Though the science of forestry has advanced over the
past decade, green timber sales in forests west of the Cascades in
Washington and Oregon don’t show it.
Take the
Roman Dunn timber sale, a tract of old-growth Douglas fir managed
by the Bureau of Land Management along the central coast of Oregon
near Eugene.
A year ago, the BLM and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service agreed that the Roman Dunn sale could go
forward only if loggers left 40 percent of the canopy in place to
provide habitat for the northern spotted owl and the marbled
murrelet, both threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Environmentalists saw that as a reasonable compromise, says Doug
Heiken, an organizer for the Oregon Natural Resources Council.
But when the salvage rider legislation was
signed into law this summer, the BLM was forced to honor the
original logging contract. It called for a clearcut of the 58-acre
tract with minimal buffer zone around two perennial creeks.
“This site has 500-year-old trees, spotted owls,
marbled murrelets, and rare amphibians,” says Heiken. “Chinook and
coho salmon spawn just downstream from it. Yet Congress ordered the
BLM to go back and clearcut the site with protection measures
weaker than those enforced by the state of Oregon.”
The BLM sold Roman Dunn to the Hull-Oakes Timber
Company Sept. 7. On Sept. 25, loggers sidestepped a dozen
protesters and began preparing the site for a
clearcut.
Like the other section 318 sales,
“Roman Dunn is an old-fashioned, dirty one,” says Andy Stahl,
executive director of the Association of Forest Service Employees
for Environmental Ethics. “There is not one of these sales that a
district manager would sign today.”
*P.L.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Timber sales are throwbacks to beastly days.
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