Once Upon a Forest

I was on a radio program out of Detroit last week, and the host asked me how things were going in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest. "Do people still sit in trees there?" he asked. "Are they still cutting down the big trees?"

My answer to both questions was yes. People do still sit in trees and protest logging. But these days, the protests rarely make the national news. The mainstream media has never allocated enough space to cover environmental news (while most newspapers have special sections on health, science and technology, special environment sections are rare), and what space there is goes to the hottest issue of the moment. These days, understandably, it is global warming.

But the health and stability of the climate is intimately tied to the health and stability of forests. Destruction of forests and other wild land is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of the total.

For this reason alone, the newest assault on America's forests, House Resolution 4200, should be big news. HR 4200 passed out of the House Resources Committee last week (with the votes of six Democrats -- showing that the timber industry spreads its influence around liberally). It goes to the Agriculture Committee for markup this week and then to a vote.

Also known as the "Walden logging bill," after its sponsor, Oregon congressman Greg Walden, HR 4200, the "Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act" would mandate logging after natural disturbances like fires, droughts and windstorms. This bill would exempt salvage logging from every relevant environmental law, including the Endangered Species Act. The bill includes no protections for old-growth reserves, roadless forests, salmon streams or other sensitive areas. Making matters worse, it is an assault on public safety that would steal taxpayer dollars from fire prevention work in order to subsidize commercial logging.

Proponents of the Walden logging bill claim they need to slash environmental protections for burned forests because otherwise environmentalists will use the protections to appeal logging plans. Often, they say, appeals can drag out long enough that the burned timber rots and becomes worthless, and if the timber can't be sold then there won't be enough money for replanting. Thus the politicians, who know best, must override the misguided environmentalists in order to "save" the forests.

There are two very large problems with this line of reasoning: the science and the facts. Chris Mooney, in his book "The Republican War on Science," has documented the Right's extremely well-orchestrated attack on science. Republicans have invented something they call "sound science," which is basically any science that gives them the results that they want, as opposed to independent science that gives the wrong answers. The attacks on science have been many and varied, ranging from distorting and misrepresenting reports from agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the outright silencing of scientists like NASA's James Hansen who try to sound the alarm about climate change. In the case of salvage logging, there is a particularly bizarre story to tell.

The story starts with the ignition of the Biscuit Fire in the Siskiyou National Forest in the summer of 2002. The fire eventually burned through about 500,000 acres. Some acres burned heavily, some burned lightly, and some not at all as the fire skipped and swirled its way through the steep wild canyons of the Siskiyou terrain.

With so much acreage burned, environmentalists knew that the pressure to log dead and dying trees, known as "salvage logging" or "post-fire logging" would be intense. Even though such logging does not help a forest recover, they prepared themselves to work with the Forest Service to design a salvage logging program that would do the least possible damage, and a plan to log about 100 million board feet moved ahead.