Conservation group objects to timber sale

Oregon Wild maintains public safety can be protected without logging the backcountry.

The conservation group Oregon Wild announced Wednesday it has objected to the D-Bug Timber Sale in the Umpqua National Forest, saying its members hope to prod forest managers to reconsider the scope of logging in roadless areas.

The U.S. Forest Service announced last month it planned to go ahead with logging in 78 acres of roadless areas as part of a 7,400-acre timber sale to reduce the danger of wildfire, particularly around cabins and evacuation routes near the Diamond Lake and Lemolo Lake resort areas.

The Forest Service had originally proposed logging within 621 acres of roadless areas but scaled back the plan in response to the concerns of conservation groups.

The Forest Service said the reduced timber sale would still protect lives and cabins in the area.

Robert Klavins, Oregon Wild's roadless wildlands advocate, said today the public's safety can be secured without logging in roadless areas.

“We're not opposed to (all) logging in the area. We do support the goals of the project,” he said. “The project, unfortunately, still overreaches.”

Klavins said Oregon Wild has identified 8,000 acres in the area where it could support “light-touch logging” to remove enough trees to “protect homes and human safety. To the extent there's logging in the forest to make money, we object.”

Ross Mickey of the American Forest Resource Council said today the wood products industry has little at stake because most of the timber is “incredibly marginal.”

Still, he said the Forest Service shouldn't have reduced the size of the project from what it originally proposed. The current plan won't adequately protect the public from fire spreading rapidly through timber killed by a bug infestation.

“We have supported this project because it's the right thing to do,” Mickey said. “The important part of this whole project is the Forest Service trying to protect the homes up there.

“I would not want to be one of the environmentalists who stop this project when something drastic happens up there and people's lives are at stake,” he said.

Efforts to reach Forest Service officials today, a federal holiday, were unsuccessful.

Klavins said he did not know whether Oregon Wild's formal objection foreshadowed a lawsuit to stop the sale.

The Forest Service originally considered thinning on 42,000 bug-infested acres in the national forest.

The original proposal drew national attention and was widely seen as a test of President Barack Obama's campaign promise to protect the 58 million acres of forest lands that have never been commercially logged.