Salvage law haunts Utah
When Forest
Supervisor Janette Kaiser announced plans for a huge salvage timber
sale on central Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest in August,
environmentalists thought they’d seen a ghost. The sale was
approved under a law they thought long dead: the salvage logging
rider. Now, they hope a recent agency decision will lay the law to
rest for good.
Kaiser’s South Manti sale had its
roots in the early 1990s, when the Forest Service started plans to
cut hundreds of acres of spruce trees that were being killed by
bark beetles. The goal was to prevent catastrophic forest fires and
allow the forest to regrow by removing dead and dying trees, says
the agency’s Don Fullmer.
In 1995, Congress
passed the salvage logging law, and the Manti-La Sal completed six
salvage sales under a quick environmental assessment. The law
expired in December 1996, but in August, Supervisor Kaiser
announced plans to sell another 22 million board feet of timber
under the salvage EA.
“It’s insane,” said Dick
Carter of the High Uintas Preservation Council. “There was no
public review.”
The Forest Service was required
by law to complete an extensive environmental impact statement for
the plan, according to Amelia Jenkins with the Wild Utah Forest
Campaign. She maintained that salvage logging is unnecessary
because bark beetles are an important part of the forest. “By
impeding the progress of the beetle, we might seriously be impeding
the forest of tomorrow,” she said.
Jenkins,
Carter and the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity appealed
the sales. And on Nov. 7, Deputy Regional Forester Jack Troyer
reversed Kaiser’s decision. “If the bark beetle does its thing on a
large scale, do I think it’s good? No,” he says. “Most people don’t
like to see gray forests.” Still, he maintains the sale needs a
closer look and further public comment. The Manti-La Sal should
complete the environmental impact statement in a matter of months,
he says. “You can expect to see this proposal in the future.”
Send comments or questions to Janette Kaiser,
Forest Supervisor, Manti-La Sal National Forest, 599 W. Price River
Drive, Price, UT 84501, 801/637-2817 or call Amelia Jenkins at the
Wild Utah Forest Campaign, 801/539-1355.
*Greg
Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Salvage law haunts Utah.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
