Kibosh on the Kaibab
Way out there in the Grand Canyon Game Preserve, a land inhabited by the Mexican spotted owl, the northern goshawk, and the Kaibab squirrel, the U.S. Forest Service planned to burn and log 17,000 acres of forest. The Bush administration's "Healthy Forest" plan defends such projects as necessary to protect communities from catastrophic fire. Only in this case, the nearest community is 48 miles away, and the East Rim Timber Sale on the Kaibab National Forest targeted old-growth, fire-resistant trees.The Forest Service yanked the sale on Tuesday, saying that its surveys on spotted owls and goshawks in the region had gotten too dusty and would have to be updated. Cathie Schmidlin of the Kaibab National Forest says the agency doesn't know what it's going to do next.
Perhaps it will address the concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who contend that the project would have logged thousands of old-growth trees while offering little fire-reduction benefit. The government triumphed in the first round when a federal judge ruled in its favor, but the case has been appealed by the environmental groups.
Schmidlin said the decision to withdraw the logging plan had nothing to do with the lawsuit.
2 Comments:
I'm confused by the Club's rhetoric on this project -- given that East Rim was proposed and developed during the Clinton Administration, how could a) it be a Bush Administration plot, and b) the Healthy Forest Initiative have anything to do with it?
Thanks for your comment. I talked to a couple of our legal-team members who are involved in the Kaibab lawsuit, and here's what they said:
The timber sale on the Kaibab National Forest was first proposed in 1994, during the Clinton administration. It was revised and proposed again in 1997. But the 2001 Scoping Notice for the harvest plan noted that the revised version now included logging in old-growth areas. It was the Forest Service under the Bush administration that exanded the scope of the logging.
More to the point, the Sierra Club certainly challenged logging projects proposed under the Clinton administration. However, the Bush administration has been far more aggressive in logging national forests, including remote areas of the backcountry--as well as in roadless areas that Clinton tried to protect. The Bush administration says it wants to protect communities from fire, but instead of proposing brush clearing and thinning near communities that have asked for help, the plans include logging old-growth areas far removed from civilization.
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