The Idaho Panhandle national forests want to log 153
million board-feet of timber this summer – doubling the cut of the
past two years – to stop a bark beetle explosion in north Idaho and
eastern Washington.
Chainsaws are set to roar by
July, and plans call for 5,000 acres of clear-cuts and 35 miles of
roads. This has Forest Service critics
rallying.
“The general problem with the Forest
Service is that for decades they have tried to treat every problem
with one answer: Log it,” says John Osborn of the The Lands Council
(formerly the Inland Empire Public Lands Council). “The Forest
Service is proposing to make that worse. You can’t log your way to
watershed health.”
Yet the agency’s proposal
appears to attempt just that. The Forest Service says it will spend
logging revenues on watershed restoration and replanting the
clear-cuts with species resistant to future beetle
outbreaks.
The current bug bonanza stems partly
from a century of logging the most fire- and bug-resistant tree
species. What remains is a forest dominated by Douglas fir and
grand fir – trees that easily succumb to bark beetle
outbreaks.
Meanwhile, loggers say if trees aren’t
cut now, the threat of fire could skyrocket, and beetles could
spread to state and private lands.
The industry
admits that past logging is part of the problem, but “we’ve learned
a lot and we are ready to apply that to improve the conditions of
the forest,” says Stefany Bales of the Intermountain Forest
Industry Association. “Leaving this alone is not going to get the
general public what they want.”
* Ken
Olsen
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Beetle wars.
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