Salvage Skirmishes

In 1994, the Alaska Wilderness and Recreation Tourism Association (AWRTA) sued the U.S. Forest Service to halt the sale of 282 million board feet of timber in the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.

The group claimed it filed the suit because the members of its association consist largely of business representatives who claim logging in the Tongass is hurting the tourism industry. These businesses include many family-owned wildnerness supply shops, fishing charters, restaurants and lodges.

But on March 1 of this year, AWRTA agreed to settle the lawsuit, allowing the Forest Service to immediately release 105 million board feet of timber for sale.

Led by Louisiana-Pacific/Ketchikan, timber companies are now trying to to have the settlement blocked, AWRTA executive director Steven Behnke said.

AWRTA claims that LPK and the Alaska Forest Association -- a timber industry group -- don't like the settlement because it is their intention to win control of the Tongass timber sales without consideration to local environmental and economic interests.

LPK would like the timber sales for itself, Behnke said, because 85 percent of the timber released from the settlement will go to local timber companies and only 13 percent to LPK.

Last month two watchdog groups charged officials of the U.S. Forest Service with obstructing an internal investigation that sought to determine if Weyerhaeuser Co. illegally cut down valuable timber worth millions of dollars in national forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The Forest Service is accused of failing to protect thousands of acres of national forest land from illegal logging and allowing such operations to continue without legal intervention required by law.

Furthermore, the 24-page report, released jointly by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Government Accountability Project, contends that forestry officials warned Weyerhauser employees that there was an on-going investigation by the agency into their logging practices.

The two groups are made up of former members of a special task force created by the Forest Service in 1991 to determine if companies that held contracts with the agency committed large-scale timber thefts in national forests.

After Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas' sudden cancellation of the probe last year, task force members organized to draw public attention to the agency's apparent unwillingness to hold timber companies accountable for the alleged thefts.

Frank Mendizabal, a spokesperson for Weyerhauser Co., told the Associated Press recently: "We operate this company in a legal manner at all times. Period."

The Forest Service refused to comment on the case Friday.

The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance (NWEA), a Washington state based conservation group, has been trying to stop the scheduled salvage logging of the state's Thunder Mountain Area, but with little success.

The NWEA offered the highest bid for a contract to purchase approximately 3.5 million board feet of mostly fire damaged timber in the area last December, offering to pay nearly $30,000 for 275 acres -- about $8.25 per thousand board feet of timber.

The group stated its intention to leave the forest standing and put it into a permanent preservation trust to keep it from ever being logged.

But the bid was rejected by supervisors of the Okanogan National Forest in March because they said the land was slated for clear cutting in the salvage contract. Environmental groups, the supervisors decided, were not qualified to bid on the contract with the plan to preserve the forest.

Mitch Friedman, NWEA's executive director, said the decision doesn't make sense because it was a "win-win solution for everybody."

Friedman said the Forest Service has already spent more than $300,000 to prepare Thunder Mountain for auction and will almost surely spend at least that amount to officiate the contract, build roads into the forest and conduct environmental assessment reports.