After five years of an uneasy truce, both sides in
the Pacific Northwest timber wars are slugging it out again (HCN,
11/23/98). On Aug. 2, federal Judge William Dwyer sided with 13
environmental groups and blocked nine major timber sales while
threatening to stop dozens more. Dwyer ruled that the Forest
Service and Bureau of Land Management failed to protect 77 animal
and plant species, including lichen, mosses, snails and
mollusks.
The timber industry says the ruling,
which affects at least 104 million board-feet of lumber, comes as a
major blow. “We’re disappointed that a federal court judge thinks
he knows better than natural resource professionals about how to
protect these species,” says Chris West, a spokesman for the
Northwest Forestry Association.
In 1994, the
Clinton administration brokered the 24 million-acre Northwest
Forest Plan after years of legal battles between environmentalists
and timber companies over protecting the northern spotted owl. The
plan called for logging on a third of the remaining public old
growth, but required the Forest Service and BLM to conduct surveys
of rare species. In court, Dwyer told the agencies that they failed
to adequately conduct these studies.
“These
forests are a kind of Noah’s Ark,” says Regna Merritt of the Oregon
Natural Resources Council. “So much surrounding land has been
developed that (these species) have nowhere else to survive. We may
not understand how each little piece of the puzzle works, but we
can’t afford to throw out 77 of those pieces.”
The Forest Service says the ruling will force it
to re-evaluate upwards of 200 projects. The industry hopes a
legislative rider currently before Congress will relax the
standards for environmental surveys. Washington Sen. Slade Gorton,
R, attached the rider to the Department of the Interior’s
appropriations bill in June.
* Tim
Westby
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Judge halts nine timber sales.
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