Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
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February 15, 1999, Monday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A28
LENGTH: 417 words
HEADLINE:
Good Move in the Forests
BODY:
THE
ADMINISTRATION, in the person of Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, continues to
move forest policy in the right direction. The latest example is the 18-month
moratorium announced the other day on road building in many though not all the
remaining roadless areas in the national forests. Because roads
are a prerequisite for logging, the effect is to put these areas off limits
while the service tries to come up with what Mr. Dombeck calls a "protective and
responsible long-term road policy." If the final policy favors conservation over
timbering, as Mr. Dombeck suggests it will, it will represent a major advance.
The policy need not ban all timbering on the national forests, depleted though
many of them are. But the standard of management should be changed to make
timbering the rare exception rather than the rule.
The outcome could
well become entangled in the next election. If completed on schedule, the new
policy will be issued about as the presidential campaign begins in earnest next
fall. The maneuvering could begin even this year, as part of the appropriations
process. The moratorium, and the broader turnaround that it bespeaks, are
opposed by the timber industry and its friends in Congress. Those include the
Alaska delegation, whose senior member, Sen. Ted Stevens, is chairman of the
Appropriations Committee.
To blunt this likely opposition, the
administration exempted from the moratorium forests for which it recently had
approved management plans, including the vast Tongass National Forest in Alaska
and much of the forest land in the Pacific Northwest. Who knows if the proffer
will be enough? Meanwhile, environmental groups, even those otherwise
sympathetic to what Mr. Dombeck is trying to do, bewail the exceptions. They
fear the interim logging that may occur on the Tongass in particular. The
administration is under pressure that it ought to resist to grant a relatively
large and well-connected employer in Ketchikan increased logging rights on the
Tongass as well.
So the moratorium could be stronger. It's still an
important step, as are other steps Mr. Dombeck has taken -- to divorce the
budget of the service from the volume of timbering it allows, for example. Roads
aren't just a proxy for the logging. They themselves do damage, particularly
when not maintained, and the service has lacked the funds to maintain them. The
argument is more complicated than just to log or not. The moratorium should
provide time to sort it out.
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February 15, 1999 
