Last year鈥檚 intense fire season led to calls for more 鈥渢reatment鈥� of federal forests to remove excess fuel that can make for bigger, hotter wildfires.
In November, House Republicans 鈥� including Oregon鈥檚 Greg Walden 鈥� passed a bill to grease the skids for more work in the woods. The bill now awaits action in the Republican-controlled Senate.
But while there鈥檚 broad bipartisan agreement that more needs to be done to promote forest health, the opposing sides can have very different pictures of what that looks like on the ground.
Nick Smith says the need for more active management of public forests is great, and urgent.
鈥淲e have currently over a hundred million acres, according to the Forest Service, of federal forest land that are at some risk of catastrophic wildfire,鈥� he says.
Smith is executive director of the industry-affiliated non-profit group Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities. He says decades of fire suppression and unwise logging practices 鈥� as well as climate change and drought 鈥� have resulted in forests that are dangerously overstocked and fire-prone. And, he says, current federal policies have failed both forest health and local timber-dependent communities.
And that, Smith says, is where the Resilient Federal Forests Act comes in.
鈥淚t鈥檚 aimed at reducing the cost and time it takes for agencies to implement projects on forests that are at immediate risk of wildfire, insects and disease,鈥� he says.
Walden is co-sponsor of the bill, HR-2936. It would streamline the process for green-lighting forest projects in a variety of ways.
One is by expanding the use of so-called categorical exclusions. These are categories of projects that are assumed to be benign so they鈥檙e not subject to detailed environmental analysis. For example, currently, post-fire salvage logging projects are excluded if they鈥檙e under 250 acres. The new bill expands that categorical exclusion to 10,000 acres.
George Sexton 鈥� with the Ashland-based environmental group KS Wild 鈥� points to another example.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a categorical exclusion for 鈥渆arly seral habitat creation,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat is the timber industry euphemism for taking out a mature forest and replacing it with a fiber plantation.鈥�
The U.S. Forest Service currently has more than 35 categorical exclusions it can use.
Another section of the bill would put new limits on legal challenges, and would prohibit plaintiffs who win their case in court from getting their legal fees reimbursed. Sexton says that would sharply limit the public鈥檚 ability to stop logging proposals that violate environmental laws.
鈥淲hat HR 2936 would do is say, yeah, you can bring a case but A, you can never win, and B, you鈥檒l never be able to afford it,鈥� he says.
The bill would also give legal priority to the 1937 law that mandates timber harvest on the so-called 鈥淥&C鈥� lands in western Oregon. One effect of that would be to essentially negate the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon, which is already targeted for down-sizing by the Trump Administration.
The bill says its main intent is to expedite projects that will improve forest health and much of its language refers to thinning, hazardous fuels reduction and insect and disease control. But environmentalist Tom Wheeler says those kinds of projects aren鈥檛 the ones that get tied up in red tape.
鈥淎 thinning project that is truly restorative and beneficial, you鈥檙e not going to need to do a ton of analysis, you鈥檙e not going to have to write an environmental impact statement,鈥� he says. 鈥漎ou can do less work to do these projects because they鈥檙e going to have a beneficial effect on the environment.鈥�
Wheeler is with the Environmental Protection Information Center in Arcata, California. His concern is that full-scale commercial logging is being carried out under the guise of 鈥渢hinning.鈥�
鈥淚nstead of removing some of the weaker trees, or the trees we don鈥檛 want on the landscape, they鈥檒l remove the biggest and best trees, because those are the ones that are going to make the best profit for a timber sale.鈥�
And that, he says, isn鈥檛 promoting forest health.
But Travis Joseph, with the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, says not to worry.
鈥淔rom our perspective, what we鈥檙e trying to see is healthy, resilient forests that are around forever,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd we believe that we have a very serious threat that we need to address through logging, through active management.鈥�
Joseph says it can take several years and millions of dollars to jump through all the regulatory and judicial hoops to get a logging project completed.
鈥淪o, we鈥檙e viewing the world through the lens of, we have this crisis, the current process is not allowing us to deal with it in a timely, cost-efficient way,鈥� he says. 鈥淲hat tools can we bring to the table to improve that process?"
The House passed the bill last November, along largely partisan lines. It鈥檚 currently awaiting action in the Senate. But even if HR-2936 doesn鈥檛 make it out of committee, expect parts of it to resurface in other forestry bills.
Copyright 2018, JPR
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Julie Sabatier/OPB
/Rep. Greg Walden at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
A logger cuts a tree that had broken off.
