Editorial: At long last; a truce in timber wars?

Corvallis Gazette-Times editorial says the new eastside timber bill isn't quite a holiday miracle...but it's close.

Maybe it doesn't exactly qualify as a holiday miracle, but the deal announced Wednesday by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden - a bill to restore timber jobs and protect old growth in eastern Oregon's six national forests - is, at the least, a welcome surprise.

Wyden unveiled the bill on Wednesday in the U.S. Senate, and representatives of the timber industry and conservation groups - people who have been battling each other for decades - showed up to support the measure.

The bill would authorize an extra $50 million for the Forest Service to shift its focus to large-scale forest restoration projects, tripling the number of acres thinned over the next three years. It also bars logging most large trees and along streams, limits permanent road building, and streamlines the process for lodging environmental objections to projects.

The measure puts the emphasis on forest restoration, a vital goal - and one that the Forest Service has long neglected, in part because of the price tag of those projects and in part because of long-running suspicion between timber interests and environmentalists.

The bill also could create additional forest jobs and could help to supply logs to struggling mills in eastern Oregon, keeping those operations running. We like the sound of that as well.

It's not a done deal - this still could unravel in the halls of Congress. We hope it does not, and we assume the measure will have the strong backing of Oregon's congressional delegation.

Despite the high hopes of one conservationist on Wednesday, the bill does not necessarily mark the end of the Western timber wars. It's worth noting that the deal took nearly a year of negotiations to hammer out. And it was significant that talks broke down on a similar deal for western Oregon's national forests, where the complex issues include habitat for salmon and the spotted owl, among other species.

So, the timber wars may not be over. But if, as Wyden hopes, the bill eventually becomes a model for similar deals in Oregon and throughout the nation, it will be remembered as an important cease-fire in the long-running warfare over our nation's forests.