SUMMARY:
Contention over logging remains an obstacle to forest restoration.The 2003 law enacted to help hasten restoration of the national forests and reduce the dangers of wildfire to homeowners and communities hasn't worked, the head of a Missoula-based environmental group told U.S. senators at a recent hearing in Washington, D.C.
“The purpose of this hearing is to review implementation of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act,” Matthew Koehler of the WildWest Institute reminded the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests July 19. “Š This is a somewhat difficult task for the simple reason that since the HFRA was signed into law in December 2003, so little work has been accomplished under the HFRA by the U.S. Forest Service.”
He'd promised as much: “You can rest assured that we will do everything in our power to stop projects that don't protect communities or restore our public forests,” Koehler said when President Bush signed the law 2 1/2 years ago. To their credit, Koehler, his organization and other like-minded groups have also worked hard in advocating forest restoration and fuel reduction projects under the law, but there's a decided our-way-or-no-way aspect to their efforts.
The trouble is, what he and others see as a threat to communities and forests sometimes are the very things others believe will protect communities and forests. There's common ground to be discovered between the different factions out there, but it's an excruciatingly slow, expensive process to find it.
The Healthy Forest Restoration Act was spawned by growing concerns over the condition of our national forests. Topping the list of concerns is fire danger. Many forests that evolved with periodic fires have changed over the near-century that people have been fighting forest fires. Fire suppression has resulted in denser forests, insect and disease epidemics that kill trees on a massive scale, and other ecological changes that leave forests more likely to fuel large, intense fire when lightning, campfire or some other spark inevitably kindles a blaze.
It's a manageable situation - or could be. Areas can be thinned to restore more natural tree densities and species composition. The amount of forest fuels can be reduced through thinning and controlled burning. Doing so around homes and communities can reduce the potential for loss of property and life when fires burn through.
The Healthy Forest law attempted to create a streamlined process for accomplishing this. The Forest Service has for many years whittled away at the problem, but the constant threat of appeals and lawsuits, mostly over logging, has mired the agency in what its top brass calls “analysis paralysis.” The new law created new procedures aimed at bringing stakeholders together, coming up with a workable plan, and getting the work done.
What the law didn't do is resolve the fundamental issue at the root of most of the contention over matters of forest stewardship: Is commercial logging legitimate or not?
Nor did the law provide nearly enough money to do the landscape-scale work, even the portions about which there's virtually no argument - the areas closest in to communities.
When people talk about “fuel reduction” in the forests, they're talking about removing trees. Many of those trees have value. They can be used for lumber, pulp or other wood products. The more and better timber cut, the more money they potentially can produce.
Some people are antagonistic toward commercial logging because of historic logging practices and excesses; some people oppose it on principle. But what opponents of logging don't do is offer a practical alternative to logging as a means of generating revenue to pay for forest stewardship. Fees collected through the sale of timber is central to Forest Service funding, and despite all the flaws with that system, there's no real movement in Congress to change it.
In Utopia, forest management is funded by plentiful federal taxes levied on the filthy rich. Here in America, the Forest Service stands in line for funding, competing with things like the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina recovery, farm subsidies, schools and all the rest.
Logging isn't the fix for unhealthy forests. But it's a legitimate and useful tool worth employing wherever appropriate. Don't expect to see a whole lot of forest restoration accomplished without it.
Meanwhile, another fire season has arrived in western Montana. Plumes of smoke rising on the horizon are a reminder that, if people can't resolve this longstanding debate over logging, nature will.
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