Silence, not trees, falling in NW forests
Lawsuits, court orders and agency delays bring logging to historically low levels and curtail activities such as road work and firewood cutting

By Michael Milstein
Sunday, June 24, 2001

Logging in the Northwest's federal forests has quietly come to a virtual standstill this year, driven to its lowest level since the beginning of the modern federal logging program by overlapping court orders and lawsuits.

In much of the Mount Hood National Forest east of Portland, officials have even stopped issuing permits to local residents who want to cut firewood.

Federal foresters in Western Oregon, Washington and Northern California this year will offer about 1 percent of the timber volume they sold in 1990, the end of the Northwest's logging boom. They will offer less than 5 percent of the wood promised under the Northwest Forest Plan, the 1994 Clinton administration compromise to protect wildlife such as the northern spotted owl while still permitting sustainable logging.

Entangled in lawsuits filed by environmental groups over the threatened spotted owl and protected salmon, cutting this year has suddenly sunk below the levels of the early 1990s when lawsuits over the spotted owl held up timber sales before the Northwest Forest Plan, federal records show.

The total volume of wood made available by the U.S. Forest Service and federal Bureau of Land Management, which once turned more timber out of the Northwest than any other region in the country, is now the lowest it's been since before World War II. That's a roughly 99 percent drop from the nearly 4 billion board feet they sold for close to $1 billion in 1990.

Example: The Northwest Forest Plan directed the BLM to offer 211 million board feet for cutting annually. Last year, beset by lawsuits, the BLM offered 69 million board feet. So far this fiscal year, now three-quarters over, the agency offered just 6 million board feet in four timber sales west of the Cascades.

That's less wood than is routinely sold by most individual national forests in the arid interior West, where trees do not grow as fast or as large.

"We're having a hard time keeping any program afloat," said Chris Strebig, a BLM spokesman in Portland.

The Northwest Forest Plan calls for the Forest Service to offer 600 million board feet in the Northwest. Last year, though, it offered 62 million board feet. So far this fiscal year, the Forest Service has offered about a third of that: 22 million board feet.

Much of the difference has been made up by more efficient sawmills producing more lumber from fewer trees and wood imported from other regions and countries.

Conservation groups see the federal logging shutdown as the inevitable legacy of decades of overcutting and a failure by federal agencies to follow wildlife safeguards in the Northwest Forest Plan. The timber industry sees it as a failure of the Northwest Forest Plan, which pledged to restore the health of the region's forests through responsible cutting and wildlife protections.

"This is the worst it's ever been since the Forest Service started selling wood," said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry group in Portland. "There's nothing in the pipeline, and there's no volume ready to be sold, so there's no relief in sight."

He said industry groups will soon call on the Bush administration and new Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth to rework the forest plan.

"We've got a broken process out here in the West, and something desperately needs to be done," Partin said.

The drop in logging this year has drawn little attention outside the industry because it's not due to any single reason, policy or court directive. Instead, it owes to a snarl of court orders, lawsuits, internal agency decisions and paperwork bottlenecks that together have put nearly all planned federal timber sales on hold and left all the involved agencies eager to avoid blame for it.

Many sales were first delayed by a lawsuit alleging that federal agencies were not following Northwest Forest Plan guidelines for surveying forests for sensitive plants and animals before logging. Although that is now settled, it was followed last month by an appeals court ruling that blocked many of the same sales until agencies more thoroughly evaluate their impacts on protected salmon.

In August, the Gifford Pinchot Task Force of Olympia and eight other Northwest conservation groups filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington. They allege that the Fish and Wildlife Service has allowed logging in habitat of the northern spotted owl without tracking the number of owls and acres of habitat affected.

"Nothing in the Northwest Forest Plan says you can take all the owls you want," said Dan Rohlf, director of the Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center in Portland, which is representing the groups. "It said you have to look at how many you're taking, and they're not doing that."

It's possible federal biologists are allowing the owl to decline toward extinction without realizing it, he said.

Although there has been no ruling in the case, the Fish and Wildlife Service has since stopped issuing clearances, known as biological opinions, required by the federal Endangered Species Act for any activities, including timber sales, that may disturb spotted owls.

There is little point to issuing the opinions now if a court order in the case could force the agency to redo them later, said Jenny Valdivia of the Fish and Wildlife Service regional office in Portland.

Without a valid biological opinion, timber sales in spotted owl habitat -- including most Northwest forests -- cannot legally proceed. Federal forest managers are also reluctant to even contract for the eventual logging of such sales because a later court decision blocking the logging could put them in breach of the contract and leave them liable for damages.

"We don't want to put ourselves at risk for that," said Forest Service spokesman Rex Holloway. "Basically, everything is on hold."

What little logging does occur is limited mainly to thinning on young tree plantations, which contain no spotted owl habitat.

The consequences extend beyond large-scale logging. Biological opinions also are required for other routine activities such as firewood cutting and road maintenance because the noise from chain saws and equipment could affect owls.

Because the Fish and Wildlife Service has stopped issuing such opinions, forest managers cannot allow those activities during the spotted owl nesting season, which runs through July. So employees of the Mount Hood National Forest have stopped issuing permits to residents seeking to remove downed trees for firewood.

Other forests have halted road work.

"These are things we've always done, but we're just not in a legal position to allow it," said Mount Hood District Ranger Jeff Walter. "It's getting pretty frustrating for people."