With environmentalists fuming, logging
companies grousing, and timber rotting, the Bush administration
tries to save face — and a sliver of its grand plans to log
the Northwest’s forest sanctuaries
SELMA, Oregon — Six inches of snow have fallen overnight
in the Siskiyou Mountains on this last weekend in March. For the
moment, the forest west of this small southwest Oregon town is silent.
The scores of protesters who temporarily blocked loggers from getting
to fire-killed trees in the Siskiyou National Forest are gone, blocked
by security guards, a Forest Service closure notice and a new steel
gate. Tom Lavagnino, a Forest Service public
affairs officer, steers his rig up the snowy road that leads to
the popular Babyfoot Lake-Kalmiopsis Wilderness trailhead. Trees
killed nearly three years ago in the lightning-sparked Biscuit Fire
— and toppled by loggers during the past three weeks —
lie charred and scattered like pickup sticks along the road. Thirteen
miles in, less than a mile from the wilderness boundary, he reaches
a cutting unit in the Fiddler timber sale. Suddenly, the revving
of a chainsaw breaks the silence. Even in deep snow, contract loggers
are felling and bucking trees.
The Biscuit Fire ignited on July 13, 2002, when lightning sparked
the first of five fires in the Siskiyou National Forest. Over the
next four weeks, driven by strong winds and record high temperatures,
the blazes merged, eventually raging over 308,000 acres. It became
the largest wildfire in Oregon’s recorded history, costing
$155 million to control.
The fire burned mostly within the rugged Kalmiopsis Wilderness
and adjacent large roadless areas. This half-million-acre knot of
wildlands straddling the Oregon-California border is home to scores
of rare plants, including the Brewer’s spruce, which is found
nowhere else. It’s one of the most diverse conifer forests
in the world.
Nearly 300,000 acres burned
at high intensity, killing 75 percent or more of all vegetation.
But these forests evolved with fire. By the spring of 2003, snow-white
trilliums were sprouting even in the blackened Babyfoot Lake basin,
where virtually every tree burned. Now, at lower elevations, pale
fawn lilies bloom by the hundreds on moist ground near streams and
road cuts, the shiny leaves of red-barked madrone sprout from charred
stumps, and the forest echoes with the woodpecker’s staccato
drill. Life has returned to the Biscuit.
So have the loggers, intent on wresting value from the towering
black snags, some of them more than three feet in diameter. And
the protesters have returned, too, arguing that burned forests should
be allowed to recover naturally, without commercial logging and
industrial-style reforestation. Early on,
Forest Service ground troops wanted to turn the Biscuit into a showcase
for ecological restoration. But politics intervened, and instead,
the Biscuit Fire has set in motion a fierce legal, political and
scientific debate about the right way to heal burned landscapes.
And more is at stake here than the removal of scorched trees or
the mugging of a rare ecosystem.
The Biscuit is fast becoming a test case that will determine how
far the Bush administration can go in developing roadless areas
and wildlife reserves nationwide. The Fiddler sale is the first
to be logged in a reserve set aside as habitat for old-growth species
under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. One of the next projects on
the list is a 333-acre timber sale in Mike’s Gulch, a roadless
area previously protected by the Clinton administration’s
Roadless Area Conservation Rule. In May, President Bush released
his own rule, which puts roadless areas off-limits to logging for
18 months. But the agency says the Biscuit project is exempt from
the 18-month moratorium, so the Mike’s Gulch project could
go ahead. That’s just the beginning:
Two-thirds of the 19,000 acres slated for logging on the Biscuit
are in these late-successional reserves; 40 percent are roadless.
But as the third anniversary of the Biscuit Fire approaches, the
largest national forest fire salvage project in recent history is
unraveling. The Forest Service is having a hard time getting companies
to bid on timber that is decaying and quickly losing its commercial
value. Environmental constraints have forced the agency to scale
back logging near streams and in stands that harbor the threatened
spotted owl. The agency’s expectation that salvage logging
would generate nearly $13 million in revenue is being revised sharply
downward. Political opposition to entering the roadless areas is
growing. Worst of all, in the push to get out the cut, the agency
has squandered an opportunity to fully restore damaged streambanks,
meadows and logging roads, and to reduce the threat of future explosive
crown fires. In the scorched forests of
the Siskiyou Mountains, the Bush administration’s forest resource-extraction
philosophy is getting a harsh reality check. "If
you’re going to try to get into roadless areas and not have
the public be upset, one way to do that is after a big fire,"
says Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice, who is representing
environmentalists in a legal challenge of the Biscuit project. "But
cutting the forest to save the forest never works." That
the Bush administration has chosen to push its logging agenda in
this place, the largest chunk of wild, unroaded public land on the
West Coast, seems a naked invitation to conflict. Past
attempts to develop unprotected wilderness in the Siskiyous have
met with fierce opposition. In 1983, when the Forest Service tried
to extend the Bald Mountain Road, dividing the Kalmiopsis Wilderness
from the unprotected North Kalmiopsis roadless area, Earth First!
activists blocked bulldozers with their bodies. In 1987, after the
Silver Fire burned 97,000 acres of the North Kalmiopsis, environmentalists
sued to stop the salvage logging; Congress finally stepped in to
resolve the legal impasse by shielding the logging from lawsuits.
In 1994, after President Clinton signed the notorious "salvage
rider" banning appeals of salvage logging, environmentalists
staged weeks-long protests over the cutting of big, live trees in
the Siskiyou National Forest under the guise of promoting forest
health. Demonstrations to stop the Biscuit salvage logging
have been no less passionate. During two warm, sunny weeks in March,
after a federal judge lifted an injunction blocking the logging,
protesters staged a series of actions on the road leading to the
Fiddler sale. One man chained himself to a pipe buried in the road.
A woman suspended herself from a bridge, preventing logging crews
from crossing. Dozens were arrested. At
the end of March, a man protesting the logging suspended himself
from a tripod in a downtown Portland intersection, blocking traffic
for an hour and a half and putting the Biscuit salvage on the front
page of the daily newspaper. The Siskiyou
Project, a small local conservation group, has attacked the planned
salvage logging using lawsuits, maps, statistics and photographs
documenting the mosaic pattern of the burn, the natural regeneration
that is occurring, and the impacts of salvage logging. Federal courts
will hear arguments this month on whether the Biscuit project violates
environmental laws and policies protecting old-growth reserves and
roadless areas. Meanwhile, environmental activists are mobilizing
for a summer of attention-grabbing protests.
"We are slowing them down, making it more difficult for them,
letting them know they can’t do this without people noticing,"
says Hazel, an activist who declines to give her last name.
The opposition includes more than just the usual cast of forest
activists. Some residents of the nearby Illinois Valley have formed
an alliance to preserve the tourism potential of the forest, a magnet
for hikers, wildflower lovers and whitewater river enthusiasts.
"Ninety percent of the visitors passing through are on their
way between Crater Lake and the California redwoods," says
Annette Rasch, a resident of nearby Cave Junction. "We want
to get them up into the Siskiyous." Ironically,
the timber industry, which is supposed to benefit from the logging,
doesn’t even want many of the dead trees. That means salvage
logging will produce far less revenue to do the important work of
restoration and fuel reduction — which would protect communities
from future wildfires, when lightning storms inevitably ignite tinder-dry
brush and young trees. "Right now,
we are in the worst possible situation," says Ross Mickey with
the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry
group. "The Forest Service has no money, we have 300,000 acres
that need rehabilitation, and there’s a big risk of reburn."
This story almost had a different ending. In early 2003, as the
ashes of the Biscuit Fire cooled, forest planner and fire specialist
Rich Fairbanks led the Forest Service interdisciplinary team that
developed a plan to address the aftermath of the fire. As part of
a draft environmental impact statement, the team created a range
of alternatives for using a light touch on these charred forests
and staying out of old-growth reserves and roadless areas. The team
focused instead on rehabilitating roads and streams, replanting
scorched forests and meadows, and thinning and underburning to reduce
future fire risks to populated areas.
The team’s original "preferred alternative" would
have produced about 90 million board-feet of timber, most from "matrix"
lands dedicated to multiple-use management, including timber harvest.
(It takes about 5,000 board-feet to fill a log truck, and 10,000
board-feet to build an average-sized home.) It was a true stewardship
plan that recognized the fragility of the burned landscape and the
importance of the wild salmon streams that thread the Siskiyous’
V-shaped valleys. "I wanted to respect the values that were
out there," says Fairbanks, a 30-year Forest Service veteran.
Fairbanks also recognized the opportunity to experiment with fire
in a remote, sparsely populated forest. "This could have been
a laboratory," he says, with forest thinning and prescribed
burns in the "wildland-urban interface" to protect communities,
and a more natural role for fire in remote roadless areas. "With
a large area like this, we could have learned how a large-scale
fire works without endangering local communities." But
everything changed after Douglas County to the north commissioned
a study to gauge the economic windfall of high-intensity salvage
logging after forest fires. Oregon State University Forestry Dean
Hal Salwasser decided to use the Biscuit Fire as a test case. The
Sessions report, named for John Sessions, the OSU forest engineer
who authored it, suggested that with access to old-growth reserves
and roadless areas, loggers could salvage up to 2.5 billion board-feet
of timber from the Biscuit Fire — if federal agencies moved
swiftly. Without aggressive logging, Sessions warned, the burned
forests would grow back to brush and lose their commercial value
for decades or centuries (HCN, 9/1/03: In fire’s aftermath,
salvage logging makes a comeback).
The Sessions
report perked up ears in Washington, D.C., even before its release.
In late May 2003, just two months after Sessions began his work,
former U.S. Rep. Bob Smith, R-Ore., arranged to fly him to Washington,
D.C., to brief U.S. Agriculture Deputy Undersecretary David Tenny
and a number of congressional staffers.
The
Sessions report hit the streets on July 17, as Rich Fairbanks and
his team were rushing to get the draft environmental impact statement
to the printer. Within days, Scott Conroy, supervisor of the Rogue
River-Siskiyou National Forest, was summoned to Washington, D.C.
The Forest Service will not release records detailing whom Conroy
met with there, and Conroy refuses to say. But when Conroy returned,
Fairbanks recalls, his boss was singing a new tune.
"Conroy
said, ‘We’ve got to get more timber.’ I told him,
‘There’s not 2 billion (board-feet) out there.’
He said, ‘Well, we’re going to act like there is.’
" On Aug. 14, the Forest Service announced
that it would delay releasing the draft environmental impact statement
while planners considered the Sessions report. Conroy
denies he got pressure from higher-ups to boost the timber cut.
"What drove my decision to add alternatives was the Sessions
report," he says. "That made it obvious that we hadn’t
considered a full range of alternatives" as required by the
National Environmental Policy Act. Fairbanks and his team were given six weeks to write two new alternatives
for the draft environmental impact statement reflecting the Sessions
report’s findings. The interdisciplinary team, which had neither
time nor adequate staffing to fulfill its new marching orders, scrambled
to meet its deadline. Both of the new alternatives called for logging
in old-growth reserves and roadless areas, although Fairbanks says
he was not allowed to complete an analysis of the ecological costs
of logging in those areas. At a meeting
of the team on Sept. 30, Conroy called for a vote on the six action
alternatives. Twenty-six of the 39 members present favored an alternative
that salvaged just 96 million board-feet of timber, stayed out of
roadless areas, and placed a high priority on watershed and wildlife
habitat rehabilitation. That wasn’t
the answer Conroy was looking for. When the draft environmental
impact statement finally came out, the preferred alternative called
for selling 518 million board-feet of timber — more than five
times what the planning team had recommended — by entering
roadless areas and old-growth reserves. It
was immediately apparent that the Forest Service’s beefed-up
Biscuit plan would not be popular. The draft plan drew fire from
environmentalists, botanists, foresters, and scientists at the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The EPA’s Seattle office warned that the preferred alternative
would have "irretrievable impacts on wilderness potential"
in roadless areas. The agency raised concerns about the impact of
logging on water quality and fish, and on the Port Orford cedar,
a high-value conifer that is threatened by the spread of a root
disease. The Fish and Wildlife Service
urged the Forest Service to stay out of inventoried roadless areas,
noting that they "provide large, relatively unmanaged landscapes
important to biological diversity and the longterm survival of many
at-risk species." Biologist Preston
Sleeger, a regional environmental officer for the Interior Department,
pointed out that threatened spotted owls, which lost more than 68,000
acres of habitat to the Biscuit Fire, had returned to several nest
sites in or near burned areas by the following year and were using
those areas to forage for prey. Some of
the harshest criticism came from University of Washington forest
ecologist Jerry Franklin, an architect of the Northwest Forest Plan.
The 1994 plan established old-growth or "late-successional"
reserves across 24 million acres of public land to provide habitat
for threatened salmon, spotted owls and other old-growth-dependent
species (HCN, 9/27/04: Life after old growth). The plan left the
reserves open to "moderate" amounts of salvage logging,
but Franklin argued against it. "General
salvage of large snags and logs is absolutely antithetical to rapid
recovery of late-successional forest habitats," Franklin wrote.
The big snags provide shade in severely burned areas and habitat
for the spotted owl’s prey, he said. Franklin
urged the agency to replant only where necessary to re-establish
seed sources, and to avoid plantation-style reforestation. Instead,
he said, foresters should try to mimic natural regeneration patterns.
"Naturally disturbed habitat that is undergoing slow natural
reforestation — without salvage or planting — is the
rarest of the forest habitat conditions in the Pacific Northwest,"
he said. The need to comply with owl habitat
and stream protection rules and other standards forced the Forest
Service to scale back its estimated timber yield to 372 million
board-feet in the final Biscuit environmental impact statement.
That was down about 30 percent from the draft proposal, but still
almost four times what the planning team had recommended. The Fish
and Wildlife Service ultimately signed off on the Biscuit plan.
The controversy continued, however. The Forest Service took the
position that an old-growth forest, once burned, is no longer an
old-growth forest: "We’re not in the wilderness, we’re
not clear-cutting and we’re not cutting old growth,"
Lavagnino said. But environmentalists responded
that an old-growth forest with dead trees remains an old-growth
forest. They argued that the burned landscapes were recovering on
their own, and said that many of the wild areas were worthy of wilderness
protection. Although the agency denied that it would allow clear-cutting,
it would require loggers to leave, on average, a mere four snags
per acre. The Forest Service pointed out
that the areas proposed for salvage equal just 4 percent of the
nearly 500,000 acres within the Biscuit Fire’s perimeter.
But Barbara Ullian of the Siskiyou Project said that statistic disguises
the intensity of logging in selected areas. For example, 90 percent
of the acres slated for logging are within in the watershed of the
wild and scenic Illinois River. Fairbanks,
the planning team leader, was pulled off the Biscuit project as
soon as the environmental impact statement was done. He retired
on April 15, deeply discouraged, and firmly convinced his agency
had sacrificed good land-management practices and solid science.
What’s even more disturbing, he said, is that Conroy and the
Bush administration appeared to be motivated not by a desire to
restore the forests, or even to help local mills, but by an anti-environmental
agenda. "They don’t care about
the (timber) volume," he said. "They want to get into
the roadless areas. They want to poke environmentalists in the eye."
But even though the administration apparently succeeded in overruling
well-meaning forest managers, its grand plan quickly began to unravel.
The Forest Service has not tried to defend the salvage logging on
ecological grounds. Instead, the project has always been couched
in economic terms. Its goals, the agency says, are to provide an
economic benefit to communities in southwest Oregon, to reduce the
future risk of catastrophic wildfire, and to generate millions for
restoring damaged roads and stream banks, replanting forests and
meadows, and thinning and burning to create fuel breaks.
The Wild and Scenic Illinois River; this spot is just downstream
from the Fiddler sale.. Rolf Skar
But on the economics, too, doubts surfaced from the very beginning.
An economic study the Forest Service itself commissioned as part
of the Biscuit plan concluded that there was no shortage of timber
available to mills in southwest Oregon, most of which have retooled
in the last decade to handle smaller logs. It predicted that putting
372 million board-feet of burned timber on the market would create
a temporary glut, driving down prices and hurting private timberland
owners. Robert Wolf, a retired forester
and former congressional staffer who lives in Maryland, has spent
60 years analyzing the costs of the Forest Service timber sale program.
He predicted in November 2004 that the Biscuit salvage logging would
generate no money at all — zero — for restoration of
burned areas, fuels treatment or even replanting the logged units.
He urged Congress to step in and pay for the necessary work.
"I pointed out to the forest supervisor that he was going to
lose money, even on the original, 96 million (board-foot) proposal,"
said Wolf. "But the Forest Service is like a used car dealer:
They lose money on every sale, but they make up for it in the volume."
Even the timber industry kept its distance from the salvage logging
plans, says Ross Mickey of the American Forest Resource Council.
"The Biscuit was still burning when we met with the Forest
Service and told them we didn’t want any salvage, we wanted
them to focus on rehabilitation," he says. Mickey
admits that’s a little disingenuous. The industry knew the
Forest Service needed revenue from salvage logging to pay for reforestation.
But he insists the industry’s real goal was to get every possible
acre replanted. "We want a forest there," he says. "Without
active tending of plantations, there isn’t going to be a forest
there." So far, the Biscuit project
has created several dozen jobs for contract loggers and supplied
timber to a handful of mills in southwest Oregon. Lavagnino says
that many of the big trees are unexpectedly sound, possibly because
the past two winters have been warmer and drier than usual.
But Dave Schott of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association
says the timber is quickly losing its value. For example, he says,
ponderosa pines killed by fire develop a blue stain within six to
eight months that makes them unsuitable for paneling and other high-value
products. One of the largest mills in the
area, the Boise Cascade mill near Medford, has no interest in bidding
on any Biscuit sales because of the timber’s low value, Schott
says. Another mill, in Cave Junction, will buy only large ponderosa
pines. "Frankly, 70 percent of the
wood in the Biscuit has no value," he says. Knowing
these sales would bring low bids, the Forest Service adjusted its
minimum bids to compensate for the high costs of logging the timber.
For example, trees cut in roadless areas and old-growth reserves
will have to be hauled out by helicopter, which costs $250 to $300
per 1,000 board-feet. So the Forest Service asked less than $50
per 1,000 board-feet for some sales, a rock-bottom price.
Grasses and wildflowers, including long leafed phlox, paint brush
and sily balsam root, have covered the burn area. Barbara Ullian
But Schott says even the low minimum bids won’t be enough to
make these sales attractive. "Anything that has to be helicopter
yarded won’t pencil out," he predicts. And
while Forest Service timber sale administrators are deployed to get
this blackened timber out of the woods, most green tree sales have
been on hold. "Everything the Forest
Service has been doing for most of the past three years has been focused
on the Biscuit sale," Schott says. Economically,
it seems clear that the Biscuit Salvage is a bust. The Forest Service
now concedes it won’t come close to selling the 372 million
board-feet of timber it projected. Some sales have attracted no bids
and have had to be withdrawn. As of mid-April, only 65 million board-feet
of Biscuit timber were under contract. The
Fiddler sale was supposed to yield 14.5 million board-feet, but now
that stream buffers have been marked, the volume is expected to be
closer to 8 million. Multiply that reduction by all the Biscuit sales
yet to be auctioned, says Lavagnino, and "probably, realistically,
100 million board-feet will come out of here." That’s
only slightly more than Rich Fairbanks’ planning team had originally
proposed, in a plan that would have stayed out of roadless areas and
old-growth reserves, and surely would have generated less controversy
and delay. "There’s no way we would
have jumped on (as a party in a lawsuit against the Forest Service)
with that original proposal," says Rick Brown, with Defenders
of Wildlife. "We are not litigation-happy. We are not focused
on suing the federal government." He says that while local groups
might not have supported the original proposal, they would have "looked
the other way" rather than fighting it. And
the original Biscuit plan would not have tied salvage logging to restoration,
as the final plan does. The agency projected salvage logging would
generate $13 million for restoration, but if the revenue doesn’t
materialize, the healing work may never happen. "If
they get a quarter of that ($13 million), I’ll be surprised,"
Schott says. "We certainly will have enough to reforest the logged
units," Lavagnino says. "That’s a given." But
whether the agency will be able to pay for restoration remains to
be seen, he says. "We figured a minimum bid would cover the cost.
It’s not clear that will happen now."
Meanwhile, the costs continue to skyrocket. The agency spent $5.8
million just preparing environmental documents and doing early restoration
and timber sale prep work between October 2002 and September 2004,
says Forest Service spokeswoman Patty Burel. That doesn’t include
the cost of other emergency rehabilitation work done while the fire
was still burning and immediately afterward. It doesn’t include
the cost of administering timber sales on the ground since logging
began late last year. Nor does it include the cost of reforesting
the 6,000 acres replanted so far, or of administering future salvage
sales.
Robert Wolf thinks the final numbers will be abysmal. Based on the
agency’s money-losing experiences with the 1995 salvage rider
and Montana’s Bitterroot Fire Salvage project, he projects
that the Forest Service will lose $1,500 on every acre of the Biscuit
logged. And Wolf predicts that even the agency’s vastly scaled-back
projections are overly optimistic: "They’re not likely
to make 100 million (board-feet)," he says. Politically,
things don’t look much better for the administration, as pressure
is building to protect the Siskiyou’s roadless areas. On April
1, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, D, asked Northwest Regional Forester
Linda Goodman to delay logging in roadless areas until a lawsuit
brought by environmentalists is resolved. That could come as soon
as late May. To go forward before that would violate the public
trust at a time when tensions already are high, the governor says.
On May 5, the Bush administration finalized its new roadless area
rule. The new rule repeals the Clinton rule, which protected 58
million acres of forest, and it gives governors 18 months to petition
the federal government to continue to protect their states’
roadless areas. While roadless areas nationwide will remain off-limits
to logging during those 18 months, work can go ahead in roadless
areas in the Biscuit project, says Forest Service spokesman Rex
Holloway. The agency has not yet said whether
it plans to do so. Kulongoski immediately blasted the new rule,
saying the federal government is shirking its duty to manage the
national forests. He and other Western governors oppose the new
process, because it will be complicated and costly, and could leave
states vulnerable to lawsuits (HCN, 8/16/04: Feds pass roadless
headache to states). Activists are already mounting campaigns against
it. Meanwhile, in the forests scorched by the Biscuit Fire, the
grand salvage-logging plans have been reduced to ashes. "The
Forest Service invited this train wreck," says Kristen Boyles,
the Earthjustice attorney. "They had an original proposal that
was a responsible proposal. The timber to be salvaged would have
gotten out quickly. By expanding this sale, by trying to make it
a poster child for the things that this administration wants to
push, like logging in late-successional reserves that were supposed
to provide habitat for old-growth species, they have made this a
huge controversy. "They had a chance
to do the right thing, to make forestry work after a big fire, and
they blew it." Kathie Durbin writes from Portland, Oregon.
CONTACT: Siskiyou Project www.siskiyou.org,
541-592-4459 Tom Lavagnino Rogue River-Siskiyou
National Forest, 541-899-3840 Dave Schott
Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, 541-773-5329
