The U.S. Forest Service announced Thursday that it would triple logging in the Sierra Nevada to levels not seen in a decade as part of a fire prevention strategy that casts aside Clinton-era restrictions on timber cutting.
Regional Forester Jack Blackwell, who presented the plan in Sacramento on Thursday, said the changes were necessary to step up forest thinning that would lessen the threat of forest fires. "If we don't take those actions, we're going to burn 'em up. It's as simple as that."
Under the new plan, logging levels will climb in the Sierra to 330 million board-feet of green timber a year, roughly three times what is now allowed. However, that is still less than half the amount cut during the peak years of commercial logging in the range in the late 1980s.
The Forest Service, which oversees 11.5 million acres of national forestland in the Sierra, signaled at the start of the Bush administration that it was unhappy with a stringent and complex set of environmental regulations adopted just before President Clinton left office.
The latest plan officially drops many of those restrictions, permitting not only the removal of far more trees but cutting ones as large as 30 inches in diameter in old-growth stands. It also loosens habitat protections for rare species such as the California spotted owl, Yosemite toad, Pacific fisher and willow flycatcher.
The changes fit into a larger strategy by the Bush administration to allow more commercial logging on public land. Last year, the administration won passage of federal legislation relaxing environmental standards it said had hampered timber cutting in Western forests dense with fire-ready growth.
The new Sierra plan was sharply criticized by environmentalists, who said it discounted years of study and millions of dollars of scientific review that led to the Clinton-era protections. "We just threw all that work out the window," said Craig Thomas of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign.
Others noted the Forest Service had retreated from promises that 75% of the logging would occur near communities vulnerable to wildfires. In its final form, the plan lowers that figure to 50%.
"It appears that the new plan is designed to let the agency go after larger trees farther from communities," said John Buckley of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.
