Dead wood - reform of the U.S. Forest Service

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1996 by Glenn Hodges

When the Clinton Administration made Jack Ward Thomas chief of the Forest Service in late 1993, environmentalists couldn't have been happier. Thomas was the agency's senior wildlife biologist who earlier that year had developed Clinton's plan to protect the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, where furious logging of old-growth forests had, until 1991, been driving the owl towards extinction. The federal judge who stopped the logging with an injunction that year fingered the Forest Service, accusing it of "a deliberate and systematic refusal ... to comply with the laws protecting wildlife."

By that time, the Forest Service had a long and well-documented history of running roughshod over the nation's forests - and the environmental laws protecting them - in its efforts to "get out the cut" for the timber industry. The appointment of Thomas, the first scientist ever to lead the agency, was hailed as a bold new direction. The Sierra Club said his appointment "signals that forest management will now be conducted in a science-based manner"; the Oregon Natural Resources Council called it "the most sweeping change of the Forest Service since its creation in 1905"; the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics said, "Jack Ward Thomas sends a clear signal that it is not going to be business as usual in the Forest Service."

As chief, Thomas dedicated the agency to a new ethic: "Tell the truth, obey the law," and use "the best scientific knowledge in making decisions." Though he believed providing timber was an important function, his Forest Service would avoid the kind of forestry that had in the past devastated ecosystems. Thomas knew that protecting threatened and endangered species isn't just about owls or fish, but about the larger webs of life of which they are integral parts. In May 1994, Thomas quoted the Endangered Species Act to describe one of his prime missions as chief: "Preserve the ecosystems upon which the species depend."

So the irony couldn't have been thicker when a federal judge in Pheonix threatened to hold Chief Thomas in contempt in May 1996 for his agency's failure to protect the Mexican spotted owl, the rare southwestern cousin of the northern spotted owl he had worked so hard to preserve. "This court is at a loss to understand why the [Forest Service] would not carry out its duties set forth in the [Endangered Species Act]," the judge wrote. For two years, the Forest Service had been considering only the impact of individual timber sales on the owl, rather than the cumulative effect. Of course, individual bites don't make a cookie disappear, either.

Then in August of this year, White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman rejected a Forest Service proposal to step up old-growth logging in California's Sierra Nevada, citing concerns that it was "not supported by the best forest science." Only 15 percent of the Sierra's original old-growth forest had never been cut, and a three-year, congressionally sponsored study had concluded that logging was contributing to the eventual extinction of a number of plant and animal species, including the California spotted owl (the third of the spotted owl cousins). Despite reports from its own biologists that the owl population had been dropping at least 5 percent per year since 1990, the Forest Service, backed by the timber industry, insisted its proposal to increase logging by 80 percent from 1995 levels was sound.

But it is the Forest Service's implementation of the timber salvage rider that Congress passed, and Clinton signed, in July 1995 that has really raised environmentalists' ire. An attachment to a recisions bill, the rider instructed the Forest Service to sell 4.5 billion board feet (a "board foot" is an inch-thick square foot of wood) of salvage timber - trees that are dead, dying, or "imminently susceptible" to fire, disease, or insect attack - to logging companies by the end of 1996. The law was controversial from the start because it freed the Service from its normal environmental assessments and made it immune to administrative appeals. It was, critics said, "logging without laws," giving the Forest Service license to cut, as salvage, "all trees made of wood," as Senator Bill Bradley put it.

Soon after the laws passage, stories from the national forests indicated that the concerns weren't unfounded: Foresters were using the rider to offer timber sales that had been stopped years earlier for environmental reasons; they were re-labeling sales that had been previously classified as "green" - healthy and alive - as salvage sales to avoid appeals; they were moving into roadless areas - undeveloped wilderness - without the environmental assessments that were usually required; they were clear-cutting steep slopes and polluting streams, they were destroying the habitat of threatened species like the grizzly bear and chinook salmon.

Though the rider allowed the Forest Service to do these things, it didn't require them to. The agency's poor use of its discretion was a vivid reminder that old habits die hard.