Seattle, WA - The Bush
administration has now completed the last stage of
a comprehensive plan demanded by the timber
industry to increase logging in Northwest forests.
At the end of 2002, the timber industry insisted
that the administration triple logging in the
Northwest and provided a blueprint for doing so.
The administration has given in to each and every
one of the industry’s demands, most recently
weakening rules designed to protect salmon and
clean water and sidestepping both science and the
law to do so.
With the Bush administration ignoring the
counsel of the government’s own scientists,
conservation and fishing groups are relying on the
federal courts to stop this renewed assault on the
Northwest’s remaining salmon streams and old
growth forests. Today Earthjustice filed suit on
behalf commercial fishing and conservation
organizations to protect the region’s watersheds
by reinstating scientifically supported logging
rules.
“The administration is defying the science and
the law to do the bidding of the timber industry,
” stated Patti Goldman of Earthjustice. “It’s bad
science; it’s bad law; and it’s bad policy.”
The rules are known as the Aquatic Conservation
Strategy, an important component of the region’s
Northwest Forest Plan. Their aim was to protect
salmon and clean water by requiring that the
government reduce the effects of logging
operations on the health of rivers and streams.
In March, the Bush administration rewrote the
rules for logging around streams, but in doing so,
ignored an extensive body of science supporting
the need for better safeguards for salmon. In
fact, when key scientists who were instrumental in
the development of the ACS expressed opposition to
the changes, the administration ignored their
views.
“The team of scientists that designed the plan
clearly intended that the agencies must find that
before logging could occur the land manager must
show how each project was consistent with the
Aquatic Conservation Strategy. This rule change
goes in the wrong direction,” states Dr. Robert
Ziemer, one of the architects of the 1994
Northwest Forest Plan. Ziemer warns that under the
Bush plan serious erosion and degradation of
aquatic habitat might go undetected until the
damage to streams is already done.
This is just the latest example of scientists
expressing concerns about the Bush administration
weakening rules that protect salmon and forests in
the Northwest.
In a policy reversal recently leaked to the
press, the administration favors counting hatchery
fish for the purposes of the Endangered Species
Act to determine whether salmon stocks are
imperiled. “This is a direct political decision,
made by political people to go against the
science,” said Dr. Ransom A. Myers, a fisheries
biologist who was on a government panel to guide
salmon policy. The panel’s recommendations were
rejected for a policy more favorable to industry
groups fighting land restrictions, Dr. Myers and
other panel members have said.
This month, the Fish and Wildlife Service
delayed the results of its status review for the
marbled murrelet, an old-growth reliant seabird,
after an independent group of scientists found
that its populations are in serious decline.
Because this is not the answer that the timber
industry wanted, it is now publicly questioning
both the science and the integrity of the
scientists. Although the Service had seemed ready
to issue its status review determination by an
April deadline, at the last minute, the
announcement was delayed without explanation.
“These new rules will do serious damage to the
region’s last, best salmon habitat,” said Glen
Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of
Fishermen’s Associations. “Now the Administration
will no longer have to actually assess or prevent
damage done to salmon-bearing streams by excessive
or poorly planned logging – or even really care.
This new ‘don't ask, don’t know’ rule just
institutionalizes scientific ignorance as an
official government policy. This is all about
greed and pay off to the timber industry, not
about biology.”
“The Aquatic Conservation Strategy protects
most of the best salmon habitat that remains in
the Northwest, and repealing it only makes the
salmon’s problems worse,” stated David Bayles of
Pacific Rivers Council. “This administration talks
about salmon recovery, then proposes to destroy
their habitat. Looks like hypocrisy to me.”
The Bush administration is making these changes
in response to an intense lobbying campaign by the
timber industry. The administration not only
agreed to weaken the ACS, it also has proceeded to
dismantle other elements of the Northwest Forest
Plan in exactly the way urged by the industry,
primarily using backroom lawsuit settlements. The
administration has already eliminated a program to
protect old-growth dependent species and is
revisiting protections for the northern spotted
owl and murrelet, both of which make their home in
old growth forests.
“The politicians in Washington, D.C., are
reversing progress and going back to the days of
the Northwest timber wars,” observed Doug Heiken
of Oregon Natural Resources Council. “There is
broad public support for helping our forests,
streams, and communities by investing in
restoration of damaged public lands, but the Bush
administration is moving away from the public
consensus by trying to increase old-growth logging
and harming salmon streams.”
Perhaps more disturbing, the administration has
also appointed Mark Rutzick as a senior
governmental adviser with responsibility for
protecting Pacific salmon. Rutzick is the former
timber industry attorney who wrote the plan to
dismantle forest protections now being implemented
by the administration. In 2001, while still an
industry lawyer, Rutzick also wrote a memorandum
praising the use of hatchery fish to restore
salmon runs; the government’s new approach closely
follows Rutzick’s prescription.
In the lawsuit filed today, Earthjustice
represents Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s
Associations, Institute for Fisheries Resources,
Oregon Natural Resources Council, Pacific Rivers
Council, The Wilderness Society, Umpqua
Watersheds, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center,
Siskiyou Regional Educational Project, Northwest
Ecosystem Alliance, and Klamath Forest Alliance.
