Salvage bill isn't needed.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The salvage logging bill approved Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives has a deceptively appealing title: the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act.

But members of the Senate, who will soon consider a similar bill introduced by Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., should not be deceived. This legislation is not about optimizing forest recovery or relying on the best scientific evidence available. It's about shortcutting critical environmental protections in order to fast-track salvage logging, regardless of the potentially damaging consequences.

Co-sponsored by Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Brian Baird, D-Wash., the bill would accelerate the environmental review process - which can now take months or years - for some federal lands. It would require federal agencies to issue decisions on timber sales within as little as 30 days, followed by a 90-day comment period.

Supporters say the bill would allow the government and local businesses to profit by selling timber killed by fires, storms or insect infestations before it rots - and would allow damaged forests to be more swiftly restored. But environmentalists and many scientists say the bill could end up doing more harm to forests than the fires, storms and insect infestations that make them targets for salvage logging.

Earlier this year, 169 scientists, including some of the nation's most prominent fire ecologists, warned that the bill could profoundly damage sensitive post-fire ecosystems by disturbing soils, causing erosion, removing wildlife nesting and feeding sites, reducing the nutrients and shade needed to help new trees to grow, and leaving behind debris that can increase fire risk.

Walden and Baird insist their bill is needed to speed up salvage sales, but that's misleading. They're ignoring changes in federal law made by the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which Congress passed in 2003 after massive wildfires in Southern California. The law contains emergency provisions that can accelerate the review process for logging projects. Thanks to those provisions, forest managers have been able to swiftly proceed with salvage logging pro- jects across the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In an effort to justify the salvage bill, Walden has cited the three-year delay in salvage logging after Southwest Oregon's 2002 Biscuit fire. But he conveniently fails to mention that the delay was caused as much by the Bush administration's midstream decision to vastly expand the scope of logging as it was by legal requirements for environmental review and public comment.

While the sponsors insist that their bill relies on state-of-the-art science, that claim is undermined by more than two dozen studies, including government reports, that have shown salvage logging can significantly harm forest recovery. Those studies include a recent Oregon State University report that found logging after the Biscuit fire has harmed forest recovery and increased fire risk. While Walden and Baird have criticized the study as isolated and incomplete, it is consistent with research findings from across the globe.

Some Democratic lawmakers - including Oregon's Peter DeFazio, who voted against the salvage bill - have offered amendments that would make this legislation more palatable. They include proposals to restore full environmental review to salvage projects and to limit expedited salvage logging to areas already earmarked for timber production.

While such proposals would help reduce the damage that the bill would inflict on national forests, they fail to address the bill's underlying flaws: It's not needed. It weakens time-tested environmental safeguards. And it ignores scientific evidence that affirms the healthy role of fire in Western forests and that has found that forest health often is best served by allowing damaged forests to recover on their own.

There is no need to make salvage logging easier or faster. But there is an urgent need, especially with the wildfire season fast approaching, for the Senate to kill a misguided timber salvage bill that would do far more damage than good.