Dear HCN,
While Andy Wiessner did
many environmentally heroic deeds in the past when he was counsel
for the House Interior Committee, such as making sure that the
California Wilderness Bill included many key lands in the Trinity
Alps Wilderness, he seems to have let the big money his consulting
work brings in color his vision a little (HCN, 5/10/99). Lynne
Bama’s story was a little brief on details about the background and
the facts in regard to Janine Blaeloch’s dedicated efforts (HCN,
3/29/99). However, both Bama and Wiessner seem to have swallowed
the “greater ease of management and higher efficiency argument” for
land consolidation made by the Forest Service and the
industry.
The original primary purpose of the
national forests, then called Forest Reserves, was not for
conservative timber production but for watershed protection. Forest
historian Harold K. Steen quotes Congressman Lewis Payson of
Illinois, one of the three members of the Conference Committee on
what became the 1891 Forest Reserve Act, as
follows:
“We have made a provision in this bill
authorizing the President … to make a reservation of the timber
lands, principally applying it to the watersheds of the West, so
that the water supply in that country may be preserved from entry
…” (USDA publ. FS-488, 1991)
The 1897 Forest
Reserve Act, best discussed by forest industry attorney Robert
Bassman in Natural Resources Lawyer 7:503-520, 1974, also puts
water protection first, ahead of timber.
Of
course, the forestry profession and the forest industry over the
years have done their best to have this original intent
re-interpreted to have timber made equal or superior to water.
Nevertheless, the Weeks Act of 1911 (providing for the Eastern
national forests) also put watershed protection first. To my
knowledge, no one has yet shown that complete forest-industry
ownership of a watershed’s lands provides as much water-flow
protection as checkerboard national forest ownership does. Despite
the Railroad Land Grants, federal ownership of every other section
provides more ground cover, more water infiltration and more soil
erosion protection than private industry ownership, particularly
some industries whose policies have meant starting at one end of
their property and clearcutting to the other end with each timber
age class.
Wiessner crows about having the
support of environmental groups, including the Mountaineers, but in
the case of the Plum Creek Exchange he doesn’t tell us about his
coming to Seattle and lobbying the groups with reassuring language
about ownership consolidation, and without telling them of the
original intent of the national forests, which U.S. Forest Service
and industry propaganda has long downplayed or re-interpreted.
Also, in the case of the Seattle Mountaineers’ support of the Plum
Creek Exchange, their letter of commitment was obtained by Wiessner
via a secret persuasive lunch meeting with Mountaineer official
Norm Winn, who did not clear his letter of support through the
Mountaineers Forest Watch Committe (of which I am a member) nor
with the other pertinent committees of the Mountaineers
Conservation Division.
Despite Bama’s depiction
of Janine Blaeloch as a “one woman truth squad,” Blaeloch asked
longtime Public Forestry Foundation forester Roy Keene and his
assistants from Eugene, Ore., to re-appraise Wiessner’s acclaimed
Huckleberry Land Exchange. Keene, who has appraised much private
and stolen public timber in Oregon, said later that the
Weyerhaeuser Corp. paid for and controlled the appraisal that the
exchange was based on, and that the Forest Service’s appraiser had
little to do with it. Keene’s cruises sampled all the old-growth
timber obtained by Weyerhaeuser and he found that the public lost
“tens of millions of dollars’ in the deal. Yet these “deals’ are
praised by a High Country News board member with seemingly a very
strong conflict of interest in at least one of them. So much for
diversity in newspaper boards, I
guess.
Ben W.
Twight
Seattle,
Washington
The writer is a
retired professor of forest policy in the School of Forest
Resources, Pennsylvania State
University.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Think forests, think water.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
