Biscuit Logging One Year Later: What Have We Learned?

It is now one year since the US Forest Service first allowed chainsaws into the old growth reserves of the Siskiyou National Forest as part of the Bush Administration’s Biscuit Fire Recovery Project. The massive scale and pristine location of this logging plan ignited a fierce controversy that grew into a community-supported campaign of civil disobedience that resulted in over 70 arrests and gained national media attention. A windfall of new evidence is shedding fresh light on a debate that has too often focused on ideology and politics rather than science or economic reality. It is time for Oregon’s political leaders, and the American public, to demand that these facts be used to shape future policy instead of being buried under the Orwellian rhetoric of a preset logging agenda.

With the Forest Service's recent announcement that they are planning to auction off two new, Roadless Area timber sales in the Biscuit fire area, and legislation moving through Congress that would suspend environmental laws and mandate post fire logging, it is more clear than ever that Southern Oregon’s forests are a proving ground at the forefront of a national debate that will affect the management of millions of acres of public lands for decades to come.

A recent World Wildlife Fund report documents that upwards of $14 million of taxpayer money has already been lost with the Biscuit logging project. This leaves no funds left over for the restoration that was supposed to occur and makes it clear that millions more are likely to be lost if future sales are carried out as planned.

The original post-fire logging plan called for cutting about 90 million board feet of timber from areas close to existing roads. This plan was quickly shelved by the Bush Forest Service and replaced with an outlandishly overzealous super-harvest that called for cutting half a billion board feet, mostly from remote, protected wildlands. This new project was based on a non-peer reviewed paper written by a pro-industry forest engineer who was sponsored to the tune of $25,000 by timber industry allies at the Douglas County Commissioners.

Opponents of Biscuit logging have always maintained that the proposed logging will damage sensitive soils, remove important nutrients, send sediment into salmon bearing streams, and otherwise harm the natural process of recovery of these fire-adapted native forests. Since logging began, a series of more credible scientific studies have shown that there is no ecological rationale whatsoever for salvage logging.

Most recently, OSU Forestry Department graduate student Daniel Donato published a report in the prestigious journal Science that challenges the underlying science of the 'fire recovery project'. His study concludes: “Post-fire logging can be counterproductive to the goals of forest regeneration and fuel reduction.” Donato immediately became the target of a revealing and distasteful campaign of ridicule and censorship by the timber industry and the old school academics and politicians who do their bidding.

Rich Fairbanks, the origianl USFS project head of the "Biscuit Fire Recovery Project", has gone public to confirm that this project is being orchestrated by political operatives in the Bush Administration who totally disregarded input from their own people on the ground. The following is a direct quote from Mr. Fairbanks: “What they were really saying was, ‘We don't give a *@#& about the local economy, much less restoration forestry. We're into this to get the Republicans re-elected.’”

In the time lapsing since logging within old growth reserves began, every major argument made by environmental activists has been affirmed and supported by scientific study, economic analysis and public sentiment. In that same time, we have seen the Bush Forest Service systematically undermine the process of public involvement while timber companies have gone virtually unpunished for illegally logging in Wilderness Areas, Botanical Reserves and streamside corridors.

Now the Bush Forest Service is gearing up to use Oregon’s forests to put a stake through the heart of one of the most popular pieces of federal environmental policy in decades, the Roadless Rule. It is time for this shameful assault to be called out for what it is. People have put their bodies on the line demanding to be heard, now it is up to our regional leaders to take a strong stand in defense of our forests and our rights to a meaningful process of public involvement.

Posted by laurel at March 29, 2006 03:51 PM | Category(s): Forest Defense/Environmental Activism