When Forest Service officials approved logging on
10,000 acres of Idaho’s Payette National Forest under the salvage
logging rider in 1995, they said the trees had been killed by a
1994 wildfire or bark beetles. Now, they admit “dead” was an
overstatement.
“People may see what appear to be
green, healthy trees removed from the forest,” the agency had
explained in a July, 1996 news release. “These trees are actually
dead.”
Truth be told, some of those trees were
just “imminently dead,” according to Forest Service entomologist
Julie Weatherby. When Weatherby returned to the logged area last
summer, she discovered two-thirds of the trees left standing in
test plots were still alive.
“Currently, our
biggest errors are associated with trees living which have been
expected to die,” wrote Weatherby in a September 1996 memo.
“Hopefully, some of these green grand firs and Douglas firs …
will die over time.”
But a second visit to the
area this August revealed that only 12 to 47 percent of the
“imminently dead” trees had died.
For Ron
Mitchell, executive director of the Boise-based Idaho Sporting
Congress, the undead trees are proof that the Forest Service cannot
be trusted with salvage logging operations. “They obviously knew
the trees were not dead,” he says. “They were just lying to get the
cut out.” His group acquired Weatherby’s memo through the Freedom
of Information Act this summer.
“Like a lot of
things, 20-20 hindsight is really quite good,” Ron Hamilton,
resource and ecology branch chief for the Payette, told Scott
Sonner of the Associated Press. “We had to make the calls on our
salvage sale based on our best information at the time.”
*Greg
Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Trees refuse to croak.
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