Restoration or Exploitation?
The Case of Fort Valley Timber Sale

By Bryan Bird
Executive Director of the Forest Conservation Council
(505) 466-2459
bmbird@worldnet.att.net

All photos on this page are of the Fort Valley timber sale. Photos taken by Rene Voss of the John Muir Project on August 21, 2000.

Flagstaff, Arizona sits in the heart of the Coconino National Forest. This National Forest is a spectacular example of the dry ponderosa pine, mixed conifer, and aspen forests that blanket many high-elevation western landscapes from Arizona north to Washington State.

The Coconino National Forest is also ground zero in the dispute over how to restore public lands after years of abusive logging, grazing, and fire suppression.

Since the turn of the century, our National Forests have been exploited for their timber. This is in direct contrast to National Parks, which have been largely preserved for their outstanding natural or historical values.

In most of the west, long gone are the park-like groves of giant ponderosa pine interwoven with thickets of young saplings supporting wildlife such as the northern goshawk, spotted owl, and tassel-eared squirrel. Instead we have been left with a legacy of depleted wildlife populations, tainted water, and fire-prone forests.

Despite the fact that logging and grazing–more than any other human activities–have increased fire risk on our federal lands, the U.S. Forest Service would have us believe that more logging will save the day.

You may have heard the Forest Service use such terms as "catastrophic fire" or "bug infestation" to justify logging on your National Forest, and that restoration is accomplished by thinning, selective logging, or "salvage" logging. This line of thought is akin to hiring the coyote to rebuild the hen house.

In most cases, disturbances such as fires and bug infestations are natural elements of forest ecosystems serving to sustain forests through natural selection. For years the National Park Service has managed and restored its vast forestlands without logging.

Increasingly the National Park Service and even the Forest Service are recognizing the superior restoration potential of fire and road removal. For example Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park has been restoring forest ecosystems by prudently manipulating fuels and conducting controlled burns (Stephenson, N.L. 1999 Reference conditions for Giant Sequoia forest restoration: structure, process, and precision, Ecological Applications in press).

Work by National Forest Protection Alliance (NFPA) Board President, Mike Petersen and The Lands Council in Spokane, WA resulted in a Forest Service review indicating that logging is simply not needed to restore dry, western forests (Sand Ecosystem Blind Review, 1999). Unfortunately the agency refuses to acknowledge its own scientists or the American public’s desire to end logging on National Forests.

A perfect case in point is the Fort Valley Restoration Project outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. Arguably, years of mismanagement have left the forests in the Fort Valley area susceptible to large-scale wildfires with fuel levels that need to be reduced. The problem is that a consortium of timber interests, forestry professors, and even some well-intentioned conservation groups have proposed logging the area to restore it using an outdated, static model of pre-European forests.

The proposal is to cut and remove trees up to 16 inches across 100,000 acres of National Forest lands and then subject the area to controlled burns. However, the area supports populations of rare wildlife whose survival depends on these forests and further, it is in a zone of the Flagstaff watershed prone to flash floods. The ecological impacts of logging far outweigh the theoretical long-term benefits.

The Forest Service has already carried out several demonstration timber sales in the area. These demonstration timber sales serve to represent what logging formulas are available and how the resulting forest will appear. The results of these demonstration sales are adverse for wildlife habitat and visually unappealing. Because of the commercial incentive attached to these demonstration timber sales, the outcome resembles in many ways that of traditional logging operations.

The Fort Valley timber sale has become a focal point in the National Forest restoration debate. Should the Forest Service conduct commercial logging to "restore" our National Forests, or should proven methods that include prudent manipulation of fuels and controlled fire that concurrently protect water quality and wildlife be implemented?

All photos on this page are of the Fort Valley timber sale. Photos taken by Rene Voss of the John Muir Project on August 21, 2000.

Guided by the Santa Fe-based Forest Conservation Council, a coalition of NFPA member groups including the Flagstaff Activist Network among others, challenged the timber sale and requested that the logging alternative be compared to a restoration alternative that excluded commercial timber harvest. The Forest Service is required to do so by law.

Stonewalled for months, the groups filed a successful lawsuit in federal district court. The NFPA member groups alleged that the Forest Service designed the project in a manner that may actually increase fire danger.

Specifically the suit claims that the Forest Service ignored evidence, which indicates that logging often increases–rather than decreases–the risk of fire through changes in microclimate and accumulation of logging debris. The suit also claims that the Forest Service failed to protect sensitive species.

In addition, the suit charges that the Forest Service failed to complete an environmental impact statement addressing the cumulative effects of its logging, ignored non-logging alternatives, and failed to circulate a revised environmental assessment for public comment.

To avoid a prolonged lawsuit and confront these valid issues, the Forest Service settled the lawsuit out of court admitting they should have solicited further input. The organizations intend to request again that the Forest Service develop a plan that would protect wildlife habitat, water quality, water flow, and property while avoiding commercial timber harvest.

Ironically, the Forest Service is carrying out just such non-logging restoration projects elsewhere on the same National Forest, yet plainly refuses to entertain such a proposal in the Fort Valley area.

The Forest Service has carried out successful restoration and fire risk reduction projects throughout the west without the use of destructive commercial timber sales. Projects include Happy Jack Restoration in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest, Murderer’s Creek Fuel Reduction in Oregon’s Malhuer National Forest, and West Chicago Creek Aspen Restoration in Colorado’s Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest.

Logging in any form is simply not necessary to restore our National Forests, reduce the risk of forest fire or stop insect infestations. Most often logging exacerbates these situations.

Natural processes need to be cautiously reintroduced and employed on our National Forest lands as an economically and ecologically superior management tool. Until restoration on public lands is free of commodity production, our National Forests will continue to fall.