End Commercial Logging

President Can't See Forest for the Trees

BY JIM STEITZ and CHARLES ROMESBURG

Over the past year, the Bush administration has backpedaled on many important protections for the last remaining wild areas in America's national forests. Much of the past century, the Forest Service, entrusted as the institutional steward of our national forests, focused its management on industrial-scale logging. The result of the massive logging and road construction program was watershed damage, loss of wildlife habitat and imperiled plant and animal species.

As a response, more than 200 Ph.D. scientists with many years of experience in biological sciences and ecology signed a letter to President Bush urging him to shift away from the damaging commercial logging program and focus on a program to restore America's national forests (Tribune, April 17). Why would more than 200 Ph.D.s peer out of the towers of academia to get involved in natural resource politics?

The answers are in the forests themselves.

Our national forests are worth more than their trees. Some 3,000 species of fish and wildlife and 10,000 plant species, many of them endangered, make their home in national forests. Virtually all of the nation's old-growth forests and roadless forest areas, two of the rarest landscape features in the country, are found on national forests.

These ecosystem relics are the last stronghold for a multitude of species. While some of these are famous, such as the spotted owl, far more are obscure but equally valuable, including numerous forms of fungi, invertebrates and plants that, tragically, often fall through the cracks of our conservation laws.

The continued logging of our national forests also wastes American tax dollars and diminishes the possibilities of future economic benefits. The Forest Service lost $2 billion on the commercial logging program between 1992-1997.

Annually, timber produces roughly $4 billion in economic activity, while recreation, fish and wildlife, clean water, and unroaded areas provide $224 billion total to the American economy.

Eighty percent of the nation's drinking water originates in national forests. When the dramatic values of ecological goods and services are taken into account, protecting national forests is vastly economically superior to continued logging.

Americans love to hike, camp, canoe and pursue a variety of other recreational activities, both motorized and non-motorized, in our national forests. With more than 4,000 campgrounds, 121,000 miles of trails and 96 Wild and Scenic rivers, they are natural treasures we should work to protect and restore.

Utah knows these lessons particularly well. The Wasatch-Cache is one of the most heavily visited national forests in the nation, yet on the Uinta Mountains, one can see the clearcuts on satellite photographs. The Ashley National Forest is now several cycles into a downward spiral of timber harvest, road construction, and assertions of diminishing credibility that yet more logging will control beetle infestations.

On the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Utah environmentalists had to go to court to stop an illegally planned timber sale that failed to include surveys for sensitive indicator species. Its neighbor to the south, the Dixie National Forest, is pursuing yet another bizarrely named "ecosystem restoration" project on the Aquarius Plateau that involves the invasion of roadless areas and the cutting of old growth. As elsewhere in the country, the timber sale program has no place in a state of increasing population and urbanization and intensifying pressure upon our vegetation communities, wildlife, waters, soils and open space.

Nor do we need the national forests to supply wood and paper products. There are alternatives to traditional timber-based products that consumers can choose, including recycled products, kenaf, hemp and agricultural fiber. Kenaf and other plants can be grown rapidly and sustainably, with no pesticides and little or no fertilizer or chemicals. Hemp produces four times the fiber per acre as timber. Each year, U.S. farmers produce 280 million tons of excess agricultural fiber that could be pulped for a higher fiber yield by weight than wood, using less chemical processing, water, and energy.

Decades of destructive logging have taken a harsh toll on the land. We must start to restore these lands across the National Forest System by shifting subsidies away from logging and into a program that allows local contractors to be paid to restore national forests. Investing in ecosystem health would provide clean water, enhanced fish and wildlife habitat and recreation, and increased jobs and economic benefits.

These 220 scientists have based their recommendation -- to protect undamaged wild forests, end commercial logging and road construction, and actively restore damaged forest areas -- on conservation biology. The Bush administration, on the other hand, is weakening the safeguards for our national forests at the behest of the timber industry.

As scientists and Americans, we all care about our national forests and want them to provide the benefits of clean water, fish and wildlife habitat, and recreation for future generations. We must take proactive steps to end commercial logging on our national forests and protect our wild forest heritage so that generations of Americans will be able to enjoy them, either through recreation or the mere knowledge, of which famed conservationist Wallace Stegner spoke, "that it is there." We hope the Bush administration takes notice of this letter and acts to protect and not despoil these natural treasures.