• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Old-Growth Forests Rescued By Funding Cuts

Posted on: Friday, 14 October 2005, 21:00 CDT

By Michael Milstein, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

Oct. 14--Nobody decided the last of the Northwest's giant old-growth trees would be protected, but it's turning out that way.

The moss-draped titans stand at the center of the enduring battles that sent logging on federal lands into steep decline. Forest activists are still fighting bitterly to save some that were slated for cutting to keep sawmills alive. The timber industry wants to cut them.

The Bush administration started out insisting they fall. But now, without saying so, it's contributing to their salvation in the national forests of the Northwest.

It's happening because the administration and Congress are starving the U.S. Forest Service of money to plan sales of the big trees, and fight the inevitable appeals and lawsuits by their defenders. Forest managers say they are no longer pouring their shrinking funds into thankless conflicts they rarely win.

"We can't afford expensive timber sales -- the kind where controversy is engendered," said Gary Larsen, supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest. "We're trying to find those where people can agree on the benefits."

It means loggers are increasingly staying away from the more than 1.1 million acres of older forests open to commercial logging from the Cascades west. Roughly 25,000 acres -- five times the area of Portland's Forest Park -- were targeted for cutting each year.

But less than a tenth of that, on average, has actually been cut.

Instead, loggers are thinning younger trees in the crowded plantations sowed after clear-cut logging of the past. It opens the stands to more wildlife and is favored by many environmental groups. Though the smaller trees yield less wood per acre, more are cut because they're not entangled in controversy.

That's more than can be said for old-growth logging in the past two decades.

-----

To see more of The Oregonian, or to subscribe the newspaper, go to http://www.oregonian.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Oregonian

More News in this Category