April 28, 2000
The first few months of the new year have been very busy ones for EPIC, as we work toward comprehensive logging reform on a number of related fronts. We hope to successfully meet the immense challenges ahead of us through a combination of new litigation and sustained public advocacy. EPIC and nearly twenty other conservation, Native American and fisheries organizations filed a sweeping new federal lawsuit on March 1, charging the California Department of Forestry (CDF) and other state officials with violating the Endangered Species Act by approving logging plans that harm Coho salmon. Substantive hearings in the case should begin shortly. In the meantime, we?re still pursuing a challenge to Pacific Lumber Company?s Sustained Yield Plan, a 120-year forest liquidation plan prepared as part of the Headwaters Forest deal.
EPIC and Sierra Club also filed suit against CDF?s approval of a ?minor amendment? that would allow Pacific Lumber to log the ?Hole in the Headwaters? logging plan, surrounded by the new Headwaters Preserve along the South Fork Elk River, without further public or environmental review. We?ve also gone to court seeking an Endangered Species Act listing for the Southern torrent salamander, a rare amphibian that thrives in the small, cold streams occuring mainly in old-growth forests. Finally, two potentially precedent-setting cases involving Habitat Conservation Plans (permits that allow corporations to kill endangered species) are currently under review by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and could be decided at any time.
The California Board of Forestry, influenced by the increasingly timber-friendly Davis Administration, eviscerated and then adopted a package of nearly negligible improvements to the state?s logging rules on March 15. Two weeks later, the Board added a ?sunset clause? to the package, ensuring that these weak rules will expire on December 31. In the meantime, the logging industry is working with CDF to craft a so-called ?watershed analysis? process that will supposedly replace the generic, landscape-wide rules currently in effect with ?site-specific? logging prescriptions based on watershed conditions. Unless sound science, public scrutiny and an open agency process are brought to bear on watershed analysis, the industry could end up with carte blanche to regulate its own activities, relying on proprietary methods and secret data. In short, this is a critical time for forestry in California. We have serious choices to make: we can either meaningfully incorporate watershed science into logging plans or turn back the clock 30 years to a time when corporate foresters made up their own rules. Public involvement in the process this summer will be crucial to a positive outcome, as will passage of Assembly Bill 717, authored by Santa Cruz Assembly Member Fred Keeley. The bill, which will be heard in the Senate Natural Resources Committee on April 11, sets scientific and public review standards for watershed analysis that should make the process far more sound.
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2000