Oregon law permits the terminally ill to receive a physician’s assistance to end life. The Forest Service, however, doesn’t wait to be asked. In a series of so-called “salvage” sales, the agency has justified logging live, green old-growth trees by claiming they are dying.
When two Malheur National Forest employees saw live, healthy old-growth trees being marked for logging at the Monument, High Roberts (.pdf file) and Easy (.pdf file) timber sales, they blew the whistle. The employees pointed out that the forest plan required live trees larger than twenty-one inches in diameter be protected from logging.
Old ponderosa pine forests are among the nation’s rarest old-growth forest type. Lumbermen prize these majestic “yellow belly” trees for the high-quality pine boards they yield. These pines often grow on flat, easily accessible terrain, so that most of these old forests have now been logged.
So much of these old-growth pine forests had been lost that in 1993 members of Congress asked a committee of scientists to study and make recommendations about these forests. The Eastside Scientific Panel wrote,
It is essential to conserve as many of the mature trees of Eastside forest as possible in the short term to sustain these forests in the long-term. Mature trees have lived for decades, even centuries; their very existence demonstrates they have the genetic characteristics to survive the full range of environmental variation present in eastern Oregon and Washington. They are reservoirs of genetic diversity and serve as irreplaceable seed sources for forest regeneration; they replenish the depleted supply of large snags and fallen logs, providing nest and den sites for many animals; and they furnish unique historic records.
The Clinton Administration responded to these concerns by adopting the Eastside Screens (.pdf file) to protect old pine trees from logging. The Eastside Screens became a part of each national forest plan in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington, and set a benchmark for protecting old-growth ponderosa pine throughout the West.
The Eastside Screens prohibit the Forest Service from logging any “live tree larger than twenty-one inches in diameter that currently exists” in the forest. The Forest Service followed this edict until three years ago when, local right-wing pressure, natural forest fires and a pro-logging George W. Bush combined to create a toxic political environment for old-growth forests.
To explain the story that has unfolded, you have to understand that Grant County, Oregon, where the Malheur National Forest is located, is a little different. In 2002, Grant County residents passed two ballot initiatives. One bans the United Nations from entering the county, the other permits any county resident to cut national forest timber without the Forest Service’s consent. Local politics have deposed three successive Malheur forest supervisors. Today’s forest supervisor, Roger Williams, understands that producing timber for the local mills is key to his survival. And those mills want old-growth pine.
Getting the cut out is tough when the forest plan bars cutting old live trees, precisely the ones the mills are clamoring for. When the forest fires of 2002 came along, Williams found a way to keep his job secure. With some help from the Forest Service’s regional office in Portland, which was happy to look the other way, Williams came up with a loophole to get around the forest plan’s protection of live trees.
Williams reasoned that if he could show these trees were “dying,” then logging them wouldn’t make any difference. But three years after the Easy fire, and the big trees were showing no ill effects. Their needles are all green and their buds are growing. Williams needed help to make the case the trees are dying and he found it in the person of Don Scott, a Forest Service entomologist in LaGrande, Oregon.
Scott came up with a theory (.pdf file) that these green trees are actually dead, “they just don’t know it yet.” (From an internal memorandum by collaborator Chris Niwa.) He reasoned that too much past fire fighting had led to a massive build-up of needles and duff around the bases of these old trees. When the fires arrived they burned slow and hot in these mounds of duff and killed the roots of the old pine trees. Although the above-ground parts of the tree appear undamaged by the fire, the fire severed the tree from its roots. He said it’s just like a Christmas tree that stays green after being severed from its roots.
With Scott’s theory to back him up, Williams had what he needed to justify logging these green, apparently healthy trees. He directed his staff to write an environmental impact statement that claims the trees are “dead” so that they did not have to be protected. Since the trees are assumed to be “dead,” the EIS could also claim that logging would not harm the old-growth forest because there is no old-growth forest.
But Dan Becker, a Malheur fire specialist, would have none of it. Becker took photographs of the healthy trees and appealed Williams’ decision. Now FSEEE and Becker have filed suit in federal district court challenging the Easy timber sale.