Illinois Valley News, Cave Junction, OR 97523, September 25,2002
Page 14
How thinning will be accomplished raises queries
By THE OREGONIAN
Federal land managers are
preparing to carry out Presi-
dent Bush’s new initiative to
thin flammable forests by ex-
empting logging projects from
citizen appeals and, in some
cases, environmental scrutiny.
The measures could give
timber cutting aimed at reduc-
ing wildfire immunity from
the web of laws and regula-
tions that environmental
groups often use to slow or
stymie logging.
They come just as Con-
gress last week appeared
deadlocked on legislation to
carry out the presidential plan,
suggesting that the administra-
tion wants to proceed with
thinning millions of acres of
overgrown Western forests
regardless of whether Con-
gress acts.
“I’m not comfortable sit-
ting around and waiting for an
outcome as uncertain as legis-
lation can be,” said Mark Rey,
undersecretary of agriculture,
who oversees the U.S. Forest
Service. “We’re going to do
this because we’re committed
to getting the job done.”
Among the plans by top
administration and forest ser-
vice officials:
*Exempting fire reduction
and some other logging pro-
jects from the requirement that
environmental impact state-
ments or assessments be com-
pleted, and with them multiple
chances for public comment.
*Allowing forest supervi-
sors to revise their manage-
ment plans governing logging
and other forest uses without
going through the environ-
mental and public reviews
they do nowl
*Revising regulations so
that citizen appeals of forest
service decisions do not auto-
matically block those deci-
sions, as they do now.
The moves took on new
prominence last week as the
Senate deadlocked over its
own attempt to step up thin-
ning of fire-prone forests in a
year during which federal fire-
fighting costs hit a record $
1.2 5 billion.
At issue in Congress is
whether judges could block
forest-thinning projects. Re-
publicans, led by Sen. Larry
Craig, of Idaho, want to re-
strict judicial power, while
leading Democrats want to
leave judges the option to halt
logging that they find unlaw-
ful.
The president meanwhile
has directed the forest service
and other federal land agen-
cies to speed work in Western
forests on their own, Rey said.
They are drawing up an ad-
ministrative measure, called a
categorical exclusion, to ex-
empt thinning and related ac-
tivities from review under the
National Environmental Pol-
icy Act, which requires close
scrutiny of federal actions.
Rey called it “one of the
two or three most important
pieces” of enacting the presi-
dent’s forest initiative because
it would free forests from
completing long and costly
reviews often blamed for
gumming up land manage-
ment.
Other critical elements,
both which are under way, are
reforming the appeals process
and designing model environ-
mental documents to save
staff time, he said.
A categorical exclusion
allows agencies to examine
records and conclude that they
have done enough environ-
mental reviews of certain
kinds of projects to know that
such projects have minimal
effect. They then could ex-
clude similar projects — in
this case thinning and the like
— from future review.
Besides thinning, such
projects could include salvage
logging of burned trees and
rehabilitation of charred for-
ests.
Environmental groups
complained that the approach
closes the public out of public
land decisions. They fear that
limiting environmental review
will open the door to thinning
that takes bigger, commer-
cially valuable trees under the
guise of abating fire risk.
But Rey said that the law
allows categorical exclusions
specifically so that agencies
need not review for similar
projects over and over. He
said that agencies must notify
the public of projects, even if
no review is conducted.
And while public com-
ment is useful, Rey said, “It’s
also accepted that it’s not nec-
essary every time something
happens.”
The forest service also is
at work on a second categori-
cal exclusion to exempt timber
sales under a certain size fron
environmental review. Such
sales could include live trees;
those threatened by bugs and
disease; and others burned or
blown over.
While the measures could
pave the way for thinning,
salvage and other logging pro-
jects to proceed much faster,
officials said, land managers
still could complete full re-
views of exceptional projects
where the environmental ef-
fects are unclear.
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592-4111