BOISE, Idaho -- After failing to halt two timber sales in Washington and
Oregon in federal court, environmental groups now hope to scuttle the projects
by accusing Boise Cascade Co. of reneging on its 2003 promise not to buy wood
from old-growth forests.
The Boise-based company began logging 10 million board feet of timber in the
Deschutes National Forest in eastern Oregon last week. It expects to begin
cutting 6.5 million board feet from the Wenatchee National Forest in
northeastern Washington within days. Both areas were damaged by 2003 fires.
Environmentalists say it's old growth. Boise Cascade says it isn't.
Forestry experts watching this fight say it highlights the difficulty of
defining just what makes up old-growth forests, which for years have been at the
center of the clash between loggers and preservationists. It's made even more
contentious because only limited research exists on the best way to promote
forest health.
"You have the environmental community saying, 'If you touch it at all, it's
contaminated and you won't end up with a natural situation.' And you have the
company saying, 'It's a light touch,"' said Bob Edmonds, the associate dean for
research at the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources. "There's
a lot of opinion, and it's not based on really good science."
In Oregon, the B & B fire that started Aug. 19, 2003, burned 91,000 acres, or
142 square miles, on the Deschutes National Forest. That same month, the Fischer
fire on the Wenatchee National Forest burned 16,000 acres.
Forest Service managers in both states decided on salvage logging and planned to
use money from the timber sales, which encompass enough wood to build 5,500
small ranch-style homes, to pay for replanting.
But environmental groups, including Conservation Northwest of Bellingham, Wash.,
objected, saying that land slated to be logged was within areas designated by
the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan as a reserve for old-growth trees and wildlife
habitat. The groups sued in U.S. District Court, arguing the reserves should be
left alone.
The ongoing lawsuits have so far failed to halt stop logging.
So now, the environmentalists are reminding Boise Cascade of its 2003 promise to
stop cutting timber from old-growth forests in the U.S. by 2004, hoping to
pressure it into pulling out of the projects. The company made the pledge after
it lost customers, including Kinko's paper products and sportswear companies
Patagonia and L.L. Bean, amid concerns over harvest practices.
"What's happened is companies like Boise Cascade have provided friendly lip
service to conservation organizations, saying 'We're not going to take
old-growth trees,"' said Karen Ganey, a Rainforest Action Network activist who
spent Thursday morning tying green ribbons on trees near the company's Boise
headquarters to drum up attention for the campaign. "Then, they go in and buy
those two (old-growth) timber sales."
Boise Cascade officials, who are removing Ganey's ribbons, disagree.
"From our point of view, nothing has changed: The commitment we made in 2003 is
still in place today," said Mike Moser, a spokesman. "(The timber sales are) not
in old-growth forests. The trees being removed are primarily dead or dying.
Green trees are being left behind."
The company -- and some scientists -- say while there may be large trees in the
areas slated for removal by Boise Cascade, a century of fire suppression and
logging east of the Cascade Range has created forests different from what were
common in the region before the arrival of Europeans.
By removing some of the trees and replanting, foresters can help restore the
original character of the region's forests and promote old-growth stands of
native trees such as ponderosa pine, said Mick Mueller, the fire ecologist on
the Wenatchee River Ranger District.
"The mere appearance of a few large trees does not an old growth forest make,"
Mueller said. "The trees we're talking about here are dead or dying. That seems
to be getting lost in this discussion."
Still, environmentalists said more than 100 trees that survived the 2003 fires
have been mislabeled for harvest. They're still alive and exceed the diameter
that should be cut, activists said.
They also argue that U.S. Forest Service employees like Mueller are under the
thumb of President Bush's designs of extracting maximum value from the nation's
trees for the logging industry.
"The Forest Service doesn't want to define anything as old growth, unless you're
going to put it into a grove and name it after Lady Bird Johnson," said Paul
West, a Rainforest Action Network spokesman.
Still, there has been a push toward reconciliation: At a Sept. 7 meeting in San
Francisco, Boise Cascade Chief Executive Officer Tom Stevens and
environmentalists from Rainforest Action Network, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, and Northwest Forest Campaign agreed to a cooperative study of
appropriate definitions of old-growth, to prevent future clashes.