Another WOPR setback

The Eugene Register Guard editorial board describes how government scientists are criticizing the BLM's new logging plan and why the agency should scrap the plan altogether.

The Western Oregon Plan Revision is a dead plan walking.

Those exact words weren’t used by the team of government scientists that recently reviewed the Bush administration’s proposed forest management plan. But it’s the underlying message that should be clear to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, who should immediately yank the plug on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s hopelessly flawed proposal to nearly triple logging on 2.2 million acres in Western Oregon.

In a scathing 100-page report, the team of federal and state experts said the BLM’s proposal failed to consider the most current and relevant data on fundamental concerns such as wildlife habitat and water quality.

The report said the computer models used by the BLM were overly simplistic and failed to take into account the loss of spotted owl and other wildlife habitat to logging and wildfires. The models also failed to take into account budgetary, political and legal factors, and generally ignored climate change and its potentially profound impacts on Western Oregon’s forests.

It’s the latest in a series of setbacks for the BLM proposal. Last month the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service reversed its earlier proposal to sharply reduce the area of critical habitat for the marbeled murrelet, a threatened bird that nests in the old growth forests of Oregon’s Coast Range. Those forests are an integral part of the BLM’s plans to increase logging and federal timber payments to rural counties.

Six separate scientific peer reviews, five of them funded by the federal government, have agreed that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s draft recovery plan for saving the spotted owl fails to adequately consider the importance of protecting the Northwest’s remaining stands of old growth.

The Bush administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency has warned that the BLM plan lacks a sound scientific basis and would cause long-term damage to water quality. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the plan fails to adequately protect steelhead and salmon.

The BLM plan is the result of the Bush administration’s sweetheart settlement of a lawsuit by the timber industry and rural counties. The lawsuit charged that the BLM had failed to fulfill its obligations under the 1937 federal O&C Act. The act requires the agency to log on a sustained yield basis the checker­board of forest lands in Western Oregon that once belonged to the Oregon & California Railroad — and it requires that O&C lands be managed for “permanent timber production” and for rural counties’ economic stability.

As a result of that settlement, the BLM drafted the WOPR, which the agency says would ramp up Western Oregon logging to yield up to 720 million board feet of timber a year. It also would add 1,000 miles of new roads, reduce spotted owl reserves by 36 percent, and eliminate 57 percent of the tree buffers along rivers and streams where salmon spawn.

It should be clear by now that there is no chance this plan will survive the inevitable lawsuits charging that it violates the federal Endangered Species Act’s stringent habitat requirements.

The administration already has wasted time by continuing to push this misguided plan. Instead, it should have crafted an alternate strategy that increases timber production — and provides funding to rural counties — by thinning crowded stands of younger trees, rather than clear-cutting and logging old growth.

BLM officials say they will take the latest scientific criticism into account while preparing to issue the final version of the WOPR. That’s a mistake. The BLM plan is so thoroughly flawed that it must be replaced, not fixed.

If Kempthorne won’t give WOPR the early execution it deserves, then Congress should intervene with legislation that protects old growth.

What part of “dead plan walking” doesn’t the Bush administration understand? Why is it stubbornly continuing to push a plan that has as little chance of surviving judicial scrutiny as a condemned man does a trip to the gas chamber?