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Lois Henry: Enviromentalists not seeing the forest for the trees
| Tuesday, Jul 22 2008 4:57 PM
Last Updated: Wednesday, Jul 23 2008 7:17 AM
I’ve been trying, really, I have. But I just cannot see eye-to-eye with some environmental groups that are dead set — lawsuits and all — against forest thinning.
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You’ve probably never had occasion to consider forest thinning and even now are wondering why they heck you should care.
Heard of the Piute fire?
So far, it’s burned up 37,000 acres and cost me, you and all the rest of us taxpayers about $23 million to fight.
A portion of that acreage was set to be thinned as part of a Forest Service program to reduce fire danger.
If the Sequoia Forest Keeper and Earth Island Institute environmental groups hadn’t sued late last year, at least some of the thinning would have been done by the time fire hit earlier this month. Not all the work would have been done, but a lot, said Sequoia National Forest Ecosystem Staff Officer Jim Whitfield.
“I can’t say it would have definitely been better,” he said. “But obviously, we wanted to change the fuel conditions.”
We’ll never know if thinning would have stemmed the Piute fire, but it sure worked at Lake Arrowhead last fall, saving countless homes. And thinning work continues around Frazier Park communities with the devastating 2006 Day fire still fresh in residents’ minds.
“There’s no question from a firefighting standpoint that a thinned forest is a much better proposition,” agreed Tom Kuekes, district ranger for the Mount Pinos District of the Los Padres National Forest.
Even so, he said a planned thinning project to take out dead and hazardous trees along roadways in the Los Padres is already tied up in litigation and the Forest Service has received an “intent to sue” notice regarding another project that would thin the forest back two miles from communities.
After talking to the two environmental groups that sued over the Piute thinning project, it’s clear their concern is that the Forest Service is more interested in kowtowing to the timber industry than watching out for the forest.
“In this administration, the impetus is on getting more areas logged, period,” Rachel Fazio with Earth Island Institute told me. “Ecology takes a back seat to that.”
The groups aren’t against all thinning, she said, just trees larger than 12 inches in diameter. They felt the project would cut too many bigger trees.
I read the Forest Service’s environmental assessment, which painstakingly pinpointed the types, sizes and amounts of trees allowed to be cut in which portions of the project area, and it repeatedly stated the purpose was to bring the area back to a more natural state. One in which fire could play a helpful role rather than devastating habitat, watershed and threatening homes and lives, as it ultimately did over the last three weeks.
The fact that a commercial logging company, Sierra Forest Products of Terra Bella, was contracted to do the thinning also seems to be a major sticking point for the environmental groups.
I have no problem, whatsoever, with it and I don’t get the angst.
Sierra Forest is a lumber mill (the last remaining one south of Sonora, by the way). They aren’t selling ammo to al-Qaida, for cripes' sake!
They paid the Forest Service for the timber. They would have used their own equipment and people to do all the work. Then they would have had to pay the Forest Service to come clean up the slash. And, yes, even after all that, they probably would have made a profit on the wood. The devils!
Fazio contended they paid pennies, $25,000, for the timber in comparison with the actual project costs, which she said was $1.6 million.
Even Ara Marderosian, executive director of Sequoia Forest Keeper, though, acknowledged project costs are so high because of the extensive planning that goes into them, which would have to be done regardless of whether a private company did the thinning or it was paid for by taxpayers.
And the lawsuits, of course, also increase costs, Marderosian said. Um ... yeah.
Despite my disagreement on this issue with Sequoia Forest Keeper and Earth Island Institute, they’re doing exactly what they should, reading the documents, asking questions and demanding better.
I just think, at some point, there oughta be a little give and take.
Too bad the fire got all the take on this one.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com.