“Controversy over federal forest management has prompted investigations by Congressional committees, the General Accounting Office, and the Office of Technology Assessment. These inquiries reveal that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lack adequate or up-to-date inventories and monitoring programs. Without such programs, the agencies cannot assess the success of replanted tree farms on the public’s forest lands or the quantity of mature timber available. Lacking such information, neither the Congress nor the public can determine whether ongoing federal timber sale programs meet legal standards for sustainable timber management. This report describes how the lack of monitoring and outdated inventories have prevented accurate determination of timber cutting levels, to detriment of America’s forest heritage.”
--Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, "Management of Federal Timber Resources: the Loss of Accountability," June 15, 1992.
In an attempt to evade court-ordered injunctions against illegal logging,
the timber industry and the ForestService fabricated a "forest health crisis."
Despite pointing to a century of fire suppression, heavy logging and road
building as the cause of the problem, they called for more of the same
as the solution. The western wildfires of 1994 helped the industry
persuade Congress that the forests must be "salvage logged" or lost.
The passage of a salvage logging amendment to a
fiscal year 1995 Interior Appropriations bill, known as the "salvage rider,"
is a dramatic example of Congress, the timber industry, and the agency
working in close cooperation to increase the amount of logging on National
Forests. It allowed unrestricted clearcutting of publicly owned forests
all over the country - including the last ancient forests - under the guise
of salvage logging. The bill purported to respond to a forest health
crisis," but more than 50 forest experts across the country protested,
pointing out that clearcutting threatens soil, watersheds, fisheries and
wildlife - causing damage that vastly exceeds the impact of insects and
fire.
The bill expressly overrode virtually all existing
federal environmental laws. It restricted Judicial remedies, preventing
citizens from gaining relief in court to halt clearcutting - even if its
effects threatened water supplies, endangered protected species, caused
erosion or imperiled communities that depend on fishing and recreation.
In California alone, nearly one billion board feet
of new timber went on sale upon passage of the salvage rider. Some
of the last roadless areas in the National Forest System were put up for
bid at way-below-market prices, effectively privatizing public assets at
a highly subsidized rate. Nationally, 4.6 billion board feet of the
most ecologically valuable timber, including healthy, intact stands of
rare old growth was sold under the program, exceeding even the 3.8 billion
board feet goal that Congress had set. These sales gave rise to new
rounds of protests and civil disobedience in forest communities nationwide,
resulting in thousands of arrests and new demands for an end to all logging
on public lands.