End old growth wars.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Siuslaw National Forest led the Northwest into the era of old growth conflict 20 years ago, and now it is showing the way out. No timber sale on the Siuslaw has been challenged in court for eight years, yet the forest is yielding more than twice as much timber per acre as other public lands west of the Cascades.

The Siuslaw has succeeded by focusing its harvest program on thinning crowded stands of younger trees, rather than offering controversial old growth sales. A bill by U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio would replicate this approach throughout the region, increasing one kind of volume and decreasing another - more timber, less noise.

DeFazio's bill, unveiled last week in Springfield, begins by recognizing the obvious: President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan has failed. The 1994 plan promised to preserve habitat for threatened and endangered species such as the northern spotted owl, while also providing a predictable harvest of 1 billion board feet of timber each year from public lands in \Western Oregon and Washington.

Neither promise has been kept. The plan's reliance on old growth timber sales for part of the predicted harvest volume represented a continuing threat to sensitive species. The resulting litigation has slowed timber sales to a trickle - last year, westside lands administered by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management yielded just 162 million board feet of timber. The Northwest Forest Plan has long been dead; after 10 years, it's time to bury the corpse.

DeFazio proposes putting public old growth forests, which his bill defines as those more than 120 years old, off-limits to logging. His proposal then appropriates $25 million a year for thinning projects in younger forests, mostly those that have already been logged and replanted. Many of these maturing forests are densely packed with even-aged trees, which without thinning will become increasingly vulnerable to fire, disease and blowdown.

DeFazio estimates his bill would result in yearly sales of 500 million board feet from westside public lands - more than double last year's volume. Lawsuits over old growth logging would end. Employment in the wood products industry would rise. Thinning projects would increase both the commercial value and environmental health of public forests.

Shifting to a focus on thinning would bring federal timberlands management into line with emerging realities. Most mills have retooled to process the smaller logs that would flow from thinning projects - even without legislation taking old growth off the table, the one-log load is seen more often on vintage postcards than on Oregon's highways. Environmentalists increasingly acknowledge that the region's younger forests will never develop the characteristics of old growth without management, including thinning. The Siuslaw and a few other forests have already made the shift, and others will eventually follow even in the absence of legislation like DeFazio's. With the funding that DeFazio proposes, the Siuslaw could produce even more.

DeFazio failed to persuade either the Clinton or Bush administrations to move beyond the Northwest Forest Plan. Suspicions run deep in government agencies, in the timber industry and in the environmental community. The battles over old growth produced a mentality of winners and losers - a conviction that anything good for one side must be bad for the other. It also produced a sizeable class of people whose political interests lay in keeping the battles going. So the old growth wars continue, consuming more fiber in court documents than they produce in timber.

Meanwhile, 2 million acres of public forests in Western Oregon and Washington need thinning. Thinning projects on these lands could produce an estimated 6 billion board feet of timber over the next decade or more. The roads to reach the timber, and the mills to process it, are already in place. Here's a chance to improve forest health and add jobs in the wood products industry without any of the controversy and gridlock that accompanies old growth timber sales.

Sensible, productive proposals that leave everybody better off have become as rare as red tree voles. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry should embrace this one - or explain why they won't.