The rescissions bill signed by President Clinton July
27 directs the Forest Service to cut salvage timber – defined as
dead, dying or at-risk trees – -to the maximum extent feasible.”
What does that mean? An Aug. 18 letter from the Forest Service’s
Washington, D.C., office to all regional foresters begins to spell
this out.
According to the leaked letter, the
plan calls for 4.5 billion board-feet of salvage timber to be cut
nationwide through the first quarter of 1997; that is more than
four times the salvage cut for 1994. The logging is in addition to
sales of healthy, “green” timber and does not include controversial
sales in Oregon and Washington which were held up by the Clinton
Northwest Forest plan.
In the Northern Region,
for example, consisting of Montana and northern Idaho, the agency
will be expected to salvage 268 million board-feet in 1995, and an
additional 541 million board-feet in 1996 and the first quarter of
1997.
Environmentalists, who are powerless to
stop the salvage sales through appeals, say the figures contain no
surprises. “It’s a feeding frenzy out there,” says Barry Rosenburg
of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. “Those numbers will
probably even go up.”
*Erik
Ryberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Salvage logging means deep cuts.
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