Sen. Craig’s Logging Bill Clears Panel Full Senate To Vote On Measure Creating Lasting Salvage Plan

Resuming an emotional fight over logging in national forests, a Senate panel voted Wednesday to waive some environmental safeguards and citizen appeal channels so as to speed salvage timbering in areas facing fire threats.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee sent Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig’s “Forest Health Protection and Restoration Act” to the full Senate.

It seeks to put in place a permanent salvage logging program after a similar, controversial measure - the emergency salvage timber rider - is set to expire this fall.

“As forest fires rage in Alaska and the southwestern United States, the need for quick passage and implementation of this legislation continues to grow,” Wayne E. Glenn, president of the United Paperworkers International Union in Nashville, Tenn., said Wednesday.

Critics said it is intended to circumvent laws protecting fish and wildlife to the benefit of the timber industry rather than forest health.

“It’s one-stop chopping,” said Kevin Kirchner, an attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

Sens. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said they opposed the Craig bill in its current form. Bradley said he would prepare an amendment before the full Senate considered the proposal.

Craig, chairman of the committee’s subcommittee on forestry, noted there are “substantial emotions on both sides” of the question of accelerating logging in fire-prone forests.

But he said his bill would provide the Forest Service with a reasonable, permanent policy with which to manage overstocked forests suffering from increased fuel build up due to disease and bug infestations.

Timber industry and labor union leaders cheered approval of the bill.

“This legislation strikes a sensible balance between environmental concerns and the social and economic realities for forest products workers, including tens of thousands of our members across the nation,” said Doug McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

“The health of our nation’s forests is an issue that must be resolved quickly in order to prevent catastrophic fires,” said W. Henson Moore, president of the American Forest and Paper Association.

Conservationists said the bill shortens time periods for some environmental reviews and eliminates others, including some documentation currently required under the National Environmental Policy Act before logging can take place.

It also eliminates citizens’ right to challenge emergency salvage logging by filing administrative appeals with the Forest Service. Those hearings can delay logging for months or even block it altogether.

“Under the guise of improving ‘forest health,’ this legislation would create a cancer in our national forests. It is a forest abuse bill,” said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife.

Craig said a “substantial majority” of the scientific community agrees thinning, salvage logging and other management techniques must be implemented quickly to address a growing forest health crisis in the West.

However, a collection of more than 100 scientists and university professors signed a letter to President Clinton Wednesday urging him to veto the bill.

They said dead and dying trees are critical to maintain forest biodiversity, control diseases and pests of forests, protect water supplies and maintain healthy fish populations.

“The misleading claims that there is a national forest health crisis falsely imply that tree deaths are a serious national problem,” said the letter organized by James Karr, professor of fisheries and zoology at the University of Washington.