GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The U.S. Forest Service lost more than $9 million by logging trees burned in the massive 2002 Biscuit fire in southwestern Oregon, a review coordinated by the World Wildlife Fund has found.
The conclusion, derived from an analysis by a retired forest policy expert for the Congressional Research Service, comes on the heels of a study out of Oregon State University that found salvage logging in the Biscuit fire area killed most of the seedlings that had generated naturally, and increased fire danger in the short term.
“This is a lose-lose, economically and ecologically speaking,” said Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund and lead author of the report, “The Facts and Myths of Post-Fire Management: A Case study of the Biscuit Fire, Southwest Oregon.”
“If Congress continues to pursue salvage logging legislation, we could see the Biscuit case played out in other places around the nation.”
The Biscuit report was prepared as part of the national debate over how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of acres of national forests that burn every year. Conservationists are gearing up for a battle over a bill introduced by U.S. Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Brian Baird, D-Wash., that would expedite environmental analyses of burned national forests to speed decisions on whether to log the dead trees.
The report cited an analysis by Robert Wolf, a respected forest policy analyst who died last month. Wolf calculated that if the Forest Service got an average price of $153 per thousand board feet of lumber, it would lose about $1,666 per acre logging burned trees in the Biscuit fire area.
The report calculated that the actual average price of $74.58 per thousand board feet produced losses of about $13 million on the 3,800 acres that have been logged. Subtracting the $3.7 million of income from logging trees along roads in danger of falling, which fetched $276 per thousand board feet, the net loss was $9.3 million.
Last fall, the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute estimated that the overall Forest Service timber program, including green trees, had lost about $6.6 billion since 1997.
Jim Golden, deputy Northwest regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service, did not dispute the conclusions of the Biscuit report. But he said the economic results would have been much better if the Forest Service had been able to sell the burned timber one year after the fire, rather than three years, by which time a lot of it had been lost to rot, particularly the smaller trees.
“The economics of these projects vary widely,” Golden said. “We don’t always expect to make a profit. Sometimes what we are trying to do is minimize your losses when you consider the broader restoration bill you are faced with after some of these catastrophic fires.
“If we have an opportunity where we can go out and do a post-fire logging operation that is sensitive to environmental values and can recover value of the burned timber, we expect that to go forward.”
The Forest Service was ready to go with the environmental analysis two years after the fire, but had to wait another season when it decided to evaluate a proposal to greatly expand the logging, going into controversial old-growth reserves and roadless areas.
Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, added that the Forest Service would have spent a lot of money on restoration work even if nothing had been logged.
“We have decades and decades of examples where timely salvage restoration efforts make not only good economic sense, but good environmental sense,” West said.
“That’s why Indian tribes, private landowners and state governments do exactly that. It’s only the federal government that is caught in this unfortunate lengthy process that leads to delayed restoration efforts.”
Ernie Niemi, an economist for ECONorthwest in Eugene who reviewed the draft report, had done his own analysis of the prospects for salvage logging on the Biscuit fire in 2004 and found it almost impossible to get a clear picture of the cost to taxpayers due to the incredibly convoluted accounting practices used by the Forest Service.
Niemie said he also used Wolf’s estimates to reach his conclusions that logging burned trees on the Biscuit fire would only be profitable if harvest was done on a small scale and close to existing roads.
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