Weighing in on WOPR

The Eugene Register Guard says letting the BLM know how bad their WOPR plan is should top your new year's resolution list.

Anyone needing a last-minute resolution to fill out their New Year’s list should add letting the Bureau of Land Management know where they stand on the federal agency’s proposal to nearly triple logging on 2.2 million acres in Western Oregon.

The BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revision, better known by its hamburgeresque acronym WOPR, is part of a nationwide effort by the Bush administration to roll back habitat protections while ramping up logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other resource-extraction activities on public lands.

If the BLM decides to proceed with the plan — and if it is not overturned by the courts — the plan will have a devastating effect on the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet, as well as Oregon’s rivers and watersheds.

A quick primer: A 1937 federal law directs the BLM to log on a sustained yield basis lands that once belonged to the Oregon & California Railroad, with 50 percent of the revenue going to 18 Western Oregon counties in which the lands are located. The revenue is intended to compensate counties in lieu of taxes and development of the federal forests within their boundaries.

With logging curtailed under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan to protect habitat for spotted owls, murrelets and other species in old growth forests, Congress filled the resulting gap in revenue to counties with federal subsidies. The payments ended this year, with frustratingly uncertain prospects for renewal, despite the federal government’s century-old commitment to rural counties.

Three years ago, the Bush administration settled a timber industry lawsuit charging that the BLM had failed to fulfill its financial obligations to Oregon counties under the 1937 act. As a result of that settlement, the BLM drafted the WOPR, a new forest management plan that would ramp up Western Oregon logging to yield 720 million board feet of timber a year.

The BLM’s proposal, which relies on clear-cutting to achieve the higher yield, would generate $108 million annually for counties. The agency says it would create a net increase of 3,442 jobs and $136.5 million in wages for rural communities.

Those are tempting figures, especially given the BLM’s failure to meet timber harvest targets under the Northwest Forest Plan.

But the environmental cost for those economic gains is too high.

Reserves for spotted owls would be cut 36 percent — from 809,400 acres to 521,500 acres. The administration’s draft recovery plan for saving the owl is based on the leaky premise that they do not require large tracts of old growth forest — and that the invasion of the barred owl represents a more serious threat than habitat loss. Six separate peer reviews by outside researchers, five of them funded by the federal government, have agreed that the recovery plan downplays the importance of protecting the Northwest’s remaining stands of old growth.

In October, 113 scientists wrote to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne urging him to yank the owl recovery plan and questioning whether political interference tainted its conclusions. Kempthorne should have done exactly that. Instead he offered half a solution, convening a panel of experts who will evaluate the best information available on the owl’s habitat needs.

In addition to the negative effects on spotted owls, the BLM’s proposal would cut habitat for marbled murrelets by 16 percent. Both the spotted owl and murrelet are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act as threatened with extinction.

The BLM’s proposal would add 1,000 miles of new roads and eliminate 57 percent of the tree buffers along rivers and streams where salmon spawn. Watersheds that many communities rely on for their drinking water would be damaged. In August, EPA officials wrote letters expressing concern that hard-won water quality gains in the Northwest that have occurred under the Northwest Forest Plan could be lost under the proposed owl recovery plan.

By now it should be clear to the administration that there is little chance the courts would find the plan satisfies the Endangered Species Act. Instead of proceeding with this flawed plan, the administration should craft an alternative strategy that increases timber production and provides funding for rural counties by thinning crowded stands of younger trees, rather than cutting old growth.

Oregonians have until Jan. 11 to comment on the BLM’s proposal. By making that the first item on their list of resolutions, they can make certain they get a rolling start on the rest.