March 8th, 2007

Judge blocks timber sale in Mount Hood forest

Logging of centuries-old trees in the Mount Hood National Forest, the crux of fierce protests for years, may have finally come to an end.

A federal judge in Portland this week blocked the forest's last timber sale planned to send old-growth stands to the auction block. It's a clear symbolic victory for activists and a turning point for the forest that once delivered many millions of board feet of old growth to Oregon sawmills every year.

Judge Michael Mosman, ruling on a lawsuit by the environmental group Bark, said the U.S. Forest Service had not considered the best available science when approving the Slinky timber sale in the Clackamas River drainage in 2003.

The 184 acres cannot be auctioned and clear-cut until foresters rewrite the environmental documentation supporting it, the judge said.

That may be unlikely anytime soon. Forest managers have turned their attention to less contentious thinning projects that do not produce as much wood, but that environmental groups are less likely to fight at every turn.

Forest Service spokesman Rick Acosta refused to comment on the court case.

Forest activists said the decision presents managers an opportunity to move away from logging and instead repair the impacts of heavy cutting in past decades. Today, Mount Hood is a popular recreational playground, visited by millions every year.

"In our mind, this is a watershed moment for the Mount Hood National Forest," said Alex Brown, executive director of Bark, the most tenacious opponent of logging in the forest. "The question now is what is the future?"

A bill in Congress would establish nearly 130,000 acres of new wilderness in the forest that would be off-limits to logging. There is some old-growth timber in the Mount Hood forest that has been sold but not logged.

The fate of the Slinky sale illustrates why national forests have not turned out the timber that they were supposed to under the Northwest Forest Plan, a Clinton administration compromise to protect wildlife and provide a smaller but steady stream of timber.

The sale is in an area of the Mount Hood forest designated for commercial logging. Its acreage lies in several small chunks fragmented by past logging and not as valuable to wildlife as larger, intact expanses, said Jim Roden, who helped plan the sale for the Forest Service.

The plan was to clear-cut the trees, leaving 10 to 12 large trees per acre, providing commercial timber and replacing older, slow-growing forest with younger, more productive stands, the Forest Service said.

Many of the trees are close to two centuries old, but may not strike many people as old-growth in the classic calendar-photo sense of massive wooden giants, he said. The largest trees that contain by far the most wood would not be cut, and the trees to be logged probably average about a foot in diameter, he said.

"I still feel this is a good project, but it probably will never happen," Roden said.

Planning for such timber sales includes years of wildlife surveys and other assessment, he said.

"We've spent a ton of money planning this," he said. "We had to look for slugs, we had to look for snails, we had to look for tree voles, and that really adds up."

But environmental activists repeatedly took issue with the sale, first filing appeals and then a lawsuit. They argued the Forest Service had ignored the ecological value of large trees, putting their commercial value above all else. They argued in the lawsuit that the Forest Service had not met a requirement to use the best available science in its decision.

The judge agreed. But he noted that a new planning rule enacted by the Bush administration since the timber sale sets a different requirement. So the timber sale might not run into the same legal catch if it were proposed today.

Thinning projects produce roughly one-fifth as much timber as an old- growth sale, he said. But forest managers see thinning of uniform stands as an approach that is more widely accepted and is less likely to run into legal roadblocks such as the appeals and lawsuits that bedeviled Slinky.

Michael Milstein: 503-294-7689; [email protected]

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