In late December, just after the
9th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated protection for all of the
roadless national forests we have left in the West, I walked up
Deadwood Ridge in southern Idaho to see what we’d saved.
The trail climbs through a ponderosa pine forest that continues to
evade logging. Back in 1996, it was targeted by the Salvage Rider,
thanks to Congress, that negated public review and environmental
laws. But the Forest Service made a major tactical error: It marked
the trees to be cut with bright blue paint.
That allowed
conservationists the chance to take dozens of citizens, TV, radio
and newspaper reporters, congressional staff and various Forest
Service staffers up this trail to see 40-inch-in-diameter,
orange-barked, fire-resilient ponderosa pine giants. There they
stood, magnificent and ringed in blue paint.
Ponderosa
pine evolved to withstand flames passing below and around them. On
Deadwood Ridge and in other old growth stands, trees stand far
apart in open grassy slopes, with limbs beginning 30 feet above the
ground. The big pines told the story of ecology losing out to
logging, and people could see the loss for themselves.
Blue trees also funded what turned out to be an effective set of
pit-bull activists with a legal bent, the Idaho Sporting Congress.
The small group won $26,000 in legal fees after showing that the
$450,000 the Forest Service spent marking 86,000 trees — both big
trees and small — committed resources before an official decision.
Six years later, all the marked trees remain, their paint
flaking off. Some trees have died, becoming snags and wildlife
habitat. Over time, more trees will die and fall into the river,
providing habitat for fish, while others will rot into the ground
and add nutrients to the soil. This is the place where the Forest
Service once expected to log 20,000 acres out of 50,000 acres of
this remnant forest and haul out as much as 50 million board-feet.
That’s the equivalent of 10,000 truckloads.
Only public
outrage and the promise of lawsuits stopped logging here and
elsewhere in the roadless forests of the West. Wildlife and fish
studies, economic analyses and public opinion polls all showed
greater benefits for leaving forests as forests. Except for what
logging does to boost local economies, forests left intact always
bring greater benefits.
The closest sawmill to Deadwood
Ridge, at Horseshoe Bend, relied on old-growth timber. It closed in
1998. The area’s biggest sawmill, at Cascade, which depended on
clearcuts, closed in 2001. Most, if not all, of the timber workers
at these mills would have preferred another six months on the job.
But this leads to an obvious question: Is it worth it to log the
last roadless forests?
It’s hard to find anyone who
thinks so. At a sawmill that closed in northwest Montana late last
year, one operator finally owned up to the crushing market
conditions he was facing. He said he had no leeway to hang on for
another year, much less establish sustainable practices.
It is well established that the Forest Service loses money on
virtually every roadless timber sale. Other kinds of losses are the
damage to streams and erosion of security for wildlife from new
roads, and the recreation opportunities displaced during logging,
which some say are lost forever.
Meanwhile, on Deadwood
Ridge, it’s no secret that wildfire is coming; the question is
when. Do we light it ourselves or wait for lightning or human
error? If we’d spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars on
prescribed fire at Deadwood, instead of on its failed logging
plans, we’d be far safer.
Maybe we could even have agreed
to remove brush and small trees if we weren’t fighting over logging
the giants. But prescribed fire wasn’t considered a viable
alternative on its own. When the cut was jettisoned, good planning
went out with the bad.
These roadless protection issues
go beyond this place; they’ve become another political ping-pong
ball. The Bush administration has shown that it won’t embrace
roadless protection by choice; it will chip away at what we have
left with a “balanced approach” that allows so-called temporary
roads and thinning. But continuing outmoded practices to maintain
political support from an industry in decline is not a fair trade
for mismanaging our intact forests.
It’s time to move on,
farther up the trail.
John McCarthy is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives in Boise, Idaho, and
directs policy for the Idaho Conservation League, which intervened
in court as a supporter of the Clinton administration’s roadless
rule.
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