By Peter Sachs / The Bulletin
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Forest Service is poised to allow logging in a roadless area in southwestern Oregon, a first-of-its-kind action in the nation that pits the Bush administration against Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski and scores of environmental groups.
A timber auction set for Friday morning comes after years of legal battles. The Forest Service is set to sell timber on 261 acres in an area of the Siskiyou National Forest about 40 miles west of Medford known as Mike's Gulch. Forest Service officials expect it will be one of the last salvage timber sales following the 2002 Biscuit Fire, which burned 500,000 acres.
Even though Mike's Gulch is relatively small, environmental groups are aghast at the precedent they say the logging will set.
"If the Forest Service and the Bush administration can log in a roadless area that was understood to be protected for at least 18 months, then this can happen anywhere," said Pat Wray, who represents a group called Backcountry Hunters and Anglers in the Northwest.
In March 2005, the Bush administration set aside a 2001 rule put in place by then-President Clinton that would have prohibited logging and other activities in forest where roads have never been built. The 2005 change gave governors 18 months to explain why their roadless areas should remain protected.
Kulongoski's staff is working on a response and plans to meet the September deadline, said Michael Carrier, the governor's natural resources policy director.
But overall, Kulongoski wants Oregon's roadless areas protected.
"I think we created a social contract and a public trust about how these areas should be managed going forward," said Carrier. "That promise is not being kept."
But Joe Walsh, a spokesman for the Forest Service in Washington, said that because this logging sale is part of the Biscuit Fire recovery plan, which was approved in 2004, the 18-month petition process for states does not apply.
Carrier said Oregon and several other states are now considering their options. A separate effort by environmental groups to secure a temporary restraining order against the sale was denied by a judge in San Francisco earlier this week, Carrier said.
If Friday's timber sale goes through, the logging in Mike's Gulch would be the first allowed in a previously roadless area anywhere in the country since 2001.
Separate projects to explore roadless forests for oil, gold and other minerals have started in a handful of other states, said Rob Vandermark, director of the Heritage Forests Campaign, a nonprofit environmental group. And while the Forest Service wanted to permit logging in roadless areas of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, those plans have been stopped by court action, he added.
Forest Service officials said that the proposed action affects a small area. While Mike's Gulch is technically an "inventoried roadless area," it already has roads on three sides less than a mile away from the timber sale, Siskiyou Forest spokeswoman Patty Burel said.
Timber in another section of the burned area, dubbed Blackberry, will be put up for sale later this summer, Burel said. Its exact size has not been finalized yet, but will probably be smaller than the Mike's Gulch area.
Mike's Gulch and Blackberry were picked for logging because they "have the least potential for future wilderness designation," Burel said.
Carrier noted that while there are 1.9 million acres of roadless forests in Oregon, he was not aware of any other plans looming for the Forest Service to start logging in places like the roadless regions of the 2003 B&B Complex Fire near Sisters.
With 9.3 million board feet of timber for sale in the parcels in the Siskiyou, Burel said the Forest Service expects at least $235,000 in revenues from the auction - money that would benefit nearby communities.
But opponents disagreed with both the Forest Service's assessment of the burned area and with the agency's motives for going forward.
"There is quite a bit of natural conifer regeneration in the sale area," said Rich Fairbanks, a retired forester who worked on the Biscuit Fire recovery plan.
Fairbanks and others suspect larger forces are at work and that the sale is not just about forest fire recovery.
"A lot of it is based on political, economic and industry pressure," Vandermark said.
Logging in roadless forests has been a divisive issue since President Clinton signed a rule banning such activities during his last days in office in January 2001. The Bush administration overturned that rule in March 2005 and has been fighting a multitude of lawsuits from states and environmental groups since 2001.