Stable logging levels are a myth

WASHINGTON----Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas told Congress on Thursday it is impossible to promise the kind of predictable, stable logging levels some Western Republicans want on national forests.

"The idea of stability -- absolute predictable stability -- is a myth," Thomas said in response to several senators who are demanding better performance in the agency's timber harvest program. The ever-changing environmental, social, and political climate prevents the service from offering anything more than it best estimate of the potential harvest on any given forest in any given year or series of years, he said.

"We are one lawsuit away from a big change all the time," Thomas told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests and public lands. "We are one budget cycle away, one hurricane away on a particular forest, one forest fire away, one spruce budworm outbreak away. We are one election away. There are many, many things that don't produce stability," he said.

Republican Sens. Larry Craig of Idaho, Frank Murkowski of Alaska, and Craig Thomas of Wyoming said they want more trees cut and a better accounting of the logging program, which dipped last year to its lowest production level since 1950. Last year the Forest Service sold only 1.3 billion board feet of the 1.7 billion board feet of salvage timber planned for sale and only 1.5 billion board feet of the 2.5 billion board feet of live green timber planned for sale, Murkowski said.

"In the past, the allowable sale quantity in your forest plan was something people depended upon and planned around," said Murkowski, chairman of the full committee. "The public deserves a clear understanding -- not just rhetoric -- about what they can expect from you," he said. "These are real people."

James Lyons, agriculture undersecretary for the environment and natural resources, said the Forest Service moved away from the practice of setting an allowable sale quantity (ASQ) on individual forests because "it created false expectations."

"The ASQ is not now nor was it ever intended to be a target. It is a measure of capability. We need to stay away from false measurements of performance," he told the panel Thursday.

But Craig, chairman of the subcommittee, said the ASQs were established as part of the forest planning process developed under the National Forest Management Act about 20 years ago, "one of the most expensive land-use reviews ever undertaken in this country. An awful lot of goal setters in the private sector get fired if they don't meet their goals," he told Lyons.

Thomas said scientists have a different perspective on the forests than they did 20 years ago.

"Nobody had ever tried a land-use plan of this scale," he said. "I think we now find the world a bit more of an uncertain place than we did in the beginning. One of the things I think we naïvely assumed going in was that if we had adequate public input we would all reason together and come up with a conclusion with which we should agree," Thomas said. "Public input has not been the panacea of coming to a consensus that we hoped."