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Logging Near Crater Lake?
The D-Bug Timber Sale, on the doorstep of Crater Lake, entails more roadless logging than occurred across the entire country during the Bush administration.
Crater Lake, Oregon’s only national park, faces logging near the boundaries of the forest that surrounds the deep blue volcanic lake, according the environmental group Oregon Wild.
The 42,000-acre area the U.S. Forest Service seeks to log is bordered on the south by Crater Lake National Park, Lemolo Lake Recreation Area to the north, Mount Thielsen Wilderness and Oregon Cascades Recreation Area to the east and the Mount Bailey Inventoried Roadless Area to the west.
Sean Stevens of Oregon Wild calls the logging plan “a really nasty sale.” He says if the D-Bug timber sale goes through it would result in more logging in Oregon’s roadless areas under President Obama then happened across the entire U.S. during the eight-year George W. Bush administration.
Under Bush, seven miles of roads were built in roadless areas, Stevens says, and 400 acres of roadless forest were logged.
The D-Bug timber sale calls for “building eight miles of roads in inventoried roadless areas; 25 miles total, including some non-inventoried roadless areas,” says Stevens. A non-inventoried roadless area is one that was not inventoried when the roadless areas were established in the 1970s. Stevens says that more areas that fit the criteria to be roadless areas were found later, after the inventory, with better mapping techniques. The D-Bug timber sale would also involve 900 acres of roadless area logging, Stevens says. That’s over twice as many roadless acres than were logged under Bush.
Also at issue with the logging project is the current uncertainty over the fate of roadless areas, areas that meet the minimum criteria for official wilderness designation. The Clinton 2001 roadless rule was eliminated in 2005 when then-President Bush issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule allowing state governors to petition for individual, state-specific rules to log in roadless areas. This rule soon went to court, and since then a number of contradictory legal rulings have been made on the roadless issue. “The Obama administration is not exactly clear on what their policy is,” says Stevens.
According to Forest Service documents on the sale, the D-Bug project is a “hazard reduction timber sale project” designed for “reducing fuels, improving forest stand conditions, salvaging present and future bark beetle mortality, and creating fuel breaks around the Diamond Lake and Lemolo Lake Wildland Urban Interface areas, and along evacuation routes that lead to and from these areas.”
Stevens says the logging “might make sense in the urban interface areas, but not in a roadless area.”
He says, “Beetles are part of the natural life cycle of this forest. Fires too.” The forest is mainly made up of lodgepole pine and mixed conifer, according the USFS’s draft environmental impact statement, which says fires in the lodgepole pine stands were “historically common,” occurring every 60 to 80 years.
Stevens says, “Cutting down a forest to save it is like chopping off both your arms to prevent gangrene.”
For information on the D-Bug timber sale and Oregon Wild’s efforts to save it, go to www.oregonwild.org
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