CALENDAR
May 3 & 4 - Sat. & Sun. - Western Washington Forest Conference - Cispus Center near Randle, Wash. - Mark Your Calendars! See following article
ACTION NEEDED FOR TONGASS FOREST
The Western Ancient Forest Campaign (WAFC) reports that calls are needed to Vice President Al Gore to help stop the clearcutting of this national treasure.
Now is the time to save the Tongass for our families and generations to come. The new land management plan for the Tongass is in its final stages, and it will be bad news for the forest, unless changes are made.
Established by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1907, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska is the largest remaining temperate rainforest in the world. The Forest Service has allowed clearcutting to decimate the Tongass for over 40 years--at taxpayers' expense.
The Forest Service is making its final revisions to the Tongass Land Management Plan (TLMP). This plan will dictate how the forest will be managed for the next 10-15 years. The TLMP will decide whether the Forest Service will continue business as usual, or will finally put an end to large-scale industrial clearcutting of the Tongass' old-growth forests.
The Forest Service unveiled its preferred TLMP alternative in a March 1996 Draft EIS. In short, it continues the status quo and fails to reflect the scientific input from peer review and subsequent assessments of impacts on the wolf and goshawk. Of 22,000 public comments, over 17,000 called for less, or the elimination of, logging on the Tongass. In addition, 12 of 17 scientific peer reviewers signed a letter condemning the preferred alternative chosen by the agency.
Please urge Vice President Gore to ensure that the Tongass Land Management Plan will:
* Eliminate clearcutting
* Maximize protection for fish and wildlife habitat
* Protect the remaining pristine areas and proposed wild & scenic rivers
To contact the vice president: Comment Line (202)456-1111; fax (202)456-7044; Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., Old Executive Office Building, Washington, DC 20501; e-mail <a href="mailto:vice.president@whitehouse.gov"> vice.president@whitehouse.gov.</a>
The Forest Service must set higher, scientifically-sound management standards for America's largest National Forest.
CONSERVATION GROUPS PETITION USDA FOR RIGHT TO NOT LOG
A petition was filed with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture on Feb. 4 by three conservation groups, requesting that Forest Service rules be changed to allow people to bid on, but not log, federal timber sales. The petition was filed on behalf of Northwest Ecosystem Alliance (Bellingham, Wash.), Oregon Natural Resources Council (Port-land, Oreg.), and Southwest Center for Biodiversity (Tucson, Ariz.).
The petition seeks regulatory changes to "allow the award of certain timber sales" to groups or individuals who do not intend to cut the trees. Presently, the Forest Service does not have the option of awarding timber sales to anyone who does not intend to log.
This limitation embarrassed the Forest Service last year, when it was forced to reject a top bid by NWEA for the Thunder Mountain timber sale, in the Okanogan National Forest of Washington. The sale was logged at a sizable loss to taxpayers and damage to the environment. Similarly, members of the SW Center for Biodiversity were allowed to purchase, but not exercise, logging rights in Arizona.
The petition makes a clear distinction between "allowing" the Forest Service to accept top bids from conservationists, and "directing" it to do so.
"We are simply saying that the Forest Service ought to have the option of awarding a timber sale to a non-logging party if this is in the best interest of the forest and the nation," said Mitch Friedman, executive director of NWEA. "Right now, our public forests are being managed like an exclusive club. A checkbook won't get you in; you need a chainsaw."
The petition should help improve fiscal accountability within the Forest Service, by providing a means of avoiding the double loss of so-called "below cost" sales. These sales not only cost more taxpayer dollars to pre-pare than they return to the Treasury, they also harm public resources.
It is important to make clear that this petition does not advance a broad opening of public lands to market forces. The petition is limited to saying that in those instances where the government has decided to market a resource such as a timber sale, it should accept the bid which is most advantageous to the nation.
WESTERN WASHINGTON FOREST CONFERENCE
The Gifford Pinchot Task Force, Western Ancient Forest Campaign, The Wilderness Society, several local Audubon chapters, and other local and regional environmental organizations are sponsoring the Western Washington Forest Conference at the Cispus Learning Center on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest near Randle, Wash., on May 3 & 4, 1997.
The purpose of the conference is to bring together forest activists from western Washington (western Oregon and northern California activists are invited, too) to network with one another, learn from guest speakers and workshop sessions, and exchange information and ideas about forest conservation issues. Workshop sessions will be offered in three concurrent tracks under these themes: foundations of forest activism, advocacy and relationships, and technical issues in forest management.
Jim Lyons, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, has been invited to be the keynote speaker. Other invited speakers include Bob Williams, U.S. Forest Service regional forester; David Frederick, supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Western Washington Fish and Wildlife Office; Robert Michael Pyle, author of "Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide;" and Kathie Durbin, author of Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat and Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign.
The conference will cost $45 per person, which includes lunch and dinner on Saturday, lodging on Saturday night at the Cispus Learning Center, and Sunday breakfast. Advance registration is required.
To obtain a conference brochure, which will have a more detailed agenda and a registration form, contact: Gifford Pinchot Task Force, P.O. Box 84542, Vancouver, WA 98684-0542; call David Jennings at 360-866-7551; or e-mail 71634.127 @compuserve.com.
The "end result" of Sen. Larry Craig's "reform" bill would be to "accelerate the clear-cutting of federal property," says the Atlanta Constitution in an editorial accusing Craig of using his job as Senate GOP Environment Task Force chair to launch "a new effort to gut environmental protection for our national forests."
The editorial points out that more logging on the national forests means greater expenses to taxpayers, "and a bigger budget deficit." Subsidized logging also puts owners of private forestland "at a significant and unfair disadvantage," the Constitution says.
"For the last couple of years, congressional Republicans have allowed people such as Craig to set their party's position on environmental issues, and they've taken a terrific beating for doing so."
GOP leaders say they want to change, but "Craig isn't making it any easier for them," the editorial concludes.
NATIONAL FOREST MANAGEMENT ACT
Some more background from WAFC, on just what is under attack in the upcoming Craig bill:
The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) is a cornerstone of environmental law intended to protect biodiversity on the national forests and to ensure public process. Unfortunately much of the promise of NFMA has never been realized, because provisions were never implemented, or worse were intentionally ignored by the land management agencies. Judge William Dwyer cited a "systematic and deliberate violation of the law" in the spotted owl case in the Pacific Northwest.
This basic failure by the Forest Service to comply with NFMA and other environmental laws has brought us the current troubling situation, where the national forests have been severely overcut, more species continue to decline, only a few remaining pristine areas are left, and even these critical refugia are now being threatened by logging.
Threatening to compound this existing problem is the new effort by Senator Larry Craig to further weaken NFMA and other laws and regulations that have limited the discretion of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and have allowed
citizen involvement.
Sen. Craig will be conducting a series of five workshops over the next two months to review his 100-page NFMA re-write at which time he will introduce a revised bill. While much of Sen. Craig's bill focuses on process issues, this debate does offer activists an opportunity to raise the substantive issues that NFMA was originally intended to address, such as the problem of clearcutting and the challenge of protecting biodiversity on public lands.
We'll all need to be following this process closely.
Logging of national forests cost federal taxpayers $398 million more than the timber sales returned to the U.S. Treasury in 1995, says The Wilderness Society based on analysis of the government's Timber Sale Program Information Reporting System (TSPIRS).
"While timber companies racked up record earnings in 1996, taxpayers had their pockets picked," Carolyn Alkire of TWS told the Associated Press. The Forest Service reported that its commercial logging turned a $58 million profit, but The Wilderness Society says the agency ignored $200 million in road construction costs and $257 million in payments to counties. Of 109 National Forests, 95 failed to return as much money as logging cost, TWS says.
CLEARCUT BRINGS MUDSLIDES, DEATHS AND LAWSUITS
The families of four Oregon mudslide victims have filed lawsuits against Champion International Corporation of Connecticut and Whitaker Logging Inc. of Roseburg, Oregon. The wrongful death lawsuit claims that a November 18, 1996 mudslide that killed the four was the fault of Champion, who owns the clearcut land where the slide originated, and Whitaker Logging, who logged the area.
A report filed by Oregon State Department of Forestry officials before the 1987 logging took place noted the victim's house was at a site potentially threatened by debris flows.
A new report by the Center for Responsive Politics found that timber corporations and others that "poured money into (the 104th) Congress typically got the votes they wanted."
The average contribution received by the 211 representatives that voted against repeal of the Logging Without Laws Rider was $2,415. The 209 who voted to end the Logging Rider received an average of $542 in industry contributions.
QUAFCO News February 1997
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