A Forest Policy Beyond Salvage

The huge costs and conflict at the Biscuit fire should prompt a search for middle ground on salvage logging

If you look at the half-million-acre Biscuit fire today, one thing is obvious: There's no good wood at the core of this nation's policy on the salvage of burned public forests.

It's not just all the charred trees chewed up by insects. It's all rotten: The millions of dollars and hundreds of hours spent writing plans for salvage and restoration projects, many of which will never happen; the endless lawsuits; the dueling scientists; the cynical politics; the breathless protests. From here, nearly all of it looks like a big waste.

If you are on one extreme side or the other in the Northwest forest wars, maybe you like what's going on now in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, where loggers and protesters are struggling over a few thousand acres of dead, burned trees. But everybody else ought to be disgusted by the waste of time, money and opportunities to create jobs and restore the landscape.

Yes, respected scientists disagree about how best to help forests recover from major wildfires -- and what steps will best prevent them in the future.

Yes, the Siskiyou forest is a significant, botanically rich place. And no, there is not a scientific or social consensus about where fire salvage is acceptable, or where its economic benefits are overwhelmed by environmental harms.

But surely we can do better than this, spending 21/2 years and untold millions of dollars just to log less than 75 million board feet of timber from a fire that burned across 500,000 acres of forest.

The salvage issue has been left too long to people on the far margins of the debate. It won't be resolved by the foresters who argued the Forest Service ought to salvage as much as 2 billion board feet of timber from the Biscuit, or by the protesters who claim helicopter logging of blackened and rotting trees amounts to "clear-cutting paradise."

There has to be a better way to decide what is going to be salvaged from wildfires on public land. There must be some middle ground where reasonable people can agree on ways to allow a modest level of careful fire salvage to occur before most of the economic value of the burned trees rots away.

We urge the Northwest members of Congress who led the effort to pass the healthy forest legislation -- including Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore. -- to focus now on trying to hammer out a similar consensus on fire salvage.

Oregon and the Northwest must not go on this way, with the Forest Service buffeted between opposing forces and spending more money planning salvage projects than it makes selling the timber. All the while, the region is throwing tax money at expensive court fights, watching jobs go to waste and failing to pay for land restoration projects that everyone agrees are worth doing.

One day last week a limb sprang up and left a deep gash in the head of one of the loggers working on Biscuit salvage. When fellow loggers tried to rush the injured man to a hospital, they were blocked by a van protesters had parked sideways across an access road. A sheriff's deputy finally winched the van out of the way, but the incident is as good a metaphor as any for Biscuit fire salvage.

This whole thing has become a senseless, bloody mess.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 The Oregonian