Obama Administration Seeks To Reconcile Loggers And Environmentalists In Oregon

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The Obama administration is working on a pair of pilot logging projects in southwestern Oregon that are designed to find a new way out of decades of conflict between timber jobs and spotted owls and salmon.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met Wednesday in Washington, D.C., with veterans of the long-standing timber wars in Oregon, members of the Oregon congressional delegation, and federal agencies.

They listened to forest ecology professors Norm Johnson of Oregon State University and Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington describe their ideas for a pair of large-scale forest restoration projects on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property that are also expected to produce a significant supply of logs for struggling mills.

The so-called O&C lands, formerly owned by the defunct Oregon & California Railroad and now administered by BLM, were once a leading source of timber as well as revenues for timber counties, but logging has never recovered from 1990s cutbacks to protect spotted owls and salmon.

The Bush administration tried to boost logging in the region but could not get around environmental laws often enforced by conservation groups through lawsuits. Salazar jettisoned the Bush administration plan and, pressed by members of the Oregon delegation, has been trying to find a new way out of the long-standing morass.

The primary goal of the pilot projects would be to restore healthy forests and fish and wildlife habitat, with the secondary goal of producing timber.

"This is historic," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. "We've got direct secretarial involvement in a much more public process involving a much more diverse group of stockholders than at any time I have seen in the last 20 years on the controversy over management of our forests. That is a big deal."

Tom Partin, head of the timber industry group American Forest Resource Council, said Salazar's involvement and the two pilot projects were a good start, but the industry looked forward to opening more O&C lands to logging that are now restricted by regulations to protect habitat for northern spotted owls, a threatened species, and red tree voles, rodents that are primary prey for the owls.

Environmental consultant Andy Kerr said if the pilot projects go through in the next 12 to 18 months, they would represent a major change in the way BLM's Medford and Roseburg districts design logging projects.

While the U.S. Forest Service and even other BLM districts in Oregon have been successful at designing projects that are not challenged by conservation groups, the Medford and Roseburg districts have continued to offer sales that cannot pass legal tests for protecting the environment, Kerr said.

The pilot projects near Ruch and Canyonville are designed to restore characteristics of forests before a century of putting out wildfires and clear-cut logging sent them into an unhealthy state that cannot sustain fish and wildlife.

The work on each project would involve thinning and logging on some 10,000 acres across watersheds of some 80,000 acres.

Comments

[sheila]

11:51 AM on 12/10/2010

The Big Enviros will sell out to anyone for anything. If that wasn't made clear by their cuddling up to Chevron, BP, Goldman Sachs and others who are destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of healthy, functioning ecosystem for Big Solar profits, then I don't know what will make the point.

REAL environmentalists have lots of ideas about how it all should work, such as "save open spaces and use our built environment for our power and water needs" but Big Enviros slaver after "access" to the power brokers and "foundation grants," which are mostly funded by the exact people they should be fighting.

If you give up 100% of your leverage in advance, then just sell your brand to greenwash, you are not an environmentalist who is "negotiating" or "protecting," you are a marketing firm who is "selling." We all need to know the difference. Sending your annual check to one of these sellouts is NOT helping the planet, you need to become informed and work on advocacy.

Start with opposing the extension of the cash grants to wilderness-killing Big Solar and Big Wind firms owned by some of the worst mercenaries in the world and demanding that those cash grants go instead to US so that WE can install solar on our roofs and retrofit our homes and businesses for greater energy efficiency. The Big Energy Giveaways need to stop, right here and right now!

[Rope-A-Dope]

10:54 AM on 12/10/2010

I live (and love) Oregon and can tell anyone interested that environmentalists and lumber companies are working together to thin forests and harvest wood. Instead of destructive clear-cutting they work side by side thinning forests while at the same time making the spread of forest fires less likely and slower. Essentially, it returns forests to a more natural state as opposed to planted tress far too close together. Logging firms are all about profit and really don't mind destroying habitat and nature to feed dividend hungry investors. It makes me sad to see what the have done to parts of our beautiful state where there is no cooperation between logging and environmentalists.