Restrictions on old growth logging eased.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Following through on a controversial earlier promise, the Bush administration on Tuesday eased restrictions on logging old growth forest in the Pacific Northwest.

Now, managers of public forests will no longer be required to survey for rare plants and animals before selling timber to private companies for logging.

Environmentalists predict the new rules will double logging on federal land, accelerate the demise of old growth forests and decimate some of the 300 rare species the survey rules had protected.

"We're going down this path of basically doing the same sort of thing that ivory hunters did with elephants and seal hunters did for the seal population," said Jeremy Hall, a field representative for the Oregon Natural Resources Council. "It's not sustainable. It's not justifiable. And it's not defensible."

Environmental groups will soon launch a lawsuit to restore the rules, Hall said.

But Forest Service spokesman Rex Holloway said most old growth forest in the region - 86 percent - remains protected. ``There are buffers along streams, and even when we're harvesting, we still have to leave 15 or 16 green trees per acre, so there is some habitat for some of these species.''

The rule changes were in response to a timber-industry lawsuit. The new rules aim to boost logging on 24 million acres of federally owned land in Washington, Oregon and California. That could help raise the tree harvest to goals set by the decade-old Northwest Forest Plan, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration.

The timber industry had complained for years that the so-called ``survey and manage'' rules - which require study of the potential effects of logging on about 300 plant and animal species - are overly intrusive and can stall logging for years.

The hope with the relaxed rules would be more jobs and an increase of federal forest payments to Oregon "at a time the state could use definite economic help," said Larry Giustina, managing partner of the Eugene-based Giustina Land & Timber Co. "The president's plan has not come to fruition, and I certainly hope that this would open the door to it. I'm hopeful anytime that they take a step back and lift some of the restrictions."

In addition, the administration on Tuesday announced a change to another part of the Northwest Forest Plan, known as the Aquatic Conservation Strategy, which outlines goals for watershed protection. The change clarifies that the agencies will no longer evaluate individual logging sales on whether they help achieve those goals, but only on whether the agencies meet those goals on a broader, watershed-wide basis.

Judges have stopped about 60 timber sales in Oregon and Washington based on that rule, environmental activists said. Those are likely to be on the fast track now, they said.

``The root of our problems is that we have an anti-environment president,'' said Regna Merritt, executive director of Oregon Natural Resources Council in Portland. ``They are changing the rules and ignoring the science in a way that is simply illegal. They're going to eliminate protections for threatened salmon and leave 47 species at high risk of extinction. The idea of looking before you log was that way we could prevent hundreds of species from going extinct.''

The group charged that the rule change was political payback to the timber industry, which has contributed heavily to the president.

The ``survey and manage'' rules had been used to protect small blocks of old growth still standing within areas designated for logging, which amounted to about 1.1 million acres in the three-state region.

Under the rules, citizens could go out into a proposed timber sale, find some of the 300 rare species, and get court protection for them - with the result of shrinking the size of the proposed timber sale. Environmentalists said the federal government frequently failed to look carefully for the rare species, and that volunteer activists often located them in tracts the federal government had already OK'd for logging.

Dozens of Eugene residents regularly combed nearby sales for rare species, said the resource council's Hall. An activist's discovery of red tree voles in the Clark forest at Fall Creek near Lowell, for instance, resulted in a ruling that shrank the sale by 70 acres.

Requirements established in the Clinton forest plan call for a 10-acre buffer around trees where voles - a tree-dwelling rodent that's the northern spotted owl's main food source - are nesting.

A settlement on the Fall Creek sale is still under negotiation. The federal government lists the northern spotted owl as a threatened species.

The Forest Service estimates that 47 species could disappear locally without the ``survey and manage'' rules. That includes eight species of coral fungi and seven species of pebble snails.

"By committing to logging old growth forests, you're going down a road that's going to be rife with controversy and gridlock," Hall said. "No matter how much the rules get weakened, there are going to be people who will do whatever they can to stop old growth logging."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.