Silting the American Dream

For over 15 years citizens in our region have worked within the laws and through public processes to end damaging logging operations on federal forests. Our experience? Laws interfering with getting out "the cut" are flaunted, suspended, or gutted. Corporate plunder has replaced law and order on our National Forests.

When Teddy Roosevelt established millions of acres of National Forests, he did so to keep these forests out of the hands of timber syndicates. There was debate from the beginning about how best to protect and preserve these forests. Central to this debate has always been the question: is commercial logging consistent with the mission of America's federal forests?

The debate is often personified by John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. John Muir, the farm boy and naturalist who founded the Sierra Club, advocated that the National Forests should remain forever wild, to ensure that Americans always have clean rivers and lakes, wildlife and forests. Pinchot, a forester- politician trained in Europe, believed that the National Forests could be preserved through uses that included logging--so long as logging was scientifically sound and showed profit.

Today, the dreams of both Muir and Pinchot lie in the ditches next to the costly 380,000 miles of logging roads bulldozed into the National Forest System. Their dreams are buried in the millions of tons of sediment that choke the spawning beds of our vanishing native trout and salmon. Logging roads and clearcuts, corporate plunder and huge costs to taxpayers have transformed the National Forests from a unique American dream to a nightmare.

Follow the money: Congress funds the Forest Service...the Forest Service delivers taxpayer-subsidized federal timber to the corporations...the corporations "donate" to the re-election campaigns of the politicians who fund the Forest Service. Get the picture?

As the General Accounting Office pointed out in 1995, the timber program for 1992-94 cost the taxpayers $1 billion more than receipts. In 1996, the condition was even worse: losses exceeded $400 million, not including damage to flooded homes, ruined hunting grounds and fishing areas, loss of hiking areas and camping grounds, and impact on other forest uses.

Upstream from Spokane and Coeur d'Alene is the Coeur d'Alene NF, the most heavily damaged of America's 156 National Forests. The Coeur d'Alene has 8,000 miles of logging roads--averaging 10 miles of logging road per square mile of forest (in some places exceeding 20 and even 30 road miles per square mile). The North Fork, once among the region's most popular fishing streams, is demolished from clearcuts and roads. Its floodwaters carry something "special": lead--millions of pounds of lead--into Lake Coeur d'Alene, the Spokane River and the lives of the 500,000 people who live there. Estimated costs for restoring the North Fork: upwards of $100 million.

The Kootenai NF, in the extreme northwest corner of Montana, is another poster child. While logging the 4th of July and Arbo timber sales, the Forest Service "found" an extra 12 million board feet (mbf) of logs (about 5,000 bf per loaded logging truck) for the timber companies that bought the sale. When the timber companies violated the government contract by logging streamsides and trees from outside the sale boundaries, the Forest Service virtually looked the other way.

The Kootenai NF is being massively clearcut. Demolished. Plundered. Remember the flooding in downtown Chewelah and the sandbags along Highway 395? Look upstream. First, Plum Creek hammered headwater streams around Chewelah. Now, the Forest Service is logging another 40 mbf, building and rebuilding 177 miles of roads. Expect more floods.

The Forest Service will soon celebrate the Lewis and Clark bicentennial by massively clearcutting near the historic trail on the Clearwater NF. Above the Lochsa River--remaining refuge to wild trout, salmon and, steelhead--the federal agency is planning a 63 mbf sale. This, despite hundreds of mudslides in 1995, 1996, and 1997 that devastated the Clearwater NF.

In the Okanogan NF, the Forest Service has approved the 1,063 acre, Long Draw salvage timber sale, and the construction of over 20 miles of road through two roadless areas which are part of the largest unprotected roadless areas in the state of Washington. This sale will impact four Lynx Management Units and a Grizzly Bear Recovery Area. As documented in the Final Environmental Impact Statement, this action is "likely to adversely affect grizzly bears and it may adversely affect gray wolves, lynx, wolverines, fisher, and marten." This sale contains clearcut units much larger in size than is allowed by the Forest Plan, so it requires a special Forest Plan Amendment to allow for such an atrocity! This sale claims to be for salvage, yet the EIS identifies that most of the timber to be cut is green and healthy.

Parents immediately know when they return home to find the baby-sitter abusing their child, that it's time to take action. For the National Forest, it's time to end commercial logging and put people to work restoring the damage.

This ~guest~ editorial was submitted by John Osborn, founder of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. If you would like to put together an article for Stump Talk please contact Northwest Forest Action Group at 206-632-1656, email: can@scn.org.