Conscious Choice: Protecting Our National Forests

September 1999 | News of the Earth

Protecting Our National Forests

by Dave Aftandilian

In 1891, Congress gave the President the authority to designate "forest reservations" on federal lands in the West. The 1897 Organic Act clarified the purpose of these reserves, saying that they were intended to protect the nation’s forests from fires and depredation, to secure favorable water flow conditions, and to provide a continuous supply of timber. It also assigned the Department of Agriculture the authority to regulate "occupancy and use" of these forests, which it has done ever since through the U.S. Forest Service.

Today the 155 National Forests, including the 270,000-acre Shawnee National Forest here in Illinois, cover 192 million acres, or about 8 percent of the United States. Although only 4 percent of the nation’s old growth forests remain, 75 percent of them are found in National Forests. At least 3,000 species of animals and 10,000 plant species, including 230 endangered species, call the National Forests home. And more than 3,400 communities in thirty-three states — over 60 million people — depend on the National Forests as a source of clean drinking water.

National Forests also provide jobs, of course. But surprisingly few of these jobs today are found in the timber industry. Although wealthy lumber corporations have repeatedly tried to greenwash the recent debates over logging in the Pacific Northwest as "tree-huggers versus jobs," only about 4 percent of the nation’s timber today comes from the National Forests; the rest is cut from privately owned lands. According to the Forest Service, 74 percent of the jobs in National Forests are related to recreation, hunting, and fishing, but only 3 percent are related to logging. Furthermore, by the year 2000, the Forest Service estimates that recreation, hunting, and fishing in the National Forests will contribute 31.4 times the income and 38.1 times the number of jobs that logging does.

What Good is a Forest?

Why should we protect our National Forests from logging? First of all, to protect supplies of clean, fresh water for the nation. As Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck puts it, "the most valuable and least appreciated resource the National Forest System provides is water." Dombeck describes the National Forests as "the headwaters of the nation," noting that they are the largest single source of water in the continental United States.

And this water tends to be very clean, filtered naturally beneath the majestic trees. Clean, drinkable water is not an insignificant benefit. For instance, Portland is one of very few large urban areas not required to filter its water supply, thanks to the crystal clear rain and meltwater from the Bull Run watershed in the Mt. Hood National Forest. It is estimated that building a water filtration plant for Portland would cost more than $200 million. So it only makes sense that Congress placed the Bull Run watershed off-limits to commercial logging in 1996. Other cities in Oregon also recognize the value of forests as sources of clean water for their residents — Eugene, Salem, Sandy, West Linn, and Lake Oswego have all asked for protection of roadless areas in their National Forest watersheds from logging.

America’s commercial and sport fishing industries also rely heavily on clean water from the National Forests. Glen Spain, Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Associations, notes that "our National Forests contain 2 million acres of ponds and lakes, 16,500 miles of coast and shoreline, and 200,000 miles of streams and rivers that support substantial commercial and subsistence fisheries." Salmon, for instance, spawn in the cool streams of the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Anglers love fishing in the National Forests too — enough to spend about $2 billion on that activity in 1992. The Sport Fishing Institute estimates that sport fishing in the National Forests generates support for almost sixty thousand jobs nationwide.

But water is only one of many undervalued services that forests provide. They preserve our future — the intact ecosystems on which we depend for our survival. The eminent biologist E.O. Wilson has warned that one-third of all the species on earth could die out in the next forty years. No one knows which species are crucial to an ecosystem’s functioning. In a famous analogy, driving species extinct as indiscriminately as we have in recent years has been compared to randomly removing rivets from an airplane while you’re flying through the air. Maybe nothing will happen, or maybe the wing will fall off.

Forests also give us a place to relax and recharge. And Americans have been taking advantage of the many recreational opportunities available in our National Forests in record numbers. In 1950, 137,000 cars and other recreational vehicles visited the National Forests every day. In 1996, that number had skyrocketed to 1.7 million per day. Annual recreational use over the past ten to fifteen years has increased from 250 million recreation visitor days (twelve-hour visits by one or more people) to 350 million, and is projected to rise still further. Put another way, the value of recreation in the National Forest wilderness and primitive areas ($594 million in fiscal year 1996) now exceeds the value of timber logged ($544 million), according to the Wilderness Society.

Forests even give us better weather, or at least moderate the effects of severe weather. They regulate the climate at local and regional levels, keeping the precious soils beneath them cool and moist. They help us cope with global warming, storing carbon dioxide as they grow. And they reduce the potentially horrific effects of flooding and landslides by soaking up rain and stabilizing hillsides with their roots. Unless, of course, they have been clearcut.

Floods, Fires, and Corporate Welfare

In February of 1996, and again in the winter of 1996-1997, intense winter storms caused severe flooding and landslides all over Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and northern California. Aerial reconnaissance documented more than 650 landslides in February 1996 in Oregon and Washington; these storms killed at least eight people and hundreds of cattle in Oregon. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the Pacific Northwest flooding in February 1996 alone cost $1 billion. And yet more mudslides and flooding occurred in the region last winter.

Many of these landslides occurred on land that had been heavily logged in recent years, usually by clearcutting vast swaths of hillsides down to the bare stumps and trucking the felled trees out on erosion-prone logging roads cut into steep slopes. Gordon Grant, a researcher with the Forest Service in Corvallis, Oregon, says that clearcutting and road construction may make landslides occur as much as five to twenty times more often than on a forested site. Other Forest Service studies in the Northwest have found that over 70 percent of mudslides and landslides in some areas were linked with logging roads.

In addition to flooding and the attendant landslides, erosion, and sedimentation of rivers and streams, clearcut forests are also much more prone to severe forest fires than intact forests. "More than any other human activity, logging has increased the risk and severity of fires by removing the cooling shade of trees and leaving flammable debris," according to the 1996 Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project study. Standing forests have a dense canopy that shades the ground and radiates heat back to the atmosphere. They also hold a lot of moisture — up to eight times as much as a patch of bare ground — which reduces the risks of forest fires and makes them less severe if they do happen.

The amazing thing is that taxpayers are financing the clearcut logging of our National Forests, contributing to the dangers of increased fire and floods, and the loss of the many natural services — wildlife habitat, clean water, recreation — that the National Forests provide. U.S. Representative Jim Leach summed up this situation particularly well:

"The U.S. government is the only property owner I know of which, in effect, pays private parties to deplete its resources. And in 1997, the American taxpayers paid approximately $1.2 billion for what amounts to barely 4 percent of all lumber harvested in this country. This is far too much money for us to be spending for what amounts to a net loss for both the environment and the taxpayer."

The 1999 report "Welfare for Waste: How Federal Taxpayer Subsidies Waste Resources and Discourage Recycling" details federal timber subsidies that average $811 million a year. One of the biggest subsidies of logging on the National Forests is the "commodity" timber sale program, which sells trees to companies at prices so cheap that the Forest Service does not even recover the cost of preparing the sales and administering the harvest — not to mention building or financing the roads that will be used to remove the felled trees, another perk provided for free to timber companies.

By the Forest Service’s own accounting, the below-cost timber sales program lost $88.6 million in fiscal year (FY) 1997, but others put the bill much higher. The Wilderness Society, for instance, estimates the FY 1997 loss at $111 million, and the John Muir Project counts a whopping $1.2 billion wasted. The independent Congressional Research Service verified these last results, concluding that "The timber sales receipts deposited in the General Treasury in FY 1997 were a small fraction of timber program expenditures. Thus, one can conclude that $1.2 billion is a‘reasonable estimate’ of the‘net cash loss’ from the Forest Service’s FY 1997 timber program to taxpayers."

In addition to being a particularly egregious case of corporate welfare, the below-cost timber sales program also harms private landowners, who cannot compete fairly with the Forest Service’s giveaway prices for timber. To keep up, private landowners overcut their land, and manage for shorter rotations.

Recycling and reuse efforts also suffer. Thanks to the cheap prices of "virgin" timber, markets for recycled paper have remained stagnant for years. According to the "Welfare for Waste" report, "below-cost timber also undermines the development of building deconstruction and timber reuse, resulting in large quantities of construction and demolition debris nationwide, much of which could have been reused if economic factors favored remilling and recycling instead of cutting new wood." For instance, the Native Forest Network notes that 48 percent of U.S. hardwood goes into shipping pallets — more than half of which are thrown out after one use.

Solutions

Giving away trees from our public lands; mortgaging our future water supplies, wildlife habitat, and recreational areas; increasing the risks of floods, fires, and erosion — there has to be a better way to manage our National Forests.

The Forest Service took an important first step back in February, when it announced an eighteen-month moratorium on new road construction in most roadless areas in the National Forests. Unfortunately, the moratorium also had plenty of loopholes big enough to drive a logging truck through, leaving more than 15 million currently roadless areas unprotected, including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska as well as many National Forests in the Pacific Northwest and northern California. Roadless status is important not just for avoiding the negative environmental impacts of the roads themselves, but also because an area must be roadless to qualify for "wilderness" designation and protection from logging and mining. The Forest Service is currently developing a long-term roads policy, which hopefully will declare all roadless areas of more than a thousand acres off-limits for new road construction.

Of course it would help to cut some of the perverse incentives encouraging unsustainable logging of the National Forests, such as the below-cost timber sales mentioned above and the nearly unlimited amount of timber receipts (sales of timber logged from National Forests) that can be retained by the Forest Service for "timber sale area betterment." Also, local communities currently receive 25 percent of the receipts from timber cut in local forests to help fund roads and schools. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck has asked Congress to end this policy, asking "Why should the richest country in the world finance the education of rural schoolchildren on the back of a controversial federal timber program?" We could also return to less destructive logging practices, encouraging selective logging instead of clearcuts, for example.

But in the long run, the only way to protect the National Forests for the future is to end all commercial logging on them for good.

One criticism of this approach is that a zero-cut policy on the National Forests might lead to increasing imports of wood from countries with even more irresponsible logging policies than ours. Indeed, at the World Trade Organization summit at Seattle this coming November, a proposed new trade agreement that could increase wood consumption and clearcut logging worldwide will be discussed.

However, as mentioned above, only about 4 percent of U.S. timber needs are served by the National Forests. Much of this relatively small amount could be supplied by increasing recycling and reuse of timber and paper products, as well as encouraging the use of alternative building materials such as rammed earth. As the world’s "first citizens," we have a responsibility to demonstrate responsible stewardship of natural resources. Many countries have modeled their national parks systems on the American model; let’s show them a National Forest system worthy of being copied as well.

U.S. Representatives Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Jim Leach (R-IA) have given us an excellent opportunity to end commercial logging on the National Forests: H.R. 1396, the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, which they reintroduced to the House in April. Their bill would prohibit all new timber sales from the National Forests, and phase out existing contracts over a two-year period. It would also establish a "Natural Heritage Restoration Corps," which would begin to repair some of the damage done by years of unsustainable logging. Perhaps most importantly, it would also provide worker retraining, compensation, and relocation, if necessary, helping those that would be put out of work by the bill to find other jobs. Finally, the bill would fund research into alternatives to wood for paper and construction uses.

The National Forests are public lands, owned by us all, and held in trust for our children’s children. As Representative Mckinney said when she introduced the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act:

"We have a choice. Our legacy for future generations can be polluted streams and forests of stumps, or National Forests that work as nature intended — filtering pollution out of our water, protecting us from flooding, providing wildlife habitat and a place for us to play and find a little peace. It will take generations for our National Forests to recover — and that’s if we start restoring them immediately. We cannot be timid or take half steps. We must stop logging our National Forests now."

Resources

To help bring an end to logging our public lands at taxpayers’ expense, write a letter to your representative, urging him or her to support H.R. 1396, the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act: U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 (Click here to find out who your representative is, or to e-mail them.).

You might also want to send a copy of your letter to Mike Dombeck, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and to Vice President Al Gore:

Mike Dombeck, Chief; U.S. Forest Service; Auditors Building; 201 14th Street, S.W. at Independence Ave., S.W.; Washington, DC 20024; 202-205-1661.

Vice President Al Gore; The White House; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; Washington, DC 20500.

For more information on forest issues: Heritage Forests Campaign, 202-861-2242, e-mail: kr@onrc.org

The John Muir Project, 626-792-0109, e-mail: JMP@johnmuirproject.org

Sierra Club, 202-547-1141, e-mail: sean.cosgrove@sierraclub.org

U.S. Forest Service

Welfare for Waste report, Grassroots Recycling Network

The Wilderness Society, 202-833-2300, e-mail: ben_beach@tws.org

Zero Cut Project, Native Forest Network, 802-863-0571, e-mail: nfnena@sover.net

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