Suit filed over old-growth protections

Associated Press

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the federal government’s latest effort to set up guidelines for protecting plants and wildlife while logging in old-growth forests.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the lawsuit challenges changes made a year ago to what are known as survey and manage guidelines in the Northwest Forest Plan, which mandate checking for certain plants and animals before logging in old growth.

It follows a lawsuit filed by the timber industry in U.S. District Court in Eugene last month that challenges the same set of guidelines in hopes of increasing the timber output of federal lands.

Put in place in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan sharply reduced logging on federal lands west of the Cascades in Washington, Oregon and Northern California after environmentalists won a lawsuit to protect habitat for the northern spotted owl, a threatened species.

The plan was supposed to offer a reliable, though much smaller, amount of timber each year, but those targets have never been met. The survey and manage guidelines were added to protect a long list of plants and wildlife, including snails, mushrooms, lichens and mosses, that depend on old-growth forest.

The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management violated the law when they removed 72 species from the list of those that must be checked for under the Northwest Forest Plan.

"That breaks a promise in the Northwest Forest Plan that logging be sensitive to the needs of wildlife," said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

The lawsuit also alleges that the government failed to consider concentrating on restoration work in second growth forests rather than cutting in old growth.

"This would solve their problems," said Heiken. "They wouldn’t have to survey because they wouldn’t be in old growth habitat. They refused to consider that alternative at all. That’s a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act."

Forest Service spokesman Rex Holloway said the agency could not comment on pending litigation, but acknowledged that it was trying to offer more timber for sale, including old growth, while complying with the demands of the latest court rulings won by environmentalists.

The sales are all planned in what is known as matrix lands, the 15 percent of lands covered by the Northwest Forest Plan where logging is allowed for commercial reasons, Holloway said.

Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, suggested the environmentalists’ lawsuit was a response to the one filed last month by the Douglas Timber Operators. It argues that Congress never intended the Northwest Forest Plan to protect species beyond those that are threatened or endangered.

"This looks like they’re trying to get our case nullified and moved to Seattle," West said, adding that the lawsuit is focused and based in Oregon. "To move to Seattle is clearly court shopping."