In the Pacific Northwest, trees probably will start
falling faster than they have in nearly a decade. In August, the
Bush administration committed to more than double the amount of
logging in public forests west of the Cascades — including
massive old-growth trees.
The commitment came in a legal
settlement with 18 Oregon counties and an industry group, requiring
the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to make
“their best efforts every year” to sell 1.1 billion
board-feet of federal timber annually, starting in 2005.
That’s the amount the Clinton administration estimated the
agencies would sell when it released the sweeping Northwest Forest
Plan in 1994 (HCN, 10/14/02: Forest protection under the knife).
But environmental lawsuits and other hang-ups have kept the actual
harvest far short of that; last year, the federal agencies offered
428 million board-feet.
“We finally have a real
commitment of what the agencies need to do, which is huge,”
says Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council,
an industry group in Portland, Ore.
The original lawsuit
was concerned only with 2.4 million acres of federal forest
intermixed with state lands. But the Bush administration’s
final settlement reaches beyond that to boost logging on more than
6 million acres — all the lands in Oregon, Washington and
Northern California covered by the Northwest Forest Plan.
“They’re using a decade-old case that had virtually no
merit or life left in it to give away the forest,” says Patti
Goldman, a lawyer with Earthjustice.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Bush administration stretches a lawsuit to get the cut out.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
