‘THERE ARE THINGS THAT
NEED TO BE CORRECTED
AND IMPROVED IF IT
WILL GO FORWARD.’
— ANDY STAHL, AUTHOR OF AN EARLY VERSION
OF THE CONTROVERSIAL TRUST PLAN
Wyden is a senior Democrat on the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee.
MORE HARM THAN GOOD?
Throw a rock at a crowd of
environmentalists and you’re guaranteed
to hit someone who hates the DeFazio
plan — unless you happen to nail Andy
Stahl. Stahl is one of the few people on the
conservation side of things who sees the
plan as salvageable.
Stahl brandishes an 83-page printout
of the draft bill, which bristles with Post-
It notes, each marking a change he would
make that would render the bill palatable.
He criticizes the make-up of the board,
the way the timber would be sold, and
its language on everything from fi re
suppression to dealing with endangered
species such as the spotted owl.
Kerr, Oregon Wild and other opponents
don’t see the bill as fi xable at all. “I would
view it as a turd that I wouldn’t want to try
to polish,” Kerr says.
Pedery says Stahl’s original proposal
“rolled back the clock to 1992.” He says,
“Andy has never really moved beyond the
timber wars of the 1990s.” Those were the
days when loggers sported bumper stickers
that proclaimed “spotted owl tastes better
fried.”
The issue isn’t just owls, these days
conservationists say it’s ecosystems. Pedery
says the real policy debate has to be “whether
or not we move into conservation forestry.”
DeFazio says his plan allows for that.
He points to the pilot projects of Northwest
forestry professors Norm Johnson and Jerry
Franklin. He grumbles that environmentalists
have stymied even those projects that are
aimed at improving forest health.
The
proposed
bill
suspends
environmental laws, Spivak says. The trees
would be logged and the forests managed
under the Oregon Forest Practices Act
(FPA). DeFazio’s bill “exempts the
very weak private lands protection for
endangered species,” she says.
DeFazio says if people don’t like
the FPA, then they need to get to work
changing it.
The bill also raises hackles about the
Clean Water Act. Spivak says it would
waive requirements for pollution permits
for certain logging roads and drainage
ditches — logging roads create sediment
that clogs salmon streams. This doesn’t
just harm the fi sh; it could harm fi shing
industries and affect drinking water.
Also, the Oregon Forest Practices Act
that applies to private timberlands, and
would apply to the timber trust, has very
different stream protections than federal
lands logging. Logging buffers that were
170 to 340 feet under the NWFP could
get reduced to as low as zero to 20 feet,
depending on whether fi sh live in the
stream or not.
“The bill is an unmitigated hydrological
disaster,” Pedery says. “One dirty little
secret of the logging industry” is that the
sediments it churns in water forcing cities
to invest in expensive fi ltration systems, he
says.
Some of the lands included in the bill
are lands up the McKenzie — the source
of Eugene’s drinking water. “The potential
for clearcutting in the McKenzie is a big
one,” Pedery says.
Kerr agrees. “One of DeFazio’s clearcut
legacies will be dirty drinking water,” he
says.
DeFazio counters these concerns by
pointing out that the massive amounts of
logging that occurred up the McKenzie in
the ’80s was “way more than we propose
to cut.” The current designation of the
forests in that area allows for clearcutting
old growth, something his plan would
prevent, DeFazio adds.
Another concern for water, and for
human health too, is pesticide spraying,
says Kim Leval of the Northwest Center
for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP).
Pesticides are rarely used on Forest
Service lands, and the BLM uses integrated
pesticide management (IPM), which means
spraying unwanted weeds, trees and bugs
with toxic chemicals is not necessarily the
fi rst step in dealing with them.
The DeFazio plan calls for using IPM
on the timber-trust lands, but Leval says
that given the way the trust is set up, “The
focus would be on getting the revenue
off the land, not on careful, preventative
measures and IPM.”
The plan has the potential to take steps
backward for endangered species, such as
salmon, which are harmed by pesticides,
as well as for community health, Leval
says. She points out that communities like
Triangle Lake in the Coast Range already
deal with increased exposures to pesticides
due to the private timberlands that surround
them. The timber trust would face the same
pressures to grow more trees faster, she
says, and so the nearby communities could
face the increased use of pesticides.
April 22, 2012
10%
OFF
all Local six
Products & Grower
Direct Produce
South Corvallis
1007 SE 3rd St, 541-753-3115
North Corvallis
29th & Grant, 541-452-3115
992 Willamette • Eugene, OR 97401
343-9661
14
APRIL 12, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
www.firstalt.coop
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM