Salvage logging doesn't save

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: Salvage logging has this image problem -- it sounds like roadside litter pickup, and that works to the benefit of timber companies and their pals in Congress. As long as they keep people thinking salvage amounts to cleaning up a few trashed trees after a forest fire, they can keep rewriting federal law to the loggers' liking.
The reality is that salvage timber now accounts for more than one-third of the wood coming out of our national forests. So it is a valuable commodity to timber companies.
Arguably, industrial-scale logging on these damaged landscapes should be governed more carefully, not less, than harvests in healthy forests. But a bill that cleared the U.S. House this month moves in the other direction.
It provides a fast-track alternative to normal environmental reviews, requiring forest managers to research their logging options within 30 days after a fire (or other damaging event), and prepare a plan within 90. The public can comment on the planning during that same 90 days -- before any plan is available for review -- and can't appeal the result except in federal court, where judges, too, are directed to expedite review.
Legislative misnomer
This so-called Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act has nothing to do with research or recovery, but with increasing salvage-timber production -- by some 40 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Still, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., the bill's sponsor, explains it as a conservation measure: "If you're going to use wood, doesn't it make sense to first use burned, dead trees, rather than cut down rain forests?"
Walden's chief example of what's wrong with existing policy is delayed sales of timber from the so-called Biscuit fire, which affected a half-million acres in his state four summers ago.
But Walden and his allies were embarrassed earlier this year when an Oregon State grad student landed a paper in the prestigious journal Science showing that salvage operations in the Biscuit had destroyed 71 percent of regenerated seedlings. The Bureau of Land Management suspended a grant supporting his research.
This was hardly trailblazing science, however. Foresters generally agree that logging not only interferes with regeneration of tree stands, but also promotes soil erosion and damages species diversity. In typical circumstances, the odds are that fire will rejuvenate a forest stand, while salvage logging will do long-term harm.