REDWOOD NEEDLES
REDWOOD NEEDLESPresented by the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Newsletter, The REDWOOD NEEDLES
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By Diane Beck, North Group
In a lawsuit sponsored by the Redwood Chapter, the Sierra Club and six other environmental organizations filed suit May 9, 2001, against the Forest Service over its so-called recovery plans for forestlands burned in the Big Bar Complex Fire of 1999. The fire spread over 140,000 acres in two national forests, within and outside the Trinity Alps Wilderness. The case is known as Sierra Club v. Bosworth.
The Forest Service, impatient with full environmental review, was able to give the go ahead to log the day the Final Environmental Impact Statement (along with the Record of Decision) was announced, on July 9. Our attorney Marc Fink, of the Western Environmental Law Center, was able to obtain a temporary restraining order in federal court from Judge Marilyn Hall Patel on July 12, which stopped the logging. A hearing on a preliminary injunction will be held in late July.
Part of the area proposed for logging by Six Rivers National Forest is within the Orleans "C" RARE II Inventoried Roadless Area, along the southwestern border of the Trinity Alps Wilderness. Until a federal judge in Idaho enjoined the roadless protection rule in June, most of the roughly 60 million acres of our national forest roadless areas were off limits to logging and road building under the Clinton Administration's roadless area conservation policy.
Six Rivers National Forest's post-fire "recovery" project, benignly called "Fuels Reduction for Community Protection - Phase 1," calls for the commercial logging of over 20 million board feet of lumber on 863 acresabout 4,000 log-truck loads. Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars for hazardous fuels reduction in national forests and in areas adjacent to communities in the wildland-urban interface. Unfortunately, Six Rivers National Forest's timber sales are miles from any community and are of no present risk of catastrophic wildfire.
The Forest Service knows that communities cannot be protected by logging large distant trees. Furthermore, the so-called recovery plans are contrary to the Forest Service's own National Fire Plan, which says that fuels reduction after wildland fire should not be an excuse for a commercial timber sale.
Fire is as natural to these forests as rain. Over the millennia, these forestlands have healed themselves after natural disturbances like fire, insect outbreaks, and landslides. Logging the big trees, and chewing up the soil while doing so, only interferes with the natural recovery process. Downed big trees slow down the runoff from rain and thus tend to stabilize the hillsides. And hillsides in these timber sales are steep and fall directly into the east fork of Horse Linto Creek, where so much excellent restoration work has taken place.
Horse Linto has received millions of dollars in salmon restoration efforts over the past 20 years. As Anthony Ambrose of the Environmental Protection and Information Center puts it, "Unnecessary and environmentally destructive logging in an area that is one of the success stories for salmon restoration is foolish, both economically and environmentally. Horse Linto is one of our best restoration success stories, and we should be doing whatever possible to protect that investment."
We think that the Forest Service should make every effort to reduce small diameter fuels around communities that are adjacent to national forests and to aid them in "fireproofing" themselves. It should not, however, pretend that its plans for commercial logging have much to do with community protection or sound contemporary fire science.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the Sierra Club, the Environmental Protection and Information Center, Klamath-Siskiyou Wild, the California Wilderness Coalition, the Center for Biological Diversity, Klamath Forest Alliance, and the Forest Conservation Council.
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