The Register-Guard
Sunday, Sep 25, 2011

BLUE RIVER - The massive Douglas fir tree in Unit 22 of the Trapper timber sale was double-marked: orange paint indicating that it was not to be cut down and yellow tape showing that it might be home to red tree voles - a favorite entree for imperiled northern spotted owls.
The tree, and its mature or ancient brethren on a sliver of land in the rugged Blue River watershed, is at the heart of the latest battle in Oregon's ongoing timber wars.
The Trapper sale skirmish is playing out in painfully slow motion - emblematic of the successes and failures the Northwest Forest Plan, which increased protections for trees, birds and fish but has come nowhere near meeting its promised timber production.
Eugene's Seneca Sawmill bought the federal contract to log Trapper eight years ago. Seneca and the U.S. Forest Service delayed logging until 2010 - for environmental and economic reasons. But when Seneca tried to move ahead with cutting, environmentalists successfully sued to block the company. In May, a U.S. District Court judge slapped an injunction on the sale. And now, after mulling an appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then rejecting the idea, the Forest Service is going back to the drawing board and following the judge's order to redo an assessment of the impact the logging would have on species at risk of extinction.
Trapper is no ordinary logging project. It's part of a federal research effort in a section of the forest specifically set aside for experimental techniques. And it's tiny, a mere 143 acres, scattered across the Blue River watershed in six individual swaths.
In the realm of federal forests, 143 acres is a pinprick. It represents .00058 percent of the 24.5 million acres governed by the Northwest Forest Plan that run from the Canada-¬Washington border down to Northern California. On the 1.6 million-acre Willamette National Forest, the 6 million board feet of timber that Trapper would yield is less than 10 percent of the total 72 million board feet of timber sales awarded in 2010.

Old growth makes it a battleground
But some of the trees in the Trapper project are big and old, dating to the last big fire that swept through more than 400 years ago, trees that conjure up the words "majestic" and "legacy."
How do you know you're in old growth - trees 200 years of age and older?
"Look around you," Willamette National Forest Supervisor Meg Mitchell says. "If you can see six trees bigger (around) than your refrigerator, you're in old growth."
That's not hard to do in the Blue River area, where Mitchell says 30 percent of the trees fit that bill.
Some are scattered throughout the Trapper sale; most have been marked to be left standing. But so-called mature trees - those in the 140- to 150-year range, would be part of the cut.
That has put a spotlight on the Trapper sale.
In the years since Seneca and the Forest Service signed the logging contract, protesters have staged rallies against Trapper. The Eugene City Council passed a resolution against it. One Eugene Water & Electric Board commissioner protested against Trapper, to the chagrin of her board colleagues.
Critics of the sale say they want to preserve not only old growth, but mature trees, trees that if left alone will become old growth soonest, restoring some of the stands lost in the decades when widespread logging was allowed on federal land.
They also say the forest-regeneration research that would be done as part of Trapper is unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Seneca and timber industry representatives - frustrated by 15 years of drastically reduced logging opportunities on federal land - won't settle for a less controversial alternative at Trapper. They want those trees on that site.
So Trapper has become a showdown.

An experiment in logging
To understand why such a small logging project could result in such a big fuss, some history is in order.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton's administration put in place the Northwest Forest Plan, a management strategy on federal forests to protect species at risk of extinction, such as the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelets, birds that rely on the oldest trees in the forest for nesting and breeding.
That put a halt to decades of intensive logging on the federal lands. The government set millions of acres aside in reserves while making 16 percent - not quite 4 million acres - available for logging.
An additional 1.5 million acres - about 6 percent - was set aside in adaptive management areas, where forest managers could try innovative ways to meet the competing goals of logging, ecology and recreation.
Managers were supposed to have some freedom to experiment. But of the 10 areas set aside for experimentation, just two have been used that way, and one of these, the Cascades Adaptive Management Area, is on the Willamette National Forest, encompassing the Blue River watershed and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. The Andrews has been home to a host of forestry research projects over the past 60 years.
Researchers at the Andrews have a long relationship with managers of the Willamette National Forest, so developing projects wasn't difficult, said Fred Swanson, an Oregon State University geologist.
Swanson, who specializes on the impact of physical disturbances such as fire, landslides and volcanic eruptions on forests, helped develop the Blue River Landscape Study, a project for the Central Cascades Adaptive Management Area that would help researchers tease out whether logging could be done to mimic how wildfire would change a site.
Forests aren't static, Swanson said. Disturbances such as fire open up the forest. Those open areas give way to brush and young trees that grow up and mature and, after centuries, become old growth.
Researchers proposed three logging projects to reflect the way wildfire moves through forests, lightly burning some areas, moderately burning others and intensively scouring some areas, leaving few live trees behind.
The first two projects - which have been completed - left 30 percent to 50 percent of the trees and were followed by controlled burns that created standing dead snags but also left the big live trees.
Trapper - the third project - was designed to mimic intense fire. It called for logging 50 percent of the trees, with fire coming through afterward and leaving just 15 percent of live trees standing.
That would give the project the feel of the most intensive logging allowed on federal forests. When it was first described in 2003, environmentalists appealed the initial decision to log, but succeeded only in persuading the Forest Service to remove several acres of the oldest trees from the project.
Seneca got the contract, but the project was postponed over the years, sometimes by the Forest Service and sometimes by Seneca. When logging was slated to begin in 2010, two groups - Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild - sued.

Big trees are valued by both sides
Both sides in the dispute have an array of arguments on the economic benefit of logging vs. the ecological necessity of leaving trees standing.
On the green side, Josh Laughlin of Cascadia Wildlands and Chandra LeGue of Oregon Wild argue strongly against the Trapper sale.
"What else is there to learn about logging in mature and old growth stands?" Laughlin said. The timber industry already had intensively logged Pacific Northwest federal forests for decades up until the Northwest Forest Plan, and the forests need a break, he said.
"We support experiments in the young stands, not at the expense of these treasured forests," he said.
Before the Northwest Forest Plan, annual logging in the area covered by the plan was often as high as 4 to 6 billion board feet a year. That massive level was accomplished only by the federal government ignoring federal environmental laws, environmentalists say.
Environmentalist lawsuits ended that era. But the Northwest Forest Plan predicted a continued harvest of 1.1 billion board feet a year - while the actual level rarely has reached half that amount.
The timber industry wants access to more than thinning projects on younger stands where logging already has occurred.
The bigger trees are economically valuable, said Dale Riddle, vice president at Seneca. Younger, smaller diameter trees can be milled into the 2-by-4s that are the backbone of construction, but the bigger trees provide a more valuable product: the attractive beams in expensive lodges, the tight grain that makes for beautiful cabinetry.
The more and bigger the trees in a single sale, the more economic it is to log them, he said.
"We want wood products that we can sell to diverse markets," Riddle said. "When lower value products aren't selling, the higher values ones are."
If those older trees are so valuable, environmentalists counter, the timber industry should let their own private stands age longer instead of cutting them on 45-year to 60-year rotations.
But forest owners pale at that notion. They fear attracting northern spotted owls, whose presence would trigger federal restrictions on their harvest, Riddle said.

Industry feels it got short end of deal
The timber industry believes it lost big under the Northwest Forest Plan.
Environmentalists got "the green dream," said Ross Mickey, a federal forest manager with the American Forest Resource Council, which represents timber companies.
The pendulum has swung too far toward preservation, he said, and with local communities suffering in an economy stuck in recession, it's time to increase logging. Mickey and Riddle say they aren't arguing for logging in old growth reserves, but for following the law and using adaptive management areas as they were intended.
Of the Willamette National Forest's 1.6 million acres, 80 percent is off limits to logging, Mickey said. Having successfully protected the oldest trees in the forests, environmentalists now want the mature stands - 80- to 150-year-old trees - off limits as well, he said.
"They're fighting for every last tree," he said.
The mature stands deserve protection, Laughlin countered, because they are future old growth. And while it is true that the federal forests set aside millions of acres as old growth reserves, much of that land is comprised of young stands of trees, expected to some day become old growth, but nowhere near that stage yet.
"Industry has been gorging at the feeding trough of the federal forests for decades," Laughlin said. "These forests need time to recover."
LeGue rejects the notion that environmentalists are "locking up" the forests.
Oregon Wild is finishing a research project that evaluates how much thinning could still be done on Pacific Northwest forests.
It concludes that in the next 20 years, timber output on the Willamette can increase by 5 percent, with an increase statewide of 6 percent and an overall increase of 38 percent throughout the Pacific Northwest, she said.
"All of this would meet our criteria for ecological restoration thinning," she wrote.
When Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild sued to halt the Trapper project, they limited their arguments to federal procedures, saying the Forest Service failed to adequately analyze the project's impact on endangered species.
A judge agreed, prohibiting logging until more assessments are done.

Finding a way through the thicket
Because it's been almost a decade since the initial Trapper assessments began, the Forest Service will resurvey the area and review new information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which this year published a recovery plan for northern spotted owls and will release a draft critical habitat plan for the birds later this fall that could have an impact on the Trapper project.
The debate leaves Fred Swanson, the geologist, shaking his head.
The research projects are long-term studies expected to last more than 200 years. Such lengthy windows are typical on forests where stands can take centuries to fully develop.
Last year, Swanson wrote a letter to Willamette Supervisor Mitchell that suggested that researchers could live without the information the Trapper project would provide. Swanson said that letter was intended to help Mitchell if she needed to back away from a controversial project.
But Swanson said the Blue River studies have merit because they widen the discussion on how to manage a complicated landscape.
"People come at the forests from three different points of view," he said. "There's the production forestry angle. The other is the species conservation perspective and the third approach, which is the one we're trying to explore in Blue River ... is an ecosystem dynamics approach."
The Blue River studies propose future logging at 100- 180- and 260-year rotations, much longer than the 80-year harvest rotations on federal lands where logging is permitted.
While the specifics of the Trapper timber sale keep managers and activists busy, Swanson believes there's another important discussion worth having: how to work through the disagreements about land management that polarize communities and lead to wild swings in public policy.
"We have a forest planning process, and that's a time for public discussion, but it has such a history of being a battleground," he said. "What is the way forward for a public discussion about what we want our future to be? We lack a forum for thoughtful discussion."
For now, however, there is just more waiting for the latest round of surveys.
Seneca has asked the judge to clarify his decision, and has indicated that it won't accept another less controversial logging project from the Forest Service to fulfill the contract.
It's as much the principle as the economics, Riddle said. If you can't log in the adaptive management areas, where can you log, he asked.
Laughlin dismisses the notion that 143 acres isn't worth fighting over.
"Sometimes we forget that these remnant old forests make life on Earth possible by providing pure air to breathe, clean water to drink, habitat for critters on the brink of extinction, and most importantly, they absorb and store incomparable amounts of human-cased carbon dioxide from the atmosphere thereby helping stabilize our out-of-balance climate," he wrote in an e-mail. "To log off these residual old forests is to hasten the demise of life as we know it."
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Land Allocation Under the Northwest Forest Plan
Total acreage covered: 24.5 million federally owned acres in Western Oregon, Washington and Northern California.
Old growth reserves: 30 percent
Wilderness areas, national parks: 30 percent
Riparian reserves: 11 percent
Withdrawn from forestry before the Northwest Forest Plan: 6 percent
Adaptive management areas: 6 percent
Logging permitted: 16 percent
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