Force feeding WOPR

BLM pushes logging plan through at last minute

It should surprise no one that the Bush administration is ramming through a last-minute approval of its plan to dramatically increase logging in Western Oregon forests.

It should surprise no one if the federal courts reject, as history suggests they will, the administration’s argument that the new plan has no direct impacts on endangered species and that there was no need to consult with federal biologists over potential harm to spotted owls and other wildlife.

It should surprise no one if the next Congress, which will be firmly under Democratic control, refuses to allocate funding for a plan that has failed to win the support of Oregon’s overwhelmingly Democratic delegation.

The Western Oregon Plan Revision, revealingly referred to as “The Whopper,” was signed Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Portland. One day later, two conservation groups filed notice of intent to sue. Given the plan’s many and glaring flaws, they will not be the last.

The Associated Press reported that it had reviewed a BLM document and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service e-mail messages that indicate the BLM last July found the logging plan was likely to harm fish protected by the Endangered Species Act. Normally that would have triggered formal consultations with the Fish & Wildlife Service, but the e-mails indicated the consultations were scrapped after “high level discussions” between BLM and Interior Department officials.

BLM officials deny that happened, but there is no shortage of precedents in which politics has trumped science in the Bush administration’s environmental policymaking.

The BLM is proceeding with the plan, despite Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s request that the agency delay adoption. The governor rightly pointed out that the plan contains flawed protections for endangered species, water quality and wilderness, and lacks anything resembling a scientifically sound forest management strategy for combating global warming.

Kulongoski noted, and lawsuits challenging the plan will certainly note as well, the bureau’s decision to defer consultation with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service on whether the plan’s logging levels would conform with the Endangered Species’ Act’s requirements to maintain critical habitat for threatened and endangered species. Instead, the BLM proposes examining individual timber sales for compliance on a case-by-case basis — a strategy of pushing the hard decisions down the line that the courts have been understandably reluctant to accept in the past.

The incoming Obama administration should beat litigants to the punch and scrap the plan when it takes over this month. Based on Obama’s statements while visiting Oregon during the primary election campaign, it seems doubtful he will proceed with a plan that certainly does not reflect the best available science on forest management strategies that combat global warming — that fails, for example, to even consider the conservation of mature forests to sequester carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.

The BLM drafted this flapping, squawking turkey of a plan as a result of a sweetheart settlement between the administration and the wood products industry.

But the agency has done the industry and timber-dependent communities no favor by plodding ahead with a plan that relies on clear-cutting and harvesting old-growth instead of developing a state-of-the art strategy that emphasizes thinning the crowded stands of younger trees that are so abundant in Western Oregon. Such a strategy could have increased timber production, generated federal timber payments for rural counties — and, most importantly, complied with federal environmental laws.