TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT2764> <title> Dec. 09, 1991: Whose Woods Are These? </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Dec. 09, 1991 One Nation, Under God </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ENVIRONMENT, Page 70 Whose Woods Are These? </hdr> <body> The fight is not just about spotted owls anymore. Conservationists step up an all-fronts campaign to save America's ancient forests By Michael D. Lemonlik--Reported by Patrick Dawson/Billings, Andrea Dorfman/New York and Elaine Shannon/Washington Deep inside the dwindling woods, a rare species of bird is threatened with extinction. Before loggers came to the forest, the birds could easily find the trees they needed for nesting--trees at least 80 to 100 years old. But the relentless advance of chain saws has leveled much of the old woodland. Environmentalists filed suit under the Endangered Species Act and won, forcing the government to put new restrictions on logging in portions of several national forests. No one knows, however, if the action came soon enough to save the endangered birds--or the unique habitat that is their only home. This story may sound familiar, but these forests are not in the Pacific Northwest, and the bird in question is not the northern spotted owl. It is the red-cockaded woodpecker, a striking red-black-and-white bird that lives in loblolly and longleaf pines from Virginia to Texas. Like the owl, it is being used by biologists as an indicator species, a sensitive probe of the vitality of forests across a broad swath of the U.S. Just as dying canaries once let coal miners know that oxygen levels were perilously low, the decline of the red-cockaded woodpecker, the northern spotted owl and many other species is a warning of a far greater threat: America's few remaining stands of old-growth forests--woods whose ancient trees have never been logged--are in danger of disappearing as distinct and valuable ecosystems. That danger has sparked increasingly bitter court battles and legislative debates between the forces of conservation and the defenders of the logging industry. In addition to campaigning on behalf of the woodpecker and the owl, environmentalists have demanded protection for the northern goshawk in Arizona and New Mexico and the grizzly bear in the northern Rockies. In Alaska protesters have forced the government to re-examine timber sales from the wild Tongass National Forest. Many conservationists call for nothing less than an overhaul of U.S. forest policy--a policy, they charge, that too often treats the woodlands as resources to be exploited rather than heirlooms to be preserved. Various bills being considered in Congress range from a proposed reduction in logging in national forests to more modest measures that would at least stop the government from selling timber at a loss, a practice that in effect charges taxpayers money to have publicly owned forests destroyed. Pressure for change is also coming from within the U.S. Forest Service, the agency responsible for the national forests. The supervisor of Montana's Lolo National Forest recently halved the amount of logging he would allow, citing the threat to native elk and the danger of soil erosion. Dissatisfaction has led some 2,000 Forest Service employees to join the two-year-old Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Says founder Jeff DeBonis, a former timber-sale planner for Oregon's Willamette National Forest: "The problem is obviously a lot bigger than just owls." More than 95% of the virgin forest in the lower 48 states has already been lost to agriculture, development and logging, and Alaska's woods are disappearing as well. At least 75% of what remains lies in 156 national forests. These tracts embrace large expanses of pristine wilderness, a haven for nature lovers and also for more than 3,000 kinds of vertebrates and thousands of species of insects and plants. But since its creation by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, the Forest Service has been required to manage its lands for "multiple use." The national forests now hold some 18% of the country's commercial timber, serve as cheap grazing land for thousands of cattle, support multimillion-dollar mining operations and contain a 579,000-km (360,000-mi.) network of roads that is eight times longer than all the U.S. interstate highways combined. Until World War II, the national forests comfortably accommodated all users, but that was when these lands were being called on to provide less than 5% of the nation's wood. Then came the postwar building boom, which boosted demand: the annual cut from the national forests surged from 3.5 billion board feet in 1950 to 9.4 billion board feet a decade later. (A board foot, the standard unit used to measure timber, is equivalent to a slab of wood 1 in. thick and 12 in. square.) This dramatic growth worried some members of Congress, which passed laws requiring the Forest Service to balance the goals of conservation and resource development. But the outflow of timber from the national forests still amounts to about 10 billion board feet a year, 14% of the nation's output. One reason is that the biggest, oldest trees, which contain enormous quantities of high-quality wood, have all but disappeared from private lands. Moreover, the lumber from the national forests is cheap for logging companies. The Forest Service not only builds all the roads, providing easy access for workers and machinery, but also sells off the trees for prices that are often far below market value. Perhaps most significant, the decisions on how much timber will be sold each year come, in the end, from Congress. Big lumber companies have enormous political clout in heavily forested states, and the Forest Service is considered by environmental groups to be little more than a federally subsidized logging agency. Says David Wilcove, an ecologist at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington: "Wildlife and wildlife habitat on federal lands are being sacrificed for the sake of the timber quota." Within the Forest Service, however, there is now a rising tide of antilogging sentiment. During the 1970s and '80s, the agency recruited ecologists and wildlife-and-fisheries biologists, in addition to its traditional foresters, road engineers and timber managers. While Forest Service policy didn't change much, the average level of environmental consciousness did. Last September, John Mumma, a regional forest manager based in Missoula, Mont., told a congressional subcommittee that he had been transferred from his position when he refused to meet timber-cutting targets. Testified Mumma: "I have failed to reach the quotas because to do so would have required me to violate federal [environmental] law." He later resigned. More recently Ernie Nunn, supervisor of the state's Helena National Forest, failed to meet his forest's prescribed cut and was told by Mumma's successor to plan on a reassignment. But on the 800,000-hectare (2 million-acre) Lolo National Forest in western Montana, another manager successfully resisted prescribed cutting. Lolo supervisor Orville Daniels decided that meeting his assigned quota of timber sales would deprive elk herds of critical escape cover and also pose silt runoff problems in the highly erodible granitic soils. So he put the sales on hold for 10 years and beat back a timber industry group's attempt to have the decision reversed; the area remains off limits to loggers. Environmentalists have learned to regard such victories with a wary eye, especially in the wake of the spotted owl debate. That controversy seemed to be settled in April 1990 when a government task force determined that the bird was imperiled and that about 1.5 million hectares (3.8 million acres) of its old-growth habitat on federal forest land should be protected. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service later proposed logging restrictions on 4.7 million hectares (11.6 million acres) of owl habitat. After a year and a half, the Bush Administration has yet to agree to a plan. Until it does, a federal judge ruled last May, sales of timber on 26,700 hectares (66,000 acres) of national forests in the Northwest must be suspended. In the meantime the Administration, whose words are pro-environment but whose actions often are not, is considering a way to maintain logging on other publicly controlled lands. In October Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. announced he would convene the so-called God Squad, a Cabinet-level committee that can override the Endangered Species Act in the regional or national interest. The squad will decide by mid-March whether to permit logging on some 1,850 hectares (4,570 acres) of Oregon land administered by the Bureau of Land Management rather than the Forest Service. The committee has convened only twice before--in its best-known action, it refused to allow the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a dam because of a threat to a small fish known as the snail darter. Says Michael Bean, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund: "If the God Squad grants an exception [to the Endangered Species Act], it's clear what will happen in subsequent cases." Environmentalists have suffered a setback in another case: last August a federal judge refused to issue a restraining order to stop the cutting of old-growth ponderosa pines in six national forests in Arizona and New Mexico. Environmentalists claimed the logging was endangering local populations of the northern goshawk, a predatory bird being touted as the spotted owl of the Southwest. The Forest Service is expected to release its final guidelines regarding logging in the birds' habitat early next year. The logging industry contends that excessive concern about birds could carry high costs for humans. In the Pacific Northwest, the companies say, nearly 100,000 jobs (a figure disputed by environmentalists) would be lost if the northern spotted owl were protected. Industry officials deny that all the old-growth forests could ever be wiped out, since some of these woodlands are already barred or inaccessible to loggers. Moreover, most companies claim that they plant more trees than they cut. The number of jobs in logging and related industries has plummeted in recent years, largely because of automation. If logging were cut back on federal land, much of the slack could be taken up by privately owned and less environmentally sensitive woods. Besides, small communities that really depend on government-owned woods for jobs will run into trouble as the forests are stripped away; not only will the trees be gone but also land that might otherwise be touted for recreation will become profoundly ugly. The Forest Service logging operations are questionable on economic grounds as well. While the agency claims it made $628 million in profit last year, critics dismiss that figure as absurd. Robert Wolf, a forestry expert and emeritus economist with the Congressional Research Service who recently analyzed the Forest Service accounts, told the House Agriculture Committee in October that "these mythical profits are achieved by accounting alchemy." Among the creative bookkeeping methods Wolf found were a failure to subtract $327 million that the agency paid to states in lieu of taxes and a practice of spreading the costs of building logging roads over hundreds of years. Wolf says that even with a $700 million congressional appropriation, the Forest Service timber program had a negative cash flow of $186.4 million in fiscal year 1990--and similar losses for at least the past four years. Some individual forests do make money, but they are more than offset by places such as the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska. More than three times the size of Massachusetts, the Tongass is the largest remaining temperate rain forest in the U.S. and still contains about 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of old-growth trees. Until last year, two 50-year contracts required the Forest Service to sell off 4.5 billion board feet of Tongass timber every decade--even when the price of lumber fell in the early 1980s to a rock-bottom $1.50 per 1,000 board feet. After years of campaigning by activists, Congress last year passed the Tongass Timber Reform Act, which closed off to loggers an additional 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of the forest, nearly 25% of it old growth. The bill also called for modifications in both of the long-term logging contracts, raising the official price of some types of Tongass timber to as much as $568 per 1,000 board feet. The federally mandated logging quota was replaced by provisions that the amount of timber offered for sale should equal market demand. But critics of the Forest Service say the agency is largely ignoring the new laws and preparing to sell Tongass timber faster than ever before. Environmentalists believe much broader legislation is needed. Their favorite proposal is the Ancient Forest Protection Act of 1991. It calls for the government to identify ecologically significant old-growth forests across the nation and protect these areas from environmentally disruptive exploitation, including logging. Another bill would ban money-losing federal timber sales and force the Forest Service to calculate the profitability of these operations in a more realistic way. Says Representative Jim Jontz, an Indiana Democrat who is principal House sponsor of both bills: "The Congress has to decide. Are we going to discard environmental laws and values, or are we going to bring down the level of timber production?" The national forests by definition belong to the American public, and it is the public, not industry lobbyists or agency bureaucrats, that should decide their fate. With increasingly concerned managers inside the Forest Service, environmentalists on the outside and legislators looking sharply over the agency's shoulder, there is reason to hope that the last stands of ancient trees will remain uncut--and that some of their younger cousins will eventually achieve the status of old growth themselves. </body> </article> </text>