Green policies backfire, rural group says

[Woodmonkey]

Green policies backfire, rural group says

Eastern Oregon - Timber and wildfire management may lead to animal deaths, a public-private alliance says


ENTERPRISE -- Policies devised to protect wildlife and ecosystems are being cited by some eastern Oregon officials as causes of damage to both wild animals and national forests.

Wallowa County Commissioner Ben Boswell of Enterprise is trying to link last year's 80 percent die-off of Rocky Mountain bighorn lambs in Hells Canyon to federal management of national forests.

That allegation will be among the issues taken up by a group called the Eastern Oregon Rural Alliance when it meets Thursday in La Grande.

The alliance is a rural forum created in 1990 to carry the concerns of eastern counties to the Legislature.

Biologists say the bighorn lambs died of pneumonia, citing a relationship between the deaths and disease-resistant domestic sheep and goats. Lambs, they said, are vulnerable because of their undeveloped immune systems.

Not so fast, Boswell said.

"The other way you get pneumonia is from smoky air," he said.

Hells Canyon was filled with smoke from wildfires much of last summer, he said. And 2007 wasn't unusual for bighorn deaths, or wildfires. Seventy-one percent of bighorn lambs died in 2006; 74 percent died in 2004 and 2005.

Wildfires and smoke resulted from dead and dying timber in national forests, Boswell said, because environmental concerns in the 1990s brought harvests to a near standstill.

That, in turn, resulted in the closure of 14 mills in eastern Oregon during a 15-year period, said Rep. Chuck Burley, R-Bend, a consultant and lobbyist for the industry-oriented American Forest Resource Council.

Wallowa County recently lost the third and last of its sawmills, and two other sawmills closed in Harney and Grant counties in the past year.

Those closures represent a loss of 198 jobs. Union County Commissioner Colleen MacLeod says the loss of 198 jobs in the two sparsely populated counties is the equivalent of losing 26,400 jobs in the Portland area.

MacLeod said people outside eastern Oregon don't seem to care much about the region's economic plight, but might care more if the troubles of rural counties are tied to the environment.

The alliance was formed 18 years ago and consists of county commissioners, city council members, livestock growers, state agency officials and others.

What frustrates county officials in eastern Oregon are U.S. Forest Service numbers that appear to establish that wood needs to be removed from forests to help prevent wildfires. A football field-size segment of national forest in the Mountain West often contains 500 to 1,000 trees today, compared with the 20 to 50 big pines occupying the same tract during the early days of the Western frontier, the agency has reported. Dense timber stands tend to be unhealthy and can succumb to disease, insects and wildfires, county officials say.

Larry McLaud, ecosystem conservation coordinator for the Hells Canyon Preservation Council environmental group, says global climate change may be a bigger factor than fuel loads on wildfires. Studies show that large wildfires typically are more dependent on climate than on forest fuels, he said.

"Until we understand what role climate plays in wildfires, it is premature to talk about fuel loading," he said.

In fiscal 2007, 523 million board feet of timber were harvested in Oregon and Washington on Forest Service-managed land, agency spokesman Tom Knappenberger said. That's a dramatic reduction from the 5.2 billion board feet harvested in 1989, but it reflects more logging than the 300 million to 400 million board feet taken off the forests in 2003.

"It's the same old battle," Burley said. "Some folks in the environmental community are not going to be happy until they shut down the last sawmill in eastern Oregon and the last one in the state."

McLaud argues that the national forest harvests of the 1980s were too big to be sustainable. Most old-growth trees are gone, he said, which is one reason timber sale offerings are unlikely to return to the levels of the 1980s.

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[CommoDave]

I'm not so sure that I can agree with them. I think it's almost comical how mankind thinks they can manage nature better than nature had managed itself for millions of years. The only way I can see our "stepping out of it" as being the problem is if when we stepped in to begin with, nature adjusted, and now, by stepping out, the animals were not as resiliant as they used to be, and had become accustomed to an environment modified by us.