Critics Whipsaw the Forest Service for Logging on Federal Land
http://forests.org/-- Forest Conservation Archives
12/22/98
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Title: Critics Whipsaw the Forest Service for Logging on Federal Land
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 12/22/98
The United States Forest Service is a bit like comedian Rodney
Dangerfield, whose main laugh line is ``I don't get no respect.''
Environmentalists think it does the bidding of the logging, mining,
and ranching industries. Those who make their living from national
forests say the agency too often capitulates to ``preservationists''
more interested in obscure plant and animal species than in
hard-working rural folks. Budget hawks say it wastes hundreds of
millions of dollars a year, and its policies are continually under
pressure by lawmakers.
The latest round came last Thursday when a coalition of
environmental groups and businesses filed suit in federal court in
Vermont. They want to halt logging on all federal land until the
Forest Service compares the economic benefits of a standing forest
versus a pile of logs or wood chips.
Perhaps all this political tussle is not surprising, given that the
Forest Service, a $3 billion, 30,000-employee organization, controls
192 million acres - with all the wealth and emotional ties to nature
that represents. But these days, the agency is under unusual pressure.
Conservative members of Congress charge that the agency is
conducting an illegal lobbying campaign to advance its policies, one
some lawmakers think is too ``green'' in its approach to timber
cutting and cattle grazing.
On the basis of 1,500 pages of Forest Service documents, Rep. Don
Young and Sen. Frank Murkowski, both of Alaska, have asked the General
Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate. ``The records ... demonstrate
that the Forest Service used career employees and taxpayer dollars to
create a propaganda campaign designed to sway public opinion in a
manner expressly pro- hibited,'' the two Republicans said in a letter
to the GAO. As chairmen of the House Resources Committee and the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Young and Murkowski
have considerable clout.
Earlier this year, Mr. Young demanded information on employees
Involved in decisions regarding grazing rights on national forests in
the Southwest - including membership in, contributions to, or contacts
with environmental groups that had sued to restrict cattle ranching on
environmentally sensitive land.
Political pressure
Environmentalists and commentators called it a McCarthyesque
threat. When Eleanor Towns, head of the Forest Service's Southwest
regional office, replied that First Amendment privacy rights forbid
such probing, Young dropped the issue. But he had made his point.
From the opposite quarter, meanwhile, conservation groups in Oregon
and Washington State recently filed suit to stop the Forest Service
from swapping land with corporate owners. Such deals are meant to
consolidate ``checkerboard'' holdings that date back to 19th-century
railroad land grants while making commercially valuable timberland
available to loggers and mill owners.
The US Department of Agriculture (the Forest Service's parent
agency) is investigating the land-exchange program, which critics say
does not include enough environmental protection.
Environmentalists and fiscal watchdog groups also criticize the
Forest Service for, in effect, subsidizing the timber industry through
the below-cost sale of rights to log billions of board-feet of timber.
The GAO recently reported that from 1995 to 1997 the federal
government lost just over $1 billion.
Industry defenders say managing national forests for timber
production as well as wildlife and recreation supplies the nation with
wood and paper products while providing thousands of jobs for rural
communities. But that argument does not mollify critics, who point to
environmental degradation.
``All too often, these logging-based revenues have come at the
expense of damaging clearcuts, eroded soils, degraded water quality,
and impaired fish and wildlife habitat,'' says Rep. George Miller of
California, senior Democrat on the House Resources Committee.
Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck concedes that the agency must
adjust to an era in which public values demand a different approach -
one that emphasizes ``watershed health and integrity'' over commodity
production.
Even though the timber program has decreased by 70 percent in less
than 10 years, timber production still drives the priorities and the
reward system, and that needs to change, Dr. Dombeck told a meeting of
foresters in September.
'What we leave behind'
Dombeck, a biologist who has been on the job for less than two
years, says his goal is ``to focus less on what we take from the land
and more on what we leave behind ... less on the volume of wood fiber
removed and more on the quality of the water, the diversity of the
species, the productive capacity of the land itself.''
Dombeck has ordered a moratorium on the building of logging roads
in national forests, and he has expressed doubts about the wisdom of
clearcutting - which shocked the agency's self-described ``timber
beasts,'' who have prided themselves on ``getting out the cut.''