President Bush in his ludicrously labeled Healthy Forests Initiative and in the recent plan to permit logging in the new Giant Sequoia National Monument -- ostensibly to prevent fires.

“We are facing a crisis of forest health of unprecedented proportions,” Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said this week. But her crisis is phony. Last year’s fires were catastrophic largely because of the Western drought. In fact, California had fewer blazes than normal. Many forests are fire-prone because they are overgrown and their floors are clogged with downed trees and brush, a natural condition that is aggravated in many areas by a flawed policy of putting out every fire as quickly as possible.

Norton claimed that 190 million acres of public land and surrounding communities are at risk. That’s an area the size of all the national forests. But the risk is primarily in those limited areas where development has crowded a forest and a fire could threaten homes and lives.

The Sierra Nevada Framework addressed this threat directly by allowing crews to cut trees up to 30 inches in diameter in stands that civilization has butted up against. Fire danger in other areas would be reduced through thinning of brush and smaller trees and through the use of controlled burns.

Now it appears the Forest Service will allow cutting of 30-inch trees in most of the Sierra and the virtual clear-cutting of areas of up to two acres. The agency says it needs to allow this to get the money to clear endangered areas. So it would let the chainsaws wail where fire presents no danger to any development -- even though new studies show that undergrowth is thickest, and fire danger highest, in areas that someone has already logged.

The logging industry isn’t likely to challenge this illogic. That will be up to kayakers, hunters, bird-watchers, backpackers, sightseers, car campers, wildflower aficionados, nature photographers, fishermen, mountaineers and others who simply think the government should be protecting beautiful wild places, not offering them up to chainsaws.