While smoke drifted through Oregon’s Rogue Valley from the Biscuit Fire, President Bush flew into the nearby town of Medford in August 2002 to promote his Healthy Forests Initiative.

The fire had been going strong for more than a month. Bush spoke about “common-sense forestry” and tree thinning to an economically depressed timber-dependent community.

After the fire was out in November, the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative gained momentum, and then came another summer of big fires in Oregon. Meanwhile, a salvage logging proposal of unprecedented size was under way at Biscuit. By the time the draft environmental impact statement was presented in November 2003, the proposal had ballooned to include a preferred alternative that aimed to log 518 million board feet, one of the largest salvage logging sales ever proposed for one of the most biodiverse and heavily protected regions in the world.

The Biscuit Fire had not only drawn attention, and the president, to Oregon and the issues surrounding wildfire, it also moved 29,000 acres, much of which is roadless old-growth forest, into the category of loggable land. Areas that had been protected under one name or another since the 1930s were burned. Now they’re considered prime targets for “recovery.” Salvage. By any other name, logging.

Salvage, the scrappy, resourceful cousin of good old-fashioned logging is a process that applies to burned, diseased or bug-killed zones. Salvage logging takes out the dead and diseased trees and seems as if it might be a good idea—on the surface. But in the mid-1990s, concerns cropped up in the environmental community that economic motives had pushed salvage logging toward green trees and places where nature’s course might work better from an ecological perspective.

The 518 million board feet called for in the preferred alternative for the Biscuit Fire salvage project is more than the 2002 U.S. Forest Service harvest in western Washington and western Oregon combined. The only salvage project in the West that surpassed this proposal in recent years is the salvage after Mount St. Helens blew; 1 billion board feet were harvested in the years following the eruption in 1980.

At Biscuit, the proposed salvage project would involve about 29,000 acres, the majority of which is protected and includes late-successional reserves, the designation for old-growth habitat. The remaining acreage is categorized as matrixÑland that would have been logged at some point. Within those management areas, just more than 12,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas would be logged. No roads would be built in the roadless areas, and if logging went forward, the land would be replanted with a mix of species designed to re-create riparian and late-successional characteristics.

So what’s all the fuss about? If the matrix lands were going to be logged anyway and the reserves and roadless areas were going to be replanted and trees encouraged to return (albeit at an unnaturally fast rate), why are conservationists and ecologists howling about Biscuit?

The problem is that although salvage sounds like a productive, balanced approach to a seemingly destroyed landscape, it carries with it a heavy ecological load. The nature of salvage means going after timber quickly, over a wide geographical range on extremely fragile land. Because the land is so delicate, a lot of restrictions are placed on the process, making it an expensive proposition. Timber companies have to get their money’s worth, which means that green trees that are even slightly damaged or that obstruct the logging process can be cut too, sweetening the deal. In prefire late-successional reserve areas, those trees would have been way, way off-limits.

Forest managers replant, sometimes with the goal of encouraging old-growth characteristics, calling it restoration and touting the benefits of speeding the forest’s return to health. Ecologists argue that restoration on these lands is a false claim—that nature will do the job, although it may take longer. In the mid-1990’s, Oregon State University College of Forestry Professor Bob Beschta led a team to produce the Beschta report, the seminal study on the ecological impacts of salvage logging. The report concludes that “most native species are adapted to natural patterns and processes of disturbance and recovery in the landscape and that preventing additional human disturbance generally will provide the best pathway to regional ecological recovery.” An undercurrent of the report, and of much anti-salvage discussion, is that any attempt to reproduce that process on a faster schedule is a thin veil to disguise other political or economic goals.

The protests against the process of salvage logging echo the protests of any kind of logging: soil compaction, road building, denuded slopes, erosion, loss of habitat. As a result of these concerns, the Forest Service places a number of restrictions on how, when and with what equipment salvage logging can be conducted. Because the dangers of erosion and soil compaction are so much greater after a fire, and because timber that’s been burned, even a little, decays at an increased rate, salvage logging needs to happen soon after a fire and under certain climatic conditions.

“The main difference, besides timing, is the equipment you’ve got to use—cable systems or helicopters instead of ground-based systems,” Richard Haynes, an economist with the Forest Service, says, “but it means you’re going after the more valuable timber. You can’t use expensive systems to remove junk.”

There are geographical issues, as well. Jim Strittholt, director of the Corvallis, Oregon–based Conservation Biology Institute, points out that postfire salvage takes place over a larger area than a traditional clear-cut might. “The difference is you have to get to the wood so soon that you end up doing more, faster,” Strittholt says. “That speed, combined with the increased geographical coverage means increased soil erosion, more exposed earth.”

Erosion seems to be the key issue, whether the subject of discussion is equipment, timing, roads or geographical coverage. At Biscuit, restoring and maintaining fish habitat (read: avoiding further erosion) is one of the Forest Service’s main objectives. But, it’s only one. Judy McHugh, director of outreach and communications for the project identifies three goals. “The main purpose of the recovery project is to propose activities that protect firefighters and community safety, restore and maintain fish habitat and recover the economic value in the area,” she says.

McHugh chooses her words carefully, and with good reason. In addition to setting records and bringing national television cameras to Medford, Biscuit touched off a policy debate that has inflamed both the timber industry and ecological interest groups.

John Sessions, a forest engineer and professor at Oregon State University, released a report in July 2003 calling for a harvest of 2 billion board feet from Biscuit, touting the massive logging as the “best way to quicken recovery and reduce risk of more fire.” Commissioned and funded by the Douglas County Commissioners, Sessions’s report focuses on the quantitative effects of “management delay” and provides a recommendation to salvage as much as possible as soon as possible—with the goal, in the late-successional reserve areas, of encouraging old-growth characteristics to return sooner, rather than on nature’s schedule.

In response, Strittholt’s Conservation Biology Institute conducted a study that examined the ecological issues behind salvage in the Biscuit area. The research group included landscape ecologists, conservation biologists and GIS analysts, based in Corvallis and San Diego.

“Our study aimed to do three things: first, to give an idea of what actually happened with the Biscuit Fire within the range of historical variability,” Strittholt says. “Second, it was a response to existing literature, specifically the Sessions report. Third, it mapped out what we would do: if we were the Forest Service, how would we map out the possibilities?”

The report, released in January 2004, states their firm conclusions: “There is no ecological justification for post-fire salvage logging in any post-fire environment and most definitely not in the Biscuit Fire where so many important biodiversity values are rare and at risk.”

McHugh is clear that salvage is only one part of a larger recovery effort. “The reason we’re doing salvage logging is not ecological; it’s economic,” she says.

It’s not completely clear, however, what the economic benefits are and who will reap them. The communities around the fire may benefit from increased jobs, but the longevity of the employment is questionable. “There is recognition that there is a discrete period of time where harvesting jobs will be available,” McHugh says, “but in creating the fuel management zones, replanting, prescribed burning, there could be a longer-term impact on local economies.”

Though there may be more low-level harvesting jobs, local mills and logging operations probably won’t see much timber from Biscuit. “Someone will get rich from this salvage project, but it’s not the surrounding communities,” Strittholt says. “There’s no local capacity for 500 million board feet.”

Within the controversy, almost all of the rhetoric and discussion about any salvage comes back to one thing: forest health. The concept seems straightforward, but there’s a fair bit of disagreement about what it means and how to achieve it. In his presentations, Sessions shows two slides of reforestation of other burned areas and talks about speeding forest health. Strittholt wouldn’t describe those forests that way. “You see a replanted, lush green site with the eye of a forester, and you see a returning resource,” he says. “You look with the eye of an ecologist, and you see a plantation, not a wild place. If you go in and salvage and plant, that’s not a wild place. That will never be a wild place.”

It would follow, then, that definitions depend on motives. Here the motives fall pretty cleanly into two categories: economic or ecological. Woe to forest managers who have to walk that political tightrope. Most people admit that the health of a forest depends on what the objective is0151there’s no such thing as a universally agreed-upon healthy forest.

The sticking point seems to be, as it often is in public land management, in how the lands are designated and how firmly forest managers stick to the rules. “The biggest battle, as far as I can tell, is the inventoried roadless areas,” Strittholt says. But start talking about roadless areas being logged, and things get a little fuzzy.

“Some [roadless areas] are adjacent to proposed roads,” McHugh says, “and in some of the alternatives, there is salvage logging in those roadless areas, but no road building.”

The proposed roads, according to McHugh, whether adjacent to roadless areas, in late-successional reserves or on matrix-lands, will be temporary, and she describes a complex unbuilding process. “We have many years of experience mitigating impact. We think about how we locate roads, compact the soil, relocate vegetation downslope,” she says. “We believe we have good engineering control.”

That may be so, but it may also be optimistic. “I’ve never seen a temporary road stay temporary,” says Strittholt. “It’s expensive to build a road, and even more expensive to unbuild it. How are they going to pay for that?”

Many questions remain. Recovery, of some kind, is a goal, but few have a clear way to get there. Some want active restoration: hurry-up salvage and quick replanting. Some want to let nature take its course. “What we’ve got to ask is whether the benefits of restoration outweigh the costs,” says Haynes. “Why not let it sit? Sometimes that’s not the best option, socially or economically.”

And sometimes the options are so disparate that gridlock is the result. The public comment period was extended in January after accusations that it had been purposefully scheduled during the holidays to discourage public discussion. Forest managers on the Siskiyou and Rogue River national forests were scheduled to make a decision soon after the extended comment period ended in late January. At press time, no decision had been announced. In a discussion sponsored by the Cascadia Wildlands Project in Eugene in mid-January, Sessions and Beschta fielded questions about what they think will happen at Biscuit. Ironically, Sessions had the only definitive answer: “What do I think will happen? Nothing. By the time the process is complete, it won’t be economically viable to salvage and that opportunity will be lost.”