Last week, an old friend sent me the following email note:
"Conservationist" Andy Kerr has come down from his mountain with an important decision for the timber industry. He has decided timber companies should cut more trees. This is generous of him. Loggers now have his permission to start sharpening their saws to thin our forests. Does this mean he approves of molesting and killing ‘young trees' but still opposes salvaging burned trees because that would be like mugging a burn victim?
Attached to his tongue-in-cheek note was an August 15 story from the Portland Tribute, titled "Eco warrior: Let's cut more trees" in which Mr. Kerr lays out his ambitious plans for thinning overly dense federally-owned forests in Oregon, Washington and northern California, a plan he says will create about 7,200 new jobs in communities that were economically devastated by the government's 1990 decision to list the northern spotted owl as a threatened species - a decision in which Kerr was a key player.
Kerr's new proposal, which is based on a study conducted by conservationist groups, calls for increasing the harvest level on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management timberlands to about 774 million board feet annually. Never mind that these same forests can easily sustain a harvest of at least eight billion board feet annually. Mr. Kerr and his colleagues at least deserve credit for recognizing that the per acre increase in forest density is an ecological time bomb, not least because of the wildfire risks increasing density brings. We have been arguing this same case on Evergreen pages for more than 20 years.
Is Kerr extending an olive branch to beleaguered timber communities he helped dismantle in the 1980s and 1990s? I don't think so. What we really have here is great election year theatre, and where theatre is concerned, Kerr is a master of what broadcasters call the "six-second sound bite." Who can ever forget his declaration that salvaging fire-killed timber was "like mugging a burn victim." I certainly haven't. He said it in a hastily called press conference in 1987, the year that some 110,000 acres of old growth timber was incinerated in a lightning caused Silver Fire on southern Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest.
Twenty-five years hence, Andy Kerr is still the most picturesque spokesman modern-day environmentalism has ever had. Witness his bold but disingenuous admission to Tribune writer Christopher Onstott:
"The fundamental reason we did the study is because conservationists are always accused of saying, ‘No.' Rightly so. So we started writing some numbers, and decided there was more potential timber harvest available than we thought. Conservationists want to increase cuts? Yes we do, but there are certain kinds of logs."
"Certain logs" is code for trees that are too small and of such poor quality that they have little or no commercial value. Kerr knows this, too. He also knows that West Coast lumbermen who survived the collapse of the federal timber sale program now prosper from a steady diet of high quality logs they purchase from state, tribal and private timberlands.
I can't name a single lumberman in the western United States [and I know most of them] who is rushing out to do business with the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management because they know their all too unpredictable timber sale programs operate under the direct control of "conservationists" and federal judges who aren't going to allow the removal of timber large enough to have any commercial value.
It's true that the trees Kerr wants removed do need to be harvested, especially in late succession reserves that are being wiped out in stand-replacing wildfires. Bear in mind that these federal reserves, which span almost 11,600 square miles [7.4 million acres] in Oregon, Washington and northern California, are thought to provide critically important nesting habitat for a northern spotted owl population of still unknown size that is now being shredded by predatory barred owls.
Equally true is the fact that these misnamed "forest restoration" projects cost the country's taxpayers more than $1,000 per acre. Yet studies conducted in Arizona, New Mexico, Montana and Idaho demonstrate that simply adding a few marketable trees to restoration projects can turn a money loser into a program that can pay its own way.
But there is a larger question here that is routinely ignored by the press. Limiting the size and age of trees that can be harvested - as Kerr is proposing - is bad science for which there is no evidence in nature. If the goal is to restore ecological functions in at risk forests the resulting thinning program needs to include trees of all sizes and ages. This is how nature does it, and it is how we should be doing it, too.
What Kerr is trying to do is steer the public away from about four million acres of "matrix lands," that were promised to lumbermen in the never implemented Clinton Forest Plan - a plan in which Kerr's invisible hand is ever present. Matrix lands are lands that the government's scientists set aside for multiple-use management, which includes harvesting.
But little harvesting has ever occurred in these forests because they remain the focal point of still unresolved timber sale appeals and lawsuits masterminded by Kerr's friends. He knows this, too. So it is easy for him to appear to be extending an olive branch while still holding a gun to the head of every unemployed logger and millworker in the region.
Back in 1995, the Forest Service put together a plan to remove several hundred diseased trees from an old-growth stand on the Siskiyou National Forest. At the time, there were spotted owls nesting nearby, and there was a lot of concern among Forest Service biologists about the loss of even more trees owls were using.
The 10.5 million board foot Sugarloaf timber sale, which covered 670 acres, was purchased by Boise Cascade Corporation. Predictably, environmentalists went to court to block the harvest. In fact, they took their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And lost. The thinning went forward, amid threats of violence by eco-terrorists, and, lo and behold, nesting owls were not harmed by the presence of loggers. In fact, the following year, a pair of owls that had been nesting there since 1990 returned and fledged their first offspring.
No doubt Kerr remembers the incident - including the fact that Sugarloaf was leveled in the 2002 Biscuit Fire, a conflagration that burned nearly 500,000 acres of timberland, including 80,000 acres of late successional owl habitat. Of 2.5 billion board feet lost [worth $825 million] the Forest Service was only able to salvage 29 million feet. The rest was bottled up in federal court litigation until it no longer had any value.
If my understanding of Kerr's proposal is correct - and I think it is - it is now okay to remove small trees from late successional reserves, so long as he approves, but it was not okay to do it at Sugarloaf. Nor were taxpayers permitted to recover their losses after the Silver or Biscuit fires, or to replant the land on which fire-killed timber stood.
If Kerr and his "conservationist" supporters seem like hypocrites, it is because they are. But they do know how to stage great theatre.
For the record, some 93 percent of the 1.1 million acre Siskiyou is off limits to harvesting. The seven percent [matrix lands] that remain are the subject of ongoing litigation. No wonder the Forest Service has rarely reached its 24 million board foot annual harvest allocation - an allocation that does not even make a dent in the 500 million feet of new wood fiber that still grow annually on the Siskiyou. Kerr knows this too, but he persists in his promise that if any old-growth timber is opened to harvesting there will be "a helluva fight."
I'm not sure who will do battle with Kerr. Certainly not the lumbermen I know. They no longer have any interest in playing his foil. Maybe he'll set up a couple of chairs and some lonely public stage here in western Oregon and argue with himself. Now there's a sideshow I'd pay good money to watch.
Click here to read the Portland Tribune story and Click here to read "Siskiyou Showdown," our 2004 story about events leading to and following the Biscuit Fire.
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