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Protecting and restoring our Olympic forest
and aquatic ecosystems
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Plan for Jackson Timber Sale Improves
by Jim Scarborough
Saturday, September 15, 2007
The U.S. Forest Service has published a 231-page environmental assessment (EA) for the “Jackson Thinning” timber sale between Quilcene and Brinnon. OFCO has been monitoring this controversial proposal since its roll-out in March 2005, at which time it landed with a distinct thud. With the sale's original iteration including logging on the recreational mecca of Mount Walker and the lovely viewshed slope of Mount Turner above Hood Canal, public condemnation was swift.
A Forest Service-sponsored field trip in '05 was attended by 28 skeptical folks made up of local residents, conservation organizations, and government agencies. A short time later, the Forest Service received a petition from 144 individuals opposing the sale, which simultaneously began to attract the interest of a direct action group centered in Olympia.
photo by Connie Gallant
The public ire directed at the Jackson sale proposal had much to do with its highly visible and visited location along Highway 101, as well as the presence of many neighbors who value the unbroken expanse of green rising above their back doors. The area's popularity and accessibility has much to do with its designation as “scenic” in Olympic National Forest's 1990 Land and Resource Management Plan. Also tripping the alarms, however, was Jackson's focus on logging much older forest than had been seen in any Olympic National Forest timber sale since the bitterly contested “salvage rider” old-growth logging of the mid-1990s. Extensive swaths of naturally regenerated forest dating from fires in the late 1800s blanket the area, particularly on mounts Walker and Turner. The latter peak also sports remnant legacy trees over three hundred years of age.
The Forest Service packages each and every timber sale these days in the guise of “accelerating” the development of old-growth conditions. Relying primarily on Oregon-based research in dryer, warmer forests, the supposition that thinning somehow improves maturing (i.e., greater than 50 years of age) second-growth forests has been hotly debated. But in the case of the Jackson sale, it was clear from the get-go this stated justification was more window dressing than substance. The forest of mounts Walker and Turner is wholly natural and just a few decades away from achieving genuine old-growth status all on its own. Like generations of trees before, much of this forest has sprung up nicely from a stand-replacement fire, an infrequent but typical disturbance phenomenon in this unique, maritime-influenced part of the Olympic rainshadow.
As Teddy Roosevelt once said about another special place: “Keep this great wonder as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” We believe the winds, rain and sun should continue to have their way on the deep forest cloaking Mount Walker and Mount Turner. The elements there need no help from us.
Consequently, we were mostly pleased to receive the Jackson EA in late August, which eliminates the proposed logging units in Mount Turner's ample marbled murrelet habitat, and appears to also be backing away from cutting on Mount Walker. Our sense is the local community will simply not allow Walker to be subjected to the chainsaw – a view District Ranger Dean Yoshina appears to share in his introductory letter to the EA, where he states his preference for a “modified” Alternative B, which includes no Walker units.
On the downside, though, Mr. Yoshina desires to keep “Unit 6” near Rocky Brook Falls in the sale. Unit 6 is in a Late Successional Reserve, where the forest is ostensibly managed for the maintenance and/or development of old-growth characteristics, with no silvicultural activity allowed in forest over 80 years of age. Whereas the Forest Service views Unit 6 as younger than this age limit, however, field visits by OFCO have in fact revealed three age classes of trees intermixed there – two of which are well over 80 years. Given that the Jackson sale's stated purpose and need revolves around moving targeted stands toward older forest conditions (putting aside for a moment the improbability of logging achieving anything of the sort), it makes little sense to retain Unit 6, which already features abundant older-forest attributes. Even without Unit 6, Mr. Yoshina's preferred Alternative B would still log 1,606 acres, which is surely enough to feed the Bush administration's timber beasts for awhile.
As feared, haul road construction still plagues this sale, too – a perennial issue the Forest Service is either unable or unwilling to fully come to grips with in an age of degraded watersheds, depressed salmon stocks, and extraordinary sums of public monies being expended to help an ailing Puget Sound. 5.5 miles of new road construction on both virgin alignments and old, vegetated grades would occur even with Alternative B, which is unacceptable. Much of this would occur in a Late Successional Reserve, where the Northwest Forest Plan makes clear that road construction “generally is not recommended.” Helpfully, though, the Forest Service does include an Alternative C in the Jackson EA that would entail less than a mile of new road construction, but which includes logging on Mount Walker with helicopters (a certain no-go).
OFCO will be submitting formal comments to the Forest Service on the Jackson sale and encourages you to do the same. We would be willing to accept a “hybrid” sale design, joining Alternative B's elimination of the Mount Walker units (and minus the “modified” B's Unit 6) with Alternative C's scaling back of harmful road construction.
Please send your comments at the earliest opportunity to:
Forest Supervisor Dale Hom
c/o Yewah Lau
Hood Canal Ranger District
P.O. Box 280
Quilcene, WA 98376
Or via the following email address:
comments-pacificnorthwest-olympic-hoodcanal@fs.fed.us.
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