An unlogged area burned by the 2002 Biscuit Fire is regenerating naturally.
proposal. The agency received 23,000 public
comments, 95 percent of them opposed to
post-fire logging, and environmental groups
filed a half-dozen lawsuits challenging the
plan. The Forest Service pushed ahead with
logging operations anyway, despite staffing
shortages and auction prices 70 percent lower
than expected. By January 2005, with only 53
million board feet cut, the operation had cost
taxpayers more than $14 million, according to
a World Wildlife Fund report.
Protesters blocked bridges along hauling
paths and environmental groups went on the
attack, saying that logging a forest after wild-
fire is like rubbing sandpaper on a burn vic-
tim’s skin. Loggers and timber lobbyists
fought back, blaming the environmental regu-
lations for delaying the process and letting all
that valuable timber go to waste.
This couldn’t go on. Everyone agreed that
something had to be done. Right on cue, Rep.
Greg Walden (R-Ore.) introduced a bill to
make these decisions much simpler.
ROLF SKAR
The legislative battle
The
Battle
of
Biscuit
P -
OST FIRE LOGGING CONTROVERSY SPLITS THE
OSU C OLLEGE OF F ORESTRY IN TWO . B Y K ERA A BRAHAM
I
n mid-July 2002, lightning ignited
five flames in southwest Oregon’s
Klamath-Siskiyou
Wildlands,
including a funny-shaped hill
called Biscuit Mountain. A wind
blew up from the east and the fires joined, cre-
ating a blaze that fire crews couldn’t contain.
The Biscuit Fire, as it’s called, burned through
500,000 acres in the Rogue River-Siskiyou
National Forest, sizzling out only with the
October rains.
Where a biologically rich green forest had
once been, a mostly black landscape
remained. People in the local community
were shaken by the blaze, some worrying
about lost timber jobs, some mourning the
loss of all that old-growth forest. And the
question became: What are we going to do
about this?
The people of Douglas County soon real-
ized that they weren’t the only ones wonder-
ing. Turns out that most of Oregon’s state and
federal legislators, more than a dozen envi-
ronmental groups, the entire U.S. Forest
Service, a determined crew of protesters,
forestry scholars, timber companies across
America, international news outlets and
President Bush were asking the same question
— and proposing their own answers.
Science, not spin, can best inform post-fire
forest management policy decisions. But cur-
rent science provides only a sketchy under-
standing of forests’ responses to fire. So far,
less than 30 peer-reviewed studies have
examined western post-fire forest ecosystems.
To fill in the knowledge gaps, Biscuit’s stake-
holders turn to Oregon State University’s
College of Forestry (CoF), the breeding-
grounds for experts nearest the burn.
What they find is a college split in two,
with some faculty members suggesting that
14 APRIL 13, 2006
the burned old forests should be actively man-
aged to grow back the tall firs fast and others
insisting that the best course of action is to
leave nature alone.
More dramatic than the rift in opinion is
the scandal that has dogged the college since
January, when a graduate student released a
study reporting that post-fire logging can hin-
der forest regeneration and increase fire risk.
A group of faculty members, including CoF
Dean Hal Salwasser and forest engineering
professor John Sessions, immediately
launched a campaign to discredit the report,
raising questions about academic freedom at
one of the nation’s top forestry schools.
Turns out the very same lightning that
started the Biscuit Fire also ignited the tension
that built up like tinder in the CoF’s halls. And
it’s a hot one.
The management question
The debate zooms in on specific parts of
the federal forest. Most people agree that
some logging is reasonable on lands legally
dedicated to mixed use, where timber produc-
tion is one of the goals. And few would argue
in favor of logging the wilderness areas,
which are legally defined as places to be left
untouched by human impact. The controversy
is over the old forests (LSRs), reserved under
the Northwest Forest Plan for wildlife habitat,
and the inventoried roadless areas, which
were protected from logging by the Clinton-
era Roadless Rule until the Bush administra-
tion repealed it.
The policy question: What should the
Forest Service do after a fire turns a complex
old forest into a newborn landscape — log
and replant it to grow big conifer trees fast, or
leave it alone to let nature take its course?
Under the Northwest Forest Plan, the answer
should be whatever action plan is best for the
northern spotted owl and other mature forest
species.
Soon after the Biscuit Fire, Forest Service
administrators in the Siskiyou began to make
their post-fire plans under the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), consider-
ing action alternatives, weighing ecological
and economic concerns and collecting public
comments. They drafted a proposal to cut 96
million board feet of wood from mixed use
lands. The most pristine parts of the Siskiyou
— the wilderness areas, inventoried roadless
areas and old forest reserves — would be left
to recover on their own.
In July 2003, the Forest Service suddenly
put the brakes on its plans in order to consid-
er new information from a review by a team
of OSU forestry professors formed by
Salwasser and led by Sessions. The analysis,
which came to be known as the Sessions
report, estimates that more than two billion
board feet of burnt timber could be cut from
the Biscuit area and warns that the longer the
Forest Service waits before logging, the less
that timber will be worth.
Despite major gaps in that report such as
the failure to consider applicable environmen-
tal regulations, the assumption that logging is
permitted in protected old growth and road-
less areas and the inclusion of non-mer-
chantable burnt hardwoods in the volume esti-
mate, Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy sent his
17-expert team of ground-pounders back to
the drawing board, telling them to produce an
option to cut at least a billion board feet. That
led to a new plan to cut 372 million board
feet, some of it from protected old forests and
roadless areas.
A flood of public opposition followed the
Walden’s bill, the Forest Emergency
Recovery and Research Act (FERRA), would
allow the Forest Service to bypass the envi-
ronmental and public processes required
under NEPA after natural disturbances on fed-
eral forests. Walden has used the Sessions
report to defend the idea that post-disturbance
logging operations simply can’t wait for
bureaucracy.
If FERRA as currently written becomes
law, the Forest Service could bring bulldozers
and chainsaws into public old-growth
reserves within 30 days of a fire, flood, torna-
do, mudslide, avalanche, infestation, wind-
storm, drought or volcanic eruption — a list
so inclusive it could apply to most federal
forests in any given year.
“If they included meteors and squirrel
sneezes, they would probably cover the whole
gamut,” said American Lands Alliance
Director Randy Spivek, who opposes
FERRA. “Walden’s legislation would elevate
the emergency of dead wood to that of a
national security issue.”
The law would be a huge boon to
Walden’s biggest financial backer, the timber
industry, which contributed $110,000 to his
2003-2004 congressional campaign. Sen.
Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who is introducing
similar legislation in the Senate, received
$227,000 from big timber during his 2001-
2006 election cycle. U.S. Agriculture
Undersecretary Mark Rey, who as a timber
industry lobbyist co-wrote the 1995 salvage
logging rider that sparked the Northwest tim-
ber wars, is also backing the bill.
So is the dean of the OSU College of
Forestry. Salwasser has thrown his clout
behind FERRA just as he did for the bill’s
predecessor, the 2003 Healthy Forests
Restoration Act (HFRA), which permitted the
Forest Service to log in previously protected
federal lands before wildfires. FERRA would
increase harvest rates in Oregon as well as
amp up forestry research funding — a poten-
tial windfall for the cash-strapped CoF.
“(FERRA) completes what HFRA began,”
Salwasser told a House committee last
November. Asked whether the CoF’s depend-
ence on timber money influenced his support
for FERRA, Salwasser replied, “That doesn’t
come into play in my thinking.”
FERRA may have political momentum,
but it isn’t about to pass without heavy con-