opinion by Roy Keene

Free Press contributor

President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan is unfolding as an updated version of a century's worth of corrupted compromises that allow private industry to continue exploiting public forests. The first clue was when the committee of "unbiased" scientists ignored their own findings and divided the remnant old growth forests in two-saving some for species and setting the rest aside for the saw. (Now, another forestry reform effort, relying on "science" and saws, claims to try and "save" America's national forests.)

The Save America's Forest Bill circulated unsuccessfully through an earlier and friendlier Congress as the Bryant Bill. The Bryant Bill promised more encompassing logging reforms, but Clinton's Forest Plan, the politically correct policy, got the support of conservationists. Weakened further under the Plan's implementation, "reformed" federal logging in the Northwest is backsliding into business as usual. Regardless of rhetoric, the public is still paying for private corporations to log the oldest, most valuable trees out of their forests.

Gradual Expansion of Defining Salvage Logging
The National Forest Reserves, originally established to save a remnant of America's native forests from industrial logging, were quickly compromised by the first Salvage Rider, the Organic Act of 1897. This Act permitted salvage logging of dead and "dying" trees from the Reserves and was followed by a procession of Acts with more liberal definitions of "dying" trees. By 1976, the scientists defining the National Forest Management Act determined that every tree eventually dies, so why not log them all when they reach maximum rate of growth at tree teenhood? After a century of compromise, so-called salvage logging had expanded into the "scientific" and systematic liquidation of our entire National Forest Reserve.

According to the Save America's Forest Bill, every claim made regarding "even age" logging is true for logging in general. But there is nothing natural about logging, regardless of the silvicultural system employed. Trees that would live many centuries longer if undisturbed, are sawed off above the root crown instead of toppled by wind or fire. Their carcasses are dragged away by brute machines while their neighbors are thrashed and the earth is torn and beaten down. Unnatural pathogens and pests are spread throughout the disrupted and weakened community. Logging does not cleanse like fire, invigorate like wind, or gradually recycle wealth, like rot or bug. Logging by any name, gradually, if not quickly, destroys a natural forest ecosystem.

By contrast, in National Parks maintaining the forest for the owner's enjoyment is deemed more important than supplying private mills with cheap public wood. The Park Service, unlike the Forest Service, manages our park forests without logging, and at less expense to the taxpayer. There is an unmistakable aura of respect and dignity in well-kept National Park forests. Visitors have the sense that their forests are being cared for instead of stripped of value. In the Sequoia Forest, the forest John Muir called "the grandest of all," park management by fire borders Forest Service selection logging by bulldozer. Viewed side by side, there can be no doubt which management paradigm is saving America's forest.

More Logging, Less Function
Forty million acres of our most valuable forests have already been logged. Regardless of political rhetoric regarding corporate subsidies and balanced budgets, the public is still paying for the logging. Regardless of industrial claims, none of the old, valuable timber extracted from our forests has been "renewed." The longer national forests are logged, the less functional, diverse and valuable they become.

The Save America's Forest Bill appears as another short sighted compromise that condones further private exploitation of public forests.

Roy Keene, an ex-logger, is a consulting forester with 30 years of experience in the forests of the Northwest. Founder of the Public Forestry Foundation, a group of public interest foresters and scientists, he has joined with the Native Forest Council as part of a nationwide effort to stop logging in national forests.

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Contents this page were published in the January/February, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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