Bury BLM forest plan

Murrelet decision is just latest of many setbacks

It’s time for Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to pull the plug on the Bureau of Land Management’s hopelessly skewed proposal to nearly triple logging on 2.2 million acres in Western Oregon.

Last Wednesday the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service dealt the plan the latest in a series of setbacks by reversing its earlier proposal to sharply reduce the area of critical habitat for the marbeled murrelet. The threatened sea bird 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, along with it, federal timber payments to rural counties.

BLM officials insist the murrelet reversal isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but that’s hard to believe.

Even if they’re right, what about the Environmental Protection Agency’s criticisms that the BLM plan lacks a sound scientific basis and would cause long-term damage to water quality? What about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s warning that the plan fails to adequately protect salmon and steelhead?

Furthermore, what about the six separate scientific peer reviews, five of them funded by the federal government, that agree that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s draft recovery plan for saving the spotted owl, a plan that’s integral to the BLM’s proposal, downplays the importance of protecting the Northwest’s remaining stands of old growth?

The administration got itself into this quagmire by agreeing to review protections for the murrelet, the spotted owl and other species that rely on old growth forests — and to craft the new forest management plan — as a result of its settlement of a lawsuit by the timber industry and rural counties. The lawsuit charged that the BLM had failed to fulfill its obligations under a 1937 law directing that O&C lands — so named because they once belonged to the Oregon & California Railroad — be managed for “permanent timber production” and for rural counties’ economic stability.

By now it should be clear that the BLM proposal is fundamentally flawed and that there is little or no chance the courts would find that it satisfies the federal Endangered Species Act. Instead of plodding ahead with an industry-driven plan that relies heavily on clear-cutting and harvesting old growth, Kempthorne should order the BLM to begin crafting a new strategy that emphasizes thinning the crowded stands of younger trees that are abundant in Western Oregon. Such a strategy could increase timber production and generate federal payments for rural counties, while meeting the ESA’s necessarily stringent habitat requirements.

That’s not likely to happen, given the administration’s mindset that public lands are savings accounts for the timber, gas, oil, mining and other extractive industries. If the BLM proceeds with its misguided plan, Congress should intervene with legislation that mandates a new forest management philosophy that emphasizes thinning, rejects clear-cutting and protects old growth.

If the BLM refuses to create a balanced, legal forest-management plan, then federal lawmakers should do the job.