Forest Joins Shift Away From Old Growth
By Michael Milstein, Oregonian
December 11, 2005

Southwest Oregon's Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest has become the latest national forest to turn away from cutting storied old-growth trees, moving instead toward less-controversial thinning of crowded younger stands.

The move reflects a broader trend by the U.S. Forest Service to give up logging of big, old trees that yield large volumes of valuable wood but have been a rallying cry for forest defenders. They have used appeals and lawsuits to fight the logging, driving up costs to the government.

Other national forests including the Siuslaw, Gifford Pinchot and, increasingly, the Mount Hood, are no longer offering old-growth trees for sale to timber companies. Controversy surrounding such cutting often drains funds and leads to such interminable holdups that the projects may never proceed.

The Rogue River-Siskiyou is now moving in the same direction. Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy last week canceled the Home Page Timber Sale, a 7-year-old project to log virgin forest that has been embroiled in lawsuits. Nobody bid on it when it was put up for auction in September.

Federal foresters would have to rework the sale, at extra cost, before auctioning it again. They expect to turn out more timber for the effort by thinning of crowded and fire-prone forests, which is a higher priority now, said forest staff officer Rob Shull.

Putting more time into the Home Page sale -- with trees averaging 19 inches across -- "is not our biggest priority right now," Shull said.

An alternative project the forest is working on would produce more than four times as much timber by thinning crowded tree plantations sowed after logging decades ago. Crowding stymies the growth of the trees and makes them more prone to wildfires.

The massive Biscuit Fire leapt across 500,000 acres of the forest in 2002, leading to controversial plans to log burned timber.

The national forest "has thousands of acres that need treatments to improve forest health and reduce fire risk," Conroy said. Shull said the alternate project will yield "a lot more volume per unit of effort."

U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat who represents the district encompassing much of the forest, praised the move for creating more jobs with less controversy.

He has been critical of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, a Clinton administration compromise that sought to provide a stream of timber by logging remnant old growth such as the Home Page sale. The stream never fully flowed, in part because of battles over old-growth cutting.

"It's ridiculous that we continue to fight over the small amount of old growth left in the Northwest while workers, mills, and communities struggle to hang on," DeFazio said last year when introducing a bill that would direct the Forest Service to protect old growth and focus on thinning, as many forests are now doing.

The bill was unsuccessful, but DeFazio is rewriting it to accommodate a call from the timber industry to allow cutting of larger trees but without compromising old-growth stands, a spokeswoman said. He hopes to introduce the new bill during the next session of Congress.

He said the Forest Service estimates it could turn out more than 6 billion board feet of timber over the next decade or more by aggressively thinning crowded and flammable stands in the region. That would be more than has flowed from the forests under the Northwest Forest Plan.

More than 80 percent of the logging in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest involves projects to restore forest health or thin dense plantations, forest spokeswoman Patty Burel said.

Many environmental groups that fight old-growth logging have endorsed thinning projects that often benefit wildlife by opening up dense thickets of smaller trees. The Siskiyou Project had sued the Forest Service to stop the Home Page timber sale but favors the thinning of unnaturally dense plantations, said Julie Norman of the group based in Cave Junction.

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