Bush-era Northwest logging plan withdrawn

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration on Thursday withdrew the Bush administration's last attempt at increasing logging in federal forests in the Pacific Northwest that are occupied by northern spotted owls and salmon.

Assistant Interior Secretary Ned Farquhar told a conference call of attorneys Thursday that they had determined the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's decision not to consult federal biologists over the logging's effects on spotted owls and salmon violated the Endangered Species Act.

Parties to the conference call said the Department of Interior will seek dismissal of the four lawsuits challenging the logging increase.

The BLM sought to increase timber production in western Oregon and increase revenues for rural Oregon counties still hurting from logging cutbacks.

The spotted owl was declared a threatened species in 1990 primarily due to heavy logging in old growth forests. Its numbers continue to decline, despite sharp reduction in logging on federal lands in 1994 that caused economic pain still felt in the region.

The Bush administration agreed to produce a new spotted owl recovery plan to settle a timber industry lawsuit.
The Bush-era plan blamed declining owl numbers on the barred owl, an aggressive East Coast cousin that has driven spotted owls from their territory, and on wildfires that have destroyed old growth forests. It eliminated habitat reserves in the Northwest Forest Plan and proposed aggressive thinning in the dry forests of the Klamath Mountains and the east side of the Cascades to reduce the threat of fire.

The Obama administration told a federal court last April it would not defend the Bush administration's plan because an inspector general's report concluded it had been politically manipulated. The administration is negotiating over the scope and timing for a review with conservation groups that filed lawsuits.

Judge struck down Bush change
Last month, another federal court struck down the Bush administration's change to a rule designed to protect the northern spotted owl.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled from Oakland, Calif., that the U.S. Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of changing the rule to make it easier to cut down forest habitat of species such as the spotted owl and salmon on 193 million acres of national forests.

"I am hopeful that this is the last nail in the coffin to (President George W.) Bush's assault on our public forests," said Pete Frost, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center in Eugene, which represented plaintiffs in one of two cases challenging the rule.

At stake was a provision of the National Forest Management Act that required maintaining viable populations of species that indicate the health of an ecosystem, such as the spotted owl. The Bush administration changed the rule last year so it required a framework of protection, rather than maintaining viable populations of wildlife.

The ruling marked the third time federal courts have turned back attempts to change the 1984 version of what is known as the viability rule within the National Forest Management Act.

The judge wrote that an environmental impact statement done by the Forest Service "does not evaluate the environmental impacts of the 2008 rule," and the agency failed to comply with Endangered Species Act requirements to consult with other federal agencies on whether the rule changes would jeopardize the survival of endangered species.

Instead, the Forest Service argued that the rule changes themselves had no direct environmental impact until they were applied to specific projects.

The judge admonished the Forest Service for simply copying legal arguments already rejected in two court rulings into their latest justification for the rule change.

Andy Stahl, director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in Eugene, said until the National Forest Management Act was enacted in 1976, the Forest Service had wide latitude to do as it pleased with little oversight — a situation the Bush administration hoped to recreate.

After President Bush was elected in 2000, his administration systematically worked to increase national forest logging by changing the rules for enforcing environmental laws, but was consistently turned back by federal court rulings.

In a related development, a new study challenges a basic justification about the threat of wildfires that the Bush administration used to make room for more logging in old growth forests that are home to the northern spotted owl.
The study, appearing in the journal Conservation Biology, found no increasing threat of severe wildfires destroying old growth forests in the drier areas where the owl lives in Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

"The argument used to justify a massive increase in logging under the (spotted owl) recovery program was not based on sound science," said Chad Hanson, a fire and forest ecologist at the University of California, Davis, who was lead author of the study. "The recovery plan took a leap-before-you-look approach and did it without sound data."

The study took satellite imagery on fire severity from 1984-2005, and compared it with government data identifying old growth forests on the east side of the Cascades in Oregon, Washington and California, and the Klamath Mountains of southern Oregon and California — all identified in the recovery plan as having the highest fire danger.

The rate of high-severity wildfires in old growth was 1.34 percent on the east side of the Cascades, and 1.74 percent in the Klamath Mountains, the study found. That amounts to a high-severity fire burning a given piece of old growth forest every 746 years on the east side of the Cascades, and every 575 years in the Klamaths.

The recovery plan looked at smaller portions of the landscape than the study and shorter periods of time, and extrapolated those results to reach its conclusions, Hanson said.

"The existing (Bush-era) recovery plan is so clearly based on these incorrect assumptions that you can't just tweak it here and amend it here and fix it," Hanson said.

Forests are actually maturing into old growth suitable for owl habitat five to 14 times faster than they are being burned by wildfire, added co-author Dominic DellaSala, chief scientist for the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy and a member of the spotted owl recovery team that fought with the Bush administration over the owl recovery plan.


The Associated Press