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Time to ax the Forest Service's timber sale program By
Jim Steitz One of President Bush's stated priorities has been to clamp down on government programs that are wasteful and bring dubious public or economic benefits. With the days of endless surpluses now a distant specter in the rear-view mirror, a new urgency has infused this issue. Again topping the list of wasteful and destructive programs, to nobody's great surprise, is the U.S. Forest Service's timber sale program. The timber program's taxpayer subsidy to timber companies has long been the bane of taxpayer advocates and conservationists. However, the Forest Service has manipulated its budget to conceal the true fiscal impact. At the request of Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Cynthia McKinney D-Ga., the General Accounting Office recently attempted to ascertain the program's true cost. What the GAO found is a stake though the heart of any hope of redeeming this program from its perennial, disgraceful antagonism to the public interest. After a year and half of investigation, the GAO concluded that it was "impractical, if not impossible, for us or anyone to accurately determine the Forest Service's timber sales program cost." It found accounting practices unheard of in private industry. "Retroactive redistribution," for example, enabled the Forest Service to charge timber program costs to another program, such as recreation. Another practice allowed staff time to be charged to a program based on pre-budgeted staff time, regardless of the actual time spent working on that program. Because of these and other shady accounting methods that deliberately left money untraceable and unaccounted for, even the GAO threw up its arms in resignation. Investigations and subsequent incriminating conclusions about the timber sale program are becoming a tradition among watchdog groups and oversight agencies. However, the program retains fierce defenders in Congress who continue to push for increased logging on national forests at the public trough. Our own Congressman Jim Hansen, in fact, has fiercely attacked a policy enacted during the Clinton Administration that barred most logging in roadless areas, even though roadless areas timber cuts are generally the most ecologically destructive and the most efficient at vaporizing taxpayer dollars. If there were some social or economic benefit of the program, perhaps pork devotees might find a rationale for its existence. However, none is to be found. Since high-volume logging commenced on national forests after World War II, the timber program has wrought a legacy of ecological annihilation and biodiversity loss. Across the country, the habitat of an array of plant and animal life is markedly reduced and fragmented, many to the brink of extinction. Although we often envision Pacific salmon runs, pine martens, goshawks, spotted owls, and other cute-and-fuzzies as logging victims, the destruction extends to the larger web of flora and microorganisms of the Earth's regulatory matrix. There is a good reason this may be unfamiliar -- the Forest Service has been caught red-handed on several occasions trying to sell timber without completing wildlife surveys. Entire fleets of fishing boats lay idled due in part to declining salmon runs, decimated by National Forest logging as well as dams. Millions of Americans rely on water systems equipped to handle the sediment loads cascading off national forests. Over 400,000 miles of roads, most built for logging, now feed silt into our drinking and fishing waters. Entire houses have been taken out by landslides deriving from timber sales, while others face wildfire danger, fed by a century of ecological short-circuiting via fire suppression designed to protect marketable timber, and by the ecologically inverse effects of logging itself, which often increases wildfire hazard. Communities in the southeastern United States are being invaded by "chip mills," the most efficient means known to man of liquidating diverse hardwood forests and replacing them with pine plantations, with a minimum of labor (lest we harbor any delusions that timber companies care about rural workers). The subsidized sales continue to hamper development of sustainable rural economies and of alternative paper and timber products that could easily replace the 2 percent to 3 percent of our pulp and wood supplied by national forests. National forest recreation alone contributes more than 30 times the economic benefit of timber sales, according to the Forest Service's own data. The usefulness of paying to degrade our own lands is long past. Reps. Jim Leach, R-La., and McKinney have introduced to Congress the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, which would end the ecological giveaway and divert the money toward restoration of past damage to the national forests (with employment preference to displaced timber workers), worker education and retraining, and research and development into promising alternative fiber products such as hemp, kenaf, and agricultural wastes. Congress has an opportunity to divest itself of special-interest pork projects and taxpayer subsidies, and attain the vision for the national forests originally laid out by its first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot: the greatest good for the greatest number for the greatest time. Will Congress escape the tentacles of entrenched, extremist timber lobbies and see the faces, human and otherwise, at the receiving end of its decrees? Time will tell. May our children forgive us if they fail.
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