Eugene weekly., April 12, 2012, Page 13, Image 13

C
ut a forest in half and
nobody is happy — not
the timber beasts, nor the
treehuggers.
You know why
they teach sharing in
kindergarten? Because it
sucks to give something
away without a promise you’ll get
something better in return. Studies of
little kids show that as they get older
and develop their cognitive skills, they
share more because they understand
reciprocity better.
Then those kids grow up to be
loggers, environmentalists, politicians
and policy wonks, and the sharing and
compromise thing gets all messed up
again.
Congressman Peter DeFazio says the
plan for Oregon’s O&C forestlands (named
for the Oregon and California Railroad)
that he has devised with fellow Democrat
Rep. Kurt Schrader and Republican Greg
Walden solves 30 years of gridlock over
logging in Oregon’s federal forests. The
forest will be shared between saving trees
and logging for profi t.
Conservationists say the congressman’s
O&C Trust, Conservation, and Jobs Act is
going to hurt the forests more than it will
help anyone.
At the heart of the issue is what to do
with more than 2.5 million acres of public
forests in Oregon. DeFazio’s plan would
essentially give half the forest — 1.5
million acres — to a “timber trust” to
log and generate money for the counties.
The other half would be managed for
“conservation values” by the Forest
Service, and according to DeFazio, protect
Oregon’s old growth once and for all. But
so far no conservation group seems to
have endorsed the plan. Instead, enviros
have expressed concerns over the effects
the logging will have on Eugene’s water
supply, wildlife and the future of Western
Oregon’s remaining native forests —
without fi xing county budget woes.
DeFazio has a reputation for being
a bit irascible and for being an equal-
opportunity offender, just as he recently
referred to Republicans as “bozos,” he also
calls some environmentalist critiques of
his plan “bullshit.”
But the enviros, long supporters of
DeFazio, are fi ring back. They say the
congressman’s plan is a “turd,” noting
that the nods to wilderness protections it
contains are “lipstick on a pig.”
So why did DeFazio put this plan out
there?
THE PLAN
The O&C lands are a complicated
mess. It’s a lot of land, with a lot of
different values — beauty, water, wildlife
and timber, to name a few. And it’s acreage
that’s locked into a complex system of
federal lands and politics.
The O&C lands are a legacy of a railroad
deal gone awry. Like most Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) lands, they create a
visual checkerboard on a map: little one-
mile squares of public land, mixed with
squares of private.
“It’s a nightmare; it’s a jigsaw puzzle;
it’s a crazy quilt,” Randi Spivak of the Geos
Institute says of the O&C lands map and
DeFazio’s proposal. “It’s a total industrial
management paradigm that shows a lack of
understanding of ecology,” she adds.
The “DeFazio plan” was originally the
“Andy Stahl plan.” Stahl is the executive
director of Forest Service Employees
for Environmental Ethics and currently a
candidate for Lane County commissioner.
DeFazio is not all that fond of calling the
proposal the DeFazio plan; he says it’s the
DeFazio-Walden-Schrader plan, and “if it
was the DeFazio plan, it would be different.”
It’s not what Republican Greg Walden would
have written either, he says dryly.
Stahl says he devised his plan fi ve years
ago based on an approach to the logging vs.
native-forest-preservation controversy in
New Zealand, where many acres of forest
had been cut down and replanted with tree
farms of exotic species. The New Zealand
model, which involved preserving native
forests and leasing out and selling off the
tree farms, “paid down the national debt and
ended the timber wars for good,” he says.
But Stahl says that although his proposal
kicked things off, he was not involved in
drafting the current DeFazio plan. “There
are things that need to be corrected and
improved if it will go forward,” he says.
SPLITTING THE BABY
“It’s a radical proposal,” says longtime
environmentalist Andy Kerr of The Larch
Company.
Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild, which also
opposes the plan, calls it “splitting the baby.”
Pedery says that rather than
administering the “bitter medicine” of
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‘THEY’RE CALLING ME
A TIMBER BEAST.’
— CONGRESSMAN PETER DEFAZIO
raising taxes, DeFazio would prefer to tell
people: “Don’t worry, be happy; we can
log our way out of this.”
In her analysis of the proposal, Randi
Spivak writes that it will privatize 1.5
million acres of publicly owned O&C land
— this would include some lands in the
national forest system — and clearcut them.
The 1.5 million acres of timber-trust
lands include forests that are125 years old
and younger. Some of those lands are native
forests, never logged and on their way to
becoming old growth, environmentalists
say. The timber trust would be managed
by a board of trustees appointed by the
governor and focused on maximizing
revenues from logging to benefi t Western
Oregon’s 18 O&C counties.
Spivak points out that some of the
native 125-year-old and younger forests
contain patches of old-growth trees, and
that those ancient trees would also be cut.
Some of the timber-trust lands would be
cut every 120 years and some as frequently
as every 40 years.
About 800,000 acres of forest older
than 125 years would get transferred to
the Forest Service and managed under the
Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), and some
of those trees would be designated old
growth and therefore protected. Another
50,000 or so acres of public forests would
be logged by Coos County to generate
money for both Coos and Douglas counties.
Currently, if a conservation group has
reservations about a federal timber sale or a
clearcut, it can appeal the sale and take the
matter to court. Under DeFazio’s plan, that
option for saving these public forests would
be gone. “They can litigate the legislation,”
DeFazio says, but there would no longer be
a federal process for each timber sale. As
long as the logging on the timber-trust lands
followed the rules, a lawsuit wouldn’t go
anywhere, DeFazio says.
Kerr calls the plan “poorly conceived
and poorly drafted” and says trust members
would have to “clearcut the shit” or violate
the fi duciary obligation. “There is no
discretion to do good,” Kerr says.
TIMBER AND TAXES
Since the 1930s, county fi nances have
been tied to logging on the O&C lands.
The idea was that having 50 percent of
the logging receipts going to the counties
would make up for large swathes of the
counties’ lands being nontaxable. It might
have seemed like a great idea at the time,
but the O&C lands have been at the center
of disputes and lawsuits for years.
After Oregon timber harvests began to
slow in the late 1980s, the money stopped
coming. Congress then stepped in with the
Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-
Determination Act, which has provided
direct federal payments to counties. The
act was renewed several times, but the
last payment to the counties was in 2011,
leaving county funding again uncertain.
DeFazio’s plan is an effort to give the
Oregon counties the money they need,
while at the same time implementing the
fi rst protections for old-growth trees on
O&C lands, he says. He sweetens the pot
by adding in some wilderness protection,
too — DeFazio says his proposal would
protect 90,000 acres of Oregon forests as
wilderness, and adds 150 miles of Oregon
rivers to the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
Most of the wilderness is in his district,
according to DeFazio, though he adds that
Walden, the Republican, is taking heat
for participating in wilderness protection.
“They’re calling me a timber beast,
and he’s being called an environmental
radical,” DeFazio notes.
A companion bill in the Senate might
fi x some of the issues people have with the
proposed legislation, the congressman says.
Courtney Warner Crowell from
Sen. Jeff Merkley’s offi ce says that the
“DeFazio-Walden-Schrader concept is
one that Sen. Merkley has been interested
in for a long time.” She says the senator
will be watching to see what they can get
through the House and “will work closely
with Sen. Wyden to build consensus in the
Senate around creating sustainable timber
harvests while protecting Oregon’s forests
for future generations.”
EUGENE WEEKLY APRIL 12, 2012
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