(CN) — The first update to an Oregon forest management plan in 22 years has reignited debate over the goal of forest management in the Pacific Northwest, once again pitting struggling rural economies against conservation advocates.
Seventeen counties in western Oregon and an association of logging groups say the Bureau of Land Management's refusal to log as much forest as is legally allowed is driving them to the brink of insolvency. The groups filed separate lawsuits in Federal Court in Washington on Friday, claiming the government illegally prioritizes environmental protection over logging.
And on Monday, a group of environmental advocacy groups piled on, claiming in federal court in Portland that the BLM and the Department of the Interior abandoned the previous, science-based management plan in favor of a plan that sacrifices riparian buffer zones for the sake of politics. And they say that violates several laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act.
Logging in Oregon ground to a halt in the wake of the 1990 listing of the spotted owl as endangered. The stalemate ended when then-President Bill Clinton brokered talks between loggers, environmentalists and the government that resulted in the 1993 Northwest Forest Plan.
On Friday, the BLM released its first update to the plan. It says its new resource management plan will protect nearly all the old-growth forest within the 2.1 million acres it manages while providing a reliable yield of timber revenue to help the economies of struggling rural counties.
The BLM manages millions of acres known as the O&C Lands in a checkerboard across the western half of Oregon. Congress put the land in the hands of the Oregon and California Railroad Company in the 1860s, but took it back in 1916 because the company was unable to sell all the land to settlers.
The O&C Act of 1937 directs the BLM to manage the O&C Lands as watersheds that regulate stream flow for salmon and as permanent timber production land for rural counties whose tax base is reduced by large swaths of federal land. The BLM must also comply with regulations under the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
Those opposing directives have created continuous controversy about how to manage the land. A 2008 effort to update the Northwest Forest Plan was shelved when it didn't pass an endangered species review.
BLM spokeswoman Sarah Levy defended the new plan, calling it the result of a painstaking effort to balance opposing interests.
"Our analysis shows that we can achieve job growth, more recreation and timber money for rural counties while also increasing the protections for fish and wildlife," Levy said in a phone interview.
But loggers, rural counties and environmentalists are all in agreement: the new plan won't work.
Environmentalists say it allows too much clear-cutting and strips away protection of stream-side buffers. Loggers and rural counties complain that the bureau's plan will only net roughly one-quarter of the amount of timber that could be sustainably produced each year.
But the real dispute is centered on the rural counties in western Oregon who say they are stymied by their inability to tax the majority of their land base because it is owned by the federal government.
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