Synopsis of the Issue
Photos of healthy post-fire trees scheduled to be cut
Research from OSU: Fire salvaging hinders restoration
The Bland Mountain Fire II of August 2004 started in an almost identical way as did the Bland Mountain Fire of 1987, reburning the plantations created from the salvage logging of the first fire. In 2004, old-growth forests on BLM lands on the edges of the 1987 fire, experienced a moderate, natural mosaic burn, creating some areas of dead trees, yet leaving lots of green trees. There was some mature timber on BLM lands that was not in the first fire that the BLM wanted to salvage. The BLM's proposal was to log 150 acres to sell 3.7 mmbf (about 750 log truck loads).
The 2004 Bland Mountain Fire burned 4,705 acres of mostly 12 to 15 year-old trees. About a third of that, 1,719 acres, was on BLM land, and like the private land, most of the public land that burned were young tree plantations. (Thus, the "salvage logging will prevent re-burning" theory goes up in smoke.) It is well-known that plantations are much less resistant to wildland fire than mature timber. In the Tiller fires of 2002, the Forest Service reported that "plantations experienced a disproportionately high amount of stand-replacement mortality caused by crown fires as compared to older, unmanaged forests… Plantations had a tendency to increase the rate of fire spread and increased the overall area of stand-replacement fire effects by spreading to neighboring stands."
In July 2004 the BLM testified to congress in support of Bush's Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The BLM gave an example of a "good" post-fire restoration project they did in 1987, after the Bland Mountain I Fire in western Oregon. The long list of "restoration activities" included salvage logging 11,000 logging truck loads of mature and old-growth forests; the BLM had converted the forests into tree plantations. One month later, the Bland Mountain II Fire started in the same place as the 1987 fire and quickly burned up the 15 year-old plantations (pictured at left).
We should have learned from this mistake. Logging live and dead old-growth after a wildfire will not reduce future fire risk. Case in point: the 1996 Spring Fire on the Umpqua National Forest burned in LSR and Wilderness was never salvaged logged or replanted, even though about 40% of it burned (in a mosaic pattern) so hot it killed the overstory trees ("stand replacement.") Four years later, a Forest Service survey showed that over 75% of the Spring Fire area was adequately stocked naturally with over 125 trees per acre. The scattered 25% that was understocked is Mother Nature's diversity.
In March 2005, the Roseburg BLM did an environmental assessment proposing salvage logging in both areas of the fire: LSR and Matrix. In April 2005, BLM advertised a timber sale in the Matrix area called the Déjà vu timber sale. They postponed a decision to salvage log in the LSR. Much of the Déjà vu sale was in old-growth forests that contained a mosaic of dead to healthy trees, with everything in between, from heavily damaged live trees, to healthy trees virtually untouched by the fire. The BLM promised to salvage log only dead trees and trees so badly injured that they would die from fire injuries within 5 years.
Though we felt the BLM was taking too many dead trees for the health of wildlife, soils and the healing forest, we did not officially object. The current administration's culture of declaring all dead trees useless was so strong that we decided instead to pick our battle of defending the spotted owl reserves. But after we looked at BLM's version of "dying" trees, we changed our mind. We had to defend the live, healthy trees that the BLM was claiming were dying.
Many live trees marked for cutting were healthy and not going to die within five years. Some were almost untouched by fire. Some were in new road right-of-ways, some had to be cut for landings and yarding corridors, and many were simply mismarked-- healthy trees included in the sale. Century-old monarchs that survived two fires (1987 and 2004) were scheduled to be cut and sold. Matrix lands or not, we felt the BLM should do what they promised to do and only sell dead and dying trees.
In May 2005, we appealed the sale to the Department of Interior asking for a stay to stop logging any live trees until our appeal could be heard. We did not ask the BLM to stop logging dead trees. But the BLM called the sale an emergency because, they claimed, dead trees would lose value if not cut immediately. Therefore, all the live, healthy green old-growth included within the sale were then being cut, even before the Department of Interior could consider our request to stop the logging of just the live trees.
The BLM's response relied on the assertion that our claims were not independently verified and that we offered no proof that green, healthy trees were being logged in violation of the BLM's decision to log only dead and dying trees.
We did fail to get an independent review of BLM's tree marking, but only because the BLM decided to proclaim an emergency waiver to the usual appeal policies. Since the BLM permitted the purchaser to log early, the BLM was successful in preventing any other experts from evaluating the sale marking. However, Edwin Royce, PhD in botany with a specialization in forest ecology from the University of California at Davis (pictured at left with what remained of a healthy 300 year-old tree), was able to visit the sale after most of unit 1 and 6, including old-growth forests, were already cut. In one corner of unit 6 that was uncut, he determined that out of 9 green trees designated for cutting, 8 were healthy and not going to die within 5 years. He further concluded that there was "a totally unacceptable error rate of eight trees out of nine incorrectly marked."
On April 25, 2005, Elaine M. Brong wrote a letter to Roseburg BLM stating that the usual policy of not implementing a decision until the BLM "has had an opportunity to review the stay request and BLM's response to that request" should be "waived for this project." The reason given was that "the species, size, and characteristics of the timber to be salvaged are such that a major loss to the volume, value of the timber, and economic benefit of the sale will occur if harvest of this material is not conducted expeditiously."
This waiver of citizen due process was unfounded. There would not have been a "major loss" during a 60 day period. Many fire salvage sales are logged as much as two or three years after a fire. The Bland Mountain II fire occurred just 8 months before the emergency waiver. Even the purchaser's contractor, who talked to us during our field trip with the BLM on May 2, told us that the wood looked good and there was no deterioration.
The BLM offered no proof of deterioration justifying the waiver. The only thing the waiver really accomplished was allowing the BLM to avoid the normal citizen review process and any meaningful administrative appeal. This review process was especially important on this sale because of the subjective nature of "dying," and using guidelines that had no bases in published scientific literature. It is unfortunate that the BLM felt the need to make sure their work was hidden from fair public review.
The trees below were marked for cutting. They show little sign of rotting or dying.
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The following article was taken from the KS Wild website.
The 2002 Biscuit Fire continues to sit at the center of a policy firestorm regarding post-fire recovery and the management of public lands. Over the last two weeks, several developments surfaced regarding the economic and ecological justifications for post-fire logging, including an attempt to censure a study from Oregon State University.
The peer-reviewed study that appeared in the January issue of the prestigious journal Science indicates that logging large trees at Biscuit hindered forest regeneration and increased fire risk. Professors at the OSU School of Forestry made attempts to censure the research, asking Science to not publish the study's results. Fortunately, the journal's top editor said there was no chance the research would be suppressed. These actions have sparked intense concern about academic freedom and have possibly damaged the reputation of OSU. Additionally, a report was released this month citing that taxpayers lost at least $9 million at Biscuit.
As more and more science becomes available citing that the Biscuit project did not help the ecology of the forest or the economy of the local communities, citizens are left to wonder why the Forest Service moved forward with the project. The former Forest Service lead planner for Biscuit was recently interviewed in the Eugene Weekly and the 32-year Forest Service veteran offered some answers.
This new information is great fodder for Letters to the Editor of your local newspaper advocating that our Congressional Representatives vote against Rep. Greg Walden and Senator Gordon Smith's misguided bills in Congress. Rep. Walden and Sen. Smith use highly questionable logic in their proposal to weaken environmental laws and public participation while mandating logging after natural events.