Lumber Industry

The Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules Thursday allowing California's biggest timber firms to cash in on the fight against global warming even as they clear-cut parts of their forests. Forest owners stand to reap tens of millions of dollars in the coming decades by selling the capacity of their woods to cleanse the air of carbon dioxide, offsetting greenhouse gases belched by industrial polluters. But the administration's successful effort to allow loggers to sell their carbon credits to industry while also clear-cutting their lands sparked intense opposition from several conservation groups.

More than 3 million acres of pristine wilderness in Alaska's Tongass National Forest would be open to logging and road building under a new management plan released Friday by the U.S. Forest Service. At 17 million acres, roughly the size of West Virginia, the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska is the country's largest national forest and the world's largest intact coastal temperate rain forest.

For the first time since coming under federal protection 15 years ago, the northern spotted owls' forest haven may be in jeopardy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to decrease the owls' "critical habitat" by 1.5 million acres, or 22%. The birds were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, with the habitat designation coming two years later.

For five years, the Washington-based World Bank Group has been trying to save one of Earth's last great forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the bank's private-sector arm is also an investor in a company that is drawing criticism for its connections to logging operations there. World Bank environmental officials say that deforestation is the second leading human contributor to global warming, after power plants and ahead of vehicle emissions.

The crime scene -- a once-wooded landscape marked by tire tracks and tree stumps -- makes the victim, Verna Potter, feel physically violated. "It's just like someone cut your heart out," says the 77-year-old Potter, who lost an estimated $50,000 worth of generations-old oak trees. They were taken from her property and sold without permission while she was away. Rogue loggers have long preyed on private properties from coast to coast, taking advantage of the elderly and the absent.

In a case involving Pacific Lumber Co.'s redwood groves, the California Supreme Court on Monday ruled that state water officials have the power to order timber companies to monitor the quality of streams and rivers near logging sites. Pacific Lumber Co. had challenged a state water board order that required it to measure the effects of logging about 700 acres on the south fork of the Elk River in Humboldt County.

The World Trade Organization's highest court struck down an earlier verdict that the United States had not violated trade rules in asserting that Canadian softwood lumber exports hurt U.S. producers. But the Appellate Body declined to make its own ruling on the legality of the U.S. measures. Canada ships about $6 billion in softwood lumber such as spruce, fir and pine to the U.S. each year. A panel of WTO judges ruled in November that Washington had breached no rules when the U.S.

The first timber likely to be harvested in a "roadless area" of a national forest since the Bush administration eased logging restrictions goes on the auction block Friday. The U.S.

Despite protests by Gov. Ted Kulongoski and environmentalists, the U.S. Forest Service auctioned off the first timber from a roadless area of a national forest since the Bush administration eased rules on logging. Kulongoski said he would seek a court order blocking the harvest, based on a lawsuit that Oregon, Washington, California and New Mexico have filed challenging the legality of the administration's overhaul of protections for the 58.

During tedious days of counting tiny Douglas fir seedlings on blackened slopes west of here, Daniel Donato never imagined his work would put him in the crosshairs of Congress. He was just studying how forests grow back after a fire. But after his research appeared in the online version of the journal Science in January, the Oregon State University graduate student began to feel like a lightning rod.