Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Timber bill won't spare Virginia's forests
Christian Trejbal
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- Christiansburg's search for sidewalks
- Local lawmakers have plenty of ideas
- Pining for the pools in Christiansburg
- Don't believe the First & Main rumors
From the RoundTable blog
The folks in Washington who gave America the Healthy Forest Initiative, which equates forest health with felled timber, are at it again. This time, "forest recovery" after a catastrophe provides the cover for chopping down trees.
The Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act (HR 4200) would allow logging on public land after a catastrophic fire, hurricane or other disaster. To streamline extraction, the act would prevent the public, the courts and those pesky environmental laws from interfering.
Supporters hold up the blackened trees left behind after massive fires in the West as the sort of lumber loggers would remove, but eastern forests would feed sawmills, too. Fires, ice storms and hungry gypsy moths would open the George Washington and Jefferson national forests to axes and saws.
It was no accident that a timber company representative from Covington testified in favor of the bill at a December congressional hearing before the House Committee on Agriculture, which Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Roanoke chairs. Goodlatte gushed support at the hearing, and both he and Virgil Goode of Rocky Mount are among its co-sponsors.
Fires annually consume about 1,800 acres in the George Washington and Jefferson national forests, and insects are a constant threat. Gypsy moths have been quiet in the region for about five years, but signs point to a resurgence near Blacksburg.
Meanwhile, timber companies cannot exploit national forests like they used to. Harvests in the George Washington and Jefferson national forests have declined for almost two decades. In 1988, loggers took 69 million board feet from the forests. Last year they took only 23 million.
That is actually good news for taxpayers. Selling federal forests to timber companies remains an economic loser.
In 1998, the last year for which comprehensive numbers are available, the public lost $130 million on the sales. The recovery act would cover losses by allowing forest officials to divert management funds to salvaging.
Nevertheless, the act's chief sponsor, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., thinks the best tree is one that is cut into two-by-fours. His large district is peppered with communities that saw severe economic downturns in the 1980s and '90s when the federal government reduced logging for environmental reasons.
These days, many of those towns have rebounded by using forests for recreation instead of timber, but many of Walden's constituents cling to the past. They pine for the days when the best use of federal land was private profit, not cross-country skiing, mountain biking and hiking.
Yet when he sought support from those communities' leaders, many declined. Elected officials in Bend, Ore., the most populous city in his district and a former timber town, researched the science underlying the act and discovered salvage logging might slow forest recovery, not accelerate it.
The most recent research appeared in the journal Science in January. In it, Daniel Donato, a graduate student in Oregon State University's College of Forestry, studied the aftermath of Oregon's 2002 Biscuit Fire. Some of the land was opened to salvage logging; some was not.
In the short term, natural processes that have evolved over millennia generated better forest recovery than chainsaws and bulldozers. Post-fire salvaging compacts soil, making it tougher for saplings to take root; removes organic material, depriving forests of precious nutrients; and fosters erosion. As a result, three times as many saplings sprouted on untouched land.
Timber salvaging is not even good for fire prevention. Loggers generally only take the valuable, thick parts of trees. They leave behind slash that can fuel the next conflagration.
Donato is quick to point out that though his findings call into question some of the assumptions behind the forest recovery act, the research in the field is far from comprehensive. The long-term effects of salvaging still need to be analyzed, and other forests, say eastern hardwoods, might respond differently.
But loggers and their friends in Washington do not appear interested in such analysis. After Donato went public in January, the Bush administration retaliated by cutting off his funding. Public uproar led to its reinstatement, but the preference for politics over science by then was clear.
Forest recovery should mean that forests recover, not that timber companies recover wood. Perhaps the science will ultimately show salvage logging is the best treatment, but Goodlatte, Goode, Walden and their congressional peers should keep the chainsaws away from America's forests until it does.
