U.S. to Triple Logging in Sierra

The U.S. Forest Service announced Thursday that it would triple logging in the Sierra Nevada to levels not seen in a decade as part of a fire prevention strategy that casts aside Clinton-era restrictions on timber cutting.

Regional Forester Jack Blackwell, who presented the plan in Sacramento on Thursday, said the changes were necessary to step up forest thinning that would lessen the threat of forest fires. “If we don’t take those actions, we’re going to burn ‘em up. It’s as simple as that.”

Under the new plan, logging levels will climb in the Sierra to 330 million board-feet of green timber a year, roughly three times what is now allowed. However, that is still less than half the amount cut during the peak years of commercial logging in the range in the late 1980s.

The Forest Service, which oversees 11.5 million acres of national forestland in the Sierra, signaled at the start of the Bush administration that it was unhappy with a stringent and complex set of environmental regulations adopted just before President Clinton left office.

The latest plan officially drops many of those restrictions, permitting not only the removal of far more trees but cutting ones as large as 30 inches in diameter in old-growth stands. It also loosens habitat protections for rare species such as the California spotted owl, Yosemite toad, Pacific fisher and willow flycatcher.

The changes fit into a larger strategy by the Bush administration to allow more commercial logging on public land. Last year, the administration won passage of federal legislation relaxing environmental standards it said had hampered timber cutting in Western forests dense with fire-ready growth.

The new Sierra plan was sharply criticized by environmentalists, who said it discounted years of study and millions of dollars of scientific review that led to the Clinton-era protections. “We just threw all that work out the window,” said Craig Thomas of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign.

Others noted the Forest Service had retreated from promises that 75% of the logging would occur near communities vulnerable to wildfires. In its final form, the plan lowers that figure to 50%.

“It appears that the new plan is designed to let the agency go after larger trees farther from communities,” said John Buckley of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.

Blackwell’s action, which officially amends a Forest Service management plan for the 11 national forests that cover much of the range, was the latest development in years of wrangling over logging levels in the Sierra. Timber cutting plummeted in the 1990s, largely out of concern for the habitat of the California spotted owl. The 3-year-old Clinton plan reduced logging even further and created 4 million acres of old-growth reserves where only trees less than a foot in diameter could be cut -- a limit that effectively ended commercial logging on those lands.

The new plan maintains the reserves in name only, allowing the logging of trees up to 30 inches across the range. The Forest Service says that most trees cut will be much smaller, but that raising the diameter limit will let loggers take more commercially valuable timber -- thus generating revenue to help pay for the removal of small, worthless growth that fuels fires.

Blackwell estimated that only a tiny fraction of the trees 20 to 30 inches in diameter would be removed. “The notion we’re going to run out there and take all of them is totally false,” he said.

“I think this is a good first start,” said David Bischel of the California Forestry Assn. “I think the Forest Service has finally recognized the most significant environmental challenge they have to deal with is catastrophic fire, and they have laid out an aggressive strategy to deal with that risk.”

First outlined in detail last year, the new Sierra blueprint has been controversial within the Forest Service as well as outside. In internal reviews, Forest Service biologists and other government scientists said they were aware of no scientific justification for weakening the Clinton-era standards and warned that increased logging could harm declining wildlife species.

Blackwell said his final decision took the criticisms into account. “We have greatly reduced the amount of spotted owl [nesting areas] we will be impacting,” he said.

He also cited a statement by a regional official of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The Forest Service is obligated to conserve wildlife. But it must also address the risk of catastrophic wildfire and its impacts to communities and wildlife,” said Steve Thompson, manager of the agency’s California and Nevada operations. “We believe the Forest Service has struck a reasonable balance with this challenge.”

Critics contend that the environmental rollbacks were driven mainly by a desire to give timber companies more access to the federally managed forests.

“I don’t think there’s any scientific information I’m aware of that would justify the changes,” said Philip Rundel, a UCLA biology professor and member of the Institute of the Environment. “Allowing trees to be cut up to 30 inches is really going to dramatically change the old-growth process. You can’t take a lot of trees from old growth and call it old growth.”

University of Washington professor Jerry Franklin, whose work on old growth helped shape national forest policy in the 1990s, said the Sierra restrictions adopted under Clinton may have been too rigid. “At times relatively large trees are going to need to be removed,” he said. “But I think this correction is excessive. This one swung back too much in the other direction of fuels and timber.”