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Timber industry wins settlement
By JEFF BARNARD
Associated Press

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The Bush Administration has reached a settlement
with the timber industry over its challenge to the Northwest Forest
Plan, agreeing to work more aggressively to meet logging goals and
consider dissolving some reserves devoted to fish and wildlife.


The U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management agreed to
do all they can to meet the 1.1 billion board feet target of timber
production set by the Northwest Forest Plan, but never met, when it
went into effect in 1994.


Under the settlement to lawsuits originally brought in 1994, BLM
agreed that timber production is the primary purpose of the


2.2 million-acre checkerboard of federal timberlands in Western Oregon
known as the O&C Lands, where 50 percent of timber revenues collected
by the government go to local counties. The lands produced 1 billion
board feet of timber before the Northwest Forest Plan went into
effect.


The BLM will also work toward dissolving as much of the 1.6
million-acre system of old growth and fish and wildlife reserves on
BLM lands in Western Oregon as possible under the Endangered Species
Act and other environmental laws so that timber production can resume.


The Forest Service and BLM agreed to establish three projects testing
new theories of logging and forest management, known as Adaptive
Management Areas, and get to work thinning crowded stands of younger
trees within areas known as late successional reserves so they will
develop more quickly into old growth and face less risk from wildfire.
The thinning is estimated to produce 300 million board feet of timber
a year.


"This is really a step towards trying to make the Northwest Forest
Plan, the Clinton forest plan, produce what the former administration
said it was going to produce," said Doug Robertson, a Douglas County
commissioner and member of the O&C Counties Association. "It's not
much more spectacular than that."


Environmentalists said the settlement was based on a lawsuit that the
timber industry had little chance of winning, and marked the falling
into place of the last of five proposals the timber industry had made
to the Bush Administration to make logging easier under the Northwest
Forest Plan.


"The Bush Administration is putting the forests of the Northwest at
risk and inviting a return to the battle in the woods, the forest wars
we had in the '80s and the '90s," said Patti Goldman, a Seattle
attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental public interest law firm.




Sunday, August 10, 2003