Wyden's bill not a savior

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has vastly more faith in the power of legislation than we have.

There’s ample reason, in any case, to be skeptical about certain claims Wyden and others are making regarding the forest management bill the senator introduced last week.

It’s called the Oregon Eastside Forests Restoration, Old Growth Protection and Jobs Act.

Wyden was right to list jobs last.

We don’t doubt that the bill, if it becomes law, will protect old growth trees and help to restore ailing national forests east of the Cascades.

Indeed, such measures are the predominant theme in the legislation.

We’re not at all sure, though, that the bill will create many jobs.

Nor are we confident that the bill will revive the region’s timber industry by spurring, as Wyden said in a press release, “a significant and sustainable increase in harvest” of lumber-ready trees from the six eastside national forests. That list includes the Wallowa-Whitman, based in Baker City.

We’re suspicious because we don’t believe Wyden’s bill would change in any meaningful way how the Forest Service manages those 8.3 million acres — in particular the agency’s preference for cutting trees that are too small to be made into lumber.

For instance, the bill prohibits the cutting of live trees larger than 21 inches in diameter. That’s precisely the policy that the Forest Service has adhered to for the past 15 years.

The legislation goes further, though, in allowing an advisory panel to recommend banning the logging of trees smaller than 21 inches in certain cases.

The bill also would prevent the Forest Service, in most cases, from building permanent roads. But that, too, is merely making law out of the status quo; the Forest Service in this region got out of the major road-building business years ago.

It’s no surprise that environmental groups such as Oregon Wild lavish praise on Wyden’s bill. Those groups had for years urged the Forest Service to stop cutting older trees and to stop building roads in eastside forests, and in the main they’ve succeeded — without an assist from a senator.

Headlines proclaiming Wyden’s bill as a sort of armistice in the “timber wars” seem a trifle silly: the environmentalists won that war years ago.

(Which, incidentally, is not an altogether bad thing. The heavy logging of the 1970s and 1980s was not sustainable, and it would be neither responsible nor realistic for Wyden or any other legislator to try to revive the forest management policy of that era.)

Wyden’s bill has garnered widespread publicity not only because environmentalists like it, though. Major players in the timber industry have also endorsed the legislation.

Yet their support is predictable, too.

The timber industry east of the Cascades is so frail that its proponents could hardly be expected to oppose a bill that purports to put logs on trucks.

Industry officials certainly have nothing to lose from standing beside their anti-logging foes while Wyden outlines his bill to reporters.

Whether the timber industry stands to gain much from Wyden’s bill is quite another matter.

The bill’s fans tout a provision requiring each of the national forests, within three years of the bill becoming law, to design at least one forest restoration project per year that covers a minimum of 25,000 acres.

In the meantime, the six forests must, in total, manage at least 80,000 acres the first year, 100,000 acres the second, and 120,000 acres the third.

Those numbers look impressive, considering the six forests combined cut trees on about 40,000 acres last year.

Conspicuously absent in the bill, though, is any numerical target for future timber harvests.

The bill is quite specific about what the Forest Service can’t do — cut larger trees and build roads, for instance. But there’s not much in there about board-feet or log loads or anything else that has to do with keeping the saws spinning or the paychecks coming for loggers and truck drivers and mill workers.

For example, the legislation proposes “wood harvests to sustain adequate levels of industry infrastructure.”

But how much is adequate? The bill doesn’t say.

The legislation does say that the Forest Service, during the first three years after the bill becomes law, should design projects that “emphasize sawtimber as a byproduct.”

But again, there are no timber volume goals.

Also, the bill makes logging projects subject to review by that aforementioned advisory panel. The panel’s seven members would include officials from environmental groups and the timber industry.

In other words, the environmentalists who endorsed Wyden’s bill did not surrender their ability to try to nix logging. Besides which, they can always sue.

The bottom line is that Wyden’s bill seems much more evolutionary — doing the same kinds of work, but on more acres — rather than revolutionary.

What that means for eastside forests is continuing the policies of the past 15 years: Cutting trees too small to be sawed into lumber, and lighting prescribed fires to get rid of brush.

Commercial logging — what sawmills need to survive — has been relegated to a secondary role in most eastside forest projects.

Wyden’s bill, which would give the Forest Service $50 million, should enable the Forest Service to “manage” more acres. But so long as commercial logging remains in effect an afterthought, then it’s likely that any increase in the supply of mill-ready logs will be of an incidental scale rather than the significant one that Wyden predicts.

Still and all, Wyden’s bill is not just a list of empty promises.

The region’s budding biomass industry, in particular, stands to benefit.

The most abundant byproducts of the types of forest restoration work that the bill promotes are small trees and brush. That stuff is worthless for sawmills, but it still has value. Scrap wood, to name three uses, can be chopped into firewood, distilled into ethanol, and burned to generate electricity.

The bill’s benefits to public land are harder to quantify in dollar terms, but no less real.

Thinning overcrowded forests reduces the risk of the wildfires that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to put out.

Keeping our forests healthy helps to protect our supplies of clean water, too — Baker City gets most of its water from streams and springs in the Wallowa-Whitman.

The point here is that Wyden’s bill is not bad legislation; it is, in fact, good for our public forests.

But it seems to us the height of naivete to count on this bill to save the scant number of sawmills left on the east side.