Scientists oppose logging bills in Congress
By Scott Sonner, AP
More than 200 biologists, ecologists and other scientists are urging Congress to defeat legislation they say would destroy critical wildlife habitat by setting aside U.S. environmental laws to speed logging of burned trees at Yosemite National Park and other national forests and wilderness areas across the West.
The experts say two measures pushed by pro-logging interests ignore a growing scientific consensus that the burned landscape plays a critical role in forest regeneration and is home to many birds, bats and other species found nowhere else.
“We urge you to consider what the science is telling us: that post-fire habitat created by fire, including patches of severe fire, are ecological treasures rather than ecological catastrophes, and that post-fire logging does far more harm than good to the nation’s public lands,” they wrote in a letter mailed to members of Congress Friday.
One bill, authored by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would make logging a requirement on some public forestland, speed timber sales and discourage legal challenges.
The House approved the legislation 244-173 in September and sent it to the Senate, where it awaits consideration by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The White House has threatened a veto, saying it would jeopardize endangered species, increase lawsuits and block creation of national monuments.
Hastings, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said wildfires burned 9.3 million acres in the U.S. last year, while the Forest Service only harvested timber from about 200,000 acres.
Hastings’ bill includes an amendment by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, which he also introduced as separate legislation specific to lands burned by this year’s Rim Fire at Yosemite National Park, neighboring wilderness and national forests in the Sierra Nevada.
“We have no time to waste in the aftermath of the Yosemite Rim Fire,” McClintock said at a subcommittee hearing in October. “By the time the formal environmental review of salvage operations has been completed in a year, what was once forestland will have already begun converting to brushland, and by the following year, reforestation will become infinitely more difficult and expensive.”
The Rim Fire started in August and grew to become one of the largest wildfires in California history. It burned 400 square miles and destroyed 11 residences, three commercial properties and 98 outbuildings. It cost $127 million to fight.
Members of the House Natural Resources Committee remain optimistic the Senate will take up Hastings’ bill before the end of the year, said Mallory Micetich, the committee’s deputy press secretary.
“We have a lot of hazardous fuel buildup, and it will help alleviate some of the threat of catastrophic wildfires,” she said.
The scientists see it differently.
“Just about the worst thing you can do to these forests after a fire is salvage-log them,” said Dominick DellaSala, the lead author of the letter. “It’s worse than the fire itself because it sets back the recovery that begins the minute the fire is out.”
DellaSala, chief scientist at the conservation group Geos Institute in Ashland, Ore., was on a team of scientists that produced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s final recovery plan for the spotted owl in 2008.
Many who signed the opposition letter have done research in the field and several played roles with the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in developing logging policies for the threatened northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest.
“Though it may seem at first glance that a post-fire landscape is a catastrophe ecologically,” they wrote, “numerous scientific studies tell us that even in patches where forest fires burned most intensely, the resulting post-fire community is one of the most ecologically important and biodiverse habitat types in western conifer forests.
“Moreover, it is the least protected of all forest types and is often as rare, or rarer, than old-growth forest due to damaging forest practices encouraged by post-fire logging policies.”
Wow, and look at all that destructive logging done here after the Angora fire.
Be interesting to see if a group/s made up of loggers, biologists, economists, and wide ranging recreation people, can come up with a competent harvesting mode of operation.
Yes, the Angora area burned and then raped by over zealous loggers. Burn areas do not provide top quality lumber. McClintock and his tea party cronies want to get laws on the books that would open the door to further degrade the forests by logging. All they see are dollar signs. When will man learn to leave Mother Nature well enough alone?
Arod, where did you hear burn areas don’t have top quality timber? The fact is burn areas yield perfect timber as long as it is harvested before it can blue stain. That usually happens within 1 year of the fire, or less depending on timing.
This is not a leading panel of experts on the subject. In fact burn areas are over represented on the landscape because fires are larger due to fuel loading caused by fire suppression. So should everything be logged? No, but that is far different from saying salvage logging should be disallowed.
Moral Hazard, the list of signer’s is an impressive list of leading ecological scientists that collectively have well over several thousand peer-reviewed publications in various areas of ecology, many of which address fire and fire affects on ecological systems. Let’s not kid ourselves, the bills in front of congress, are all about assisting logging companies to log and nothing about the efficacy of how and when logging should occur within burned areas. That would be a reasonable discussion, but this is simply an attempt by the House to pay-off some logging interest.
Rick
And Rick, what is missing on the list and is absolutely absent is any discussion or any expert, like a Scott Stevens, who can discuss historic fire behavior and quantify historic prevalence of burned acres on the landscape. The point being that preserving it all would then cause that stand condition to be over-represented because fires are both hotter and larger due to fire suppression.
There are two sides of this that are equally extreme, the log everything group and don’t touch anything group. You and the group that signed the list argue for the latter and the house bill supports the former.
As usual with most things in politics, the middle is unrepresented but correct; there should be some salvage logging and there should be some left alone.
Moral, this letter (signed btw by a number of leading scientists in fire research) is in response to some very specific legislation that is not attempting to find a middle ground, but is staking out an extreme position. If the legislation actually sought to involve all stake holders and sought a collaborative solution, this letter probably never would have happen, or would have had far fewer and less notable scientists joining the day.
Not to be overly cynical, but the Republican majority in the house completely pissed off the business community with its shutdown and the debt ceiling fight, and this is partially a move to buy back some credibility with laws they known will never pass the Senate nor get signed into law. The last Congress (and this one) are shaping up to accomplish very little (as measured by bills that become law) under Boehner then any congress in the modern era.
This is probably more about staking out a position come the 2014 election then an attempt to actually pass something into law. To actually find a true path forward, you would actually work with folks across the aisle and find an approach that both sides could live with. But that is not Boehner’s interest.
Rick
I agree with that Rick with the caveat that the press is taking the letter and making it sound like its a scientific repudiation of all salvage logging. Here’s an interesting point.
nobody talks about harvesting rice in any controversial way. Yes there are efforts to change some farming practices, but over all we cut rice every fall.
Take the same acres and grow a crop of trees on them, and all of a sudden people come out of the woodwork to protest the harvest. Well why is tree farming different from rice farming? Why is it now inappropriate to use National Forest lands for the purpose they were actually set aside?
I’ve always had an issue with the DBH measurement of an “Old Growth” tree, as it doesn’t take into any account the ecosystem that went into the time-span of growing the tree to the size it is . . .the very fact that there are “stories” (under & over) refers to the incredible number of habitats that exist with a 30″ DBH (X’s the number of trees) . . . created in the decades it took to grow the tree.
The idea that we must “rush in” and “wipe the slate clean” belies the silvicultural aspects of the forest regenerating itself with the help of the species that survived, which of course would be further decimated by removing even more of the tree population. . .
As to the “hurry” itself, it would be good to review the 1988 Yellowstone fire, as the ‘rush’ there was to send scientific crews to evaluate its’ potential for regrowth – when I was there several years ago with National Park Service guidance, the actual downed-trees were still in major evidence and had not been “logged” (as far as the eye could see) – the revegetation was the first sign of regrowth, as was next the biologic.
Ecologic considerations must be the answer here – in spite of the amount of linear board-feet of lumber made available. . .to take convenient advantage of a disaster would be criminal. . .
“By the time the formal environmental review of salvage operations has been completed in a year, what was once forestland will have already begun converting to brushland, and by the following year, reforestation will become infinitely more difficult and expensive.”
Sure it will Tom… sure it will.
What a joker.
Rape, Pillage and Plunder. Greed and Profit over the common good. Hmmm. What is different? Nothing. The only thing that is ever going to solve anything (maybe) is next election, no matter where it is or what is is for, vote the incumbents out and get some new blood in. They may actually agree to disagree and work together to compromise and as a result our government may work again.