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THROUGH THE WOODS
June 19, 1998
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript
The U.S. Forest Service plans to stop building roads in roadless areas of some national forests. What effects will these changes have on the logging industry? Tom Bearden reports.
TOM BEARDEN: Timber is the economic heart and soul of Cascade, Idaho. People have been turning trees into lumber around here for nearly a century. But now they're desperately afraid that the government is deliberately trying to put them out of business. Later this summer the US Forest Service plans to stop building new roads in presently road-less areas of the national forests.
Without those roads, loggers say they won't be able to harvest timber in those areas. Many people in Cascade think the moratorium is really just the beginning of a process that will eventually lock up the national forests and deprive them of the steady supply of timber they depend on to make a living. So recently they shut their town down in a symbolic 18-minute protest, saying that's what will happen to the town permanently if the 18-month moratorium is implemented.
REP. HELEN CHENOWETH, (R), Ohio: I would have crawled up here on my hands and knees on cracked glass to be with you, because this is-(cheers)-
TOM BEARDEN: Many of the state's political leaders were there to show their support, including Rep. Helen Chenoweth.
REP. HELEN CHENOWETH: And last night I saw a Forest Service spokesman come on the air and say, they just need to understand that all we're doing is asking for a time-out for 18 months for us to get our plan together. And I thought to myself, how many paychecks have you lost because you had to face being out of work? They don't.
TOM BEARDEN: But the Forest Service says the moratorium provides a badly needed chance to re-evaluate the entire road network. The agency says it has more existing roads than it has money to repair them. Some are eroding due to lack of maintenance, spilling sediment into streams, and killing fish. Other thoroughfares need upgrading to keep up with ever larger crowds of visitors who flock to the forest for recreation. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck says the moratorium will give the agency time to assess all of that.
MIKE DOMBECK, US Forest Service Chief: When you have 373,000 miles of roads of which 60 percent were unable to maintain to a level of standard the standards that they were designed for both environmental and safety problems, it's just time to step back and reassess the issue.
TOM BEARDEN: Dombeck says the moratorium doesn't mean holding any permitted activity in the road-less areas; it just gives the agency a chance to balance competing needs.
MIKE DOMBECK: What are the needs? What are the demands? Where are people wanting to go camping, hunting, fishing? What are the local needs of the people that live within the national forests? And then develop a policy based upon the best science to meet those needs.
TOM BEARDEN: But Jack Lamb, who runs the town's sawmill, thinks there's another agenda.
JACK LAMB, Boise-Cascade Sawmill: I really do not believe that the road-less moratorium is about taking an 18-month time-out to figure something out. I mean, I can't take an 18-month time-out here to figure something out in this sawmill. The guy that owns the restaurant downtown can't take an 18-month time-out to figure that out. I don't think we needed 18 months time-out, and I think what we have going on is another mechanism by which we'll take the whole nother big chunk of land, scatter it all over the place, and incorporate that into wilderness area. And I don't think that's the way to manage the forest.
TOM BEARDEN: Wilderness designation removes land from being logged and prohibits all motorized recreational uses. Environmentalists say protecting these areas is vital to preserving 300-year-old trees and rare wildlife habitats. Almost 8 percent of Idaho is already designated as wilderness, and Cascade is afraid the moratorium is an excuse to add millions of acres to that total.
Without timber to cut, the sawmill would be forced to close. But that's where the best paying jobs in town are. Rancher and County Commissioner Phil Davis says if the mill shuts down, the town would never be able to replace the lost tax revenues. Currently that's about $2 million a year.
PHIL DAVIS, County Commissioner: That is about what our property tax is in this county. So basically, we would have to try and double the property taxes to make up for-if we supplied the same services that we're supplying today. That can't be done.
TOM BEARDEN: Those services include funding for schools. Many in Cascade worry the schools will suffer severe cutbacks if the timber-related revenue is reduced. It's a fear that Idaho Senator Larry Craig says other small towns share.
SEN. LARRY CRAIG, (R), Idaho: I've visited with all 12 county superintendents of schools in the last month, and some of them are really considering four-day weeks, so there could be a lot of kids that won't go to school next year, at least for the full school program, and a lot of moms and dads that won't be able to bring food home to the table.
JOHN McCARTHY, Idaho Conservation League: I think that people in Cascade have a real set of problems. I don't diminish their problems. I don't dismiss their problems.
TOM BEARDEN: John McCarthy is the executive director of the Idaho Conservation League. He says the timber era has passed and that change is inevitable.
JOHN McCARTHY: Wilderness is Idaho's future, and the next century what Idaho is going to be known for us microchips and wilderness. Idaho's biggest employer is microchips. It's not in agriculture; it's not in timber; it's not in mining. And the town will certainly change. The town would change. Their kids will come down to Boise and make 20 to 30 dollars an hour doing electronic chips.
TOM BEARDEN: And McCarthy says Cascade will be able to thrive on a growing tourist business. Last year alone tourism increased 7 percent in Idaho and brought $2 billion into the state, but Cascade residents argue that tourism industry jobs will never generate the kind of salaries that the timber industry does.
PHIL DAVIS: The down side to strictly tourism is the jobs do not pay as much. Also, the services that we have to provide, that the county has to provide, the hospital, the jail, the prosecutor, these kind of things are all-the more tourism you have, the more services you have to supply. And they don't have the tax base to pick up what it takes to supply them. So when those people come to visit us, sometimes it's a net loss to us.
TOM BEARDEN: Aside from the economic arguments that Cascade residents make against the moratorium, they also argue that ultimately the new policy will be bad for the forests. They point to massive forest fires like this one as evidence the forest must be carefully managed to be healthy. Over the past decade huge fires have swept across the state. They've been intensely hot fires, because there was a lot of underbrush or fuel on the ground as a result of a century of fire suppression efforts by the Forest Service.
The fires were so hot that all the trees were destroyed, and in some places the ground was literally sterilized. Loggers advocate thinning the forest by harvesting timber to avoid those devastating fires. But thinning costs money. The moratorium on new roads would force thinning to be carried out by helicopter, a much more expensive proposition. Boise National Forest Supervisor David Rittenhouse explains.
DAVID RITTENHOUSE, Boise National Forest Supervisor: It's pretty easy to do this and thin these smaller diameter trees when you're right next to the road, but when you get farther back, and you have to deal with helicopter logging, the cost and the economic viability of the project becomes a little bit tougher to deal with. How we're going to provide these treatments is a big challenge that we still have ahead of us to sort out.
JOHN McCARTHY: I say instead of subsidizing logging, let's subsidize land protection; let's subsidize land treatment; let's go ahead and give the forest what it needs, not give the timber corporations what they demand, which is what we've done for the last twenty/thirty years. And, where has that gotten us?
TOM BEARDEN: In the end, Republican Senator Craig says the moratorium isn't about science or timber health or the preservation or loss of jobs or lifestyle. He says it's about politics.
SEN. LARRY CRAIG: I sat down six months ago with Mike Dombeck and said, you know, Mike, let's work this problem out on a bipartisan basis. This administration refused. They wanted to time it for the '98 elections. This is a very loud political statement on their part and a very damaging action for the state and other public land states.
TOM BEARDEN: Officials at the Forest Service deny the moratorium is about politics. They say it's about bringing back a balance to these public lands of many uses.
MIKE DOMBECK: The timber harvest shouldn't be dominant. It should be on an equal plane with recreation concerns, with wildlife concerns, hunting, fishing, protecting our cultural heritage. And if we work within that philosophical framework of working within the limits of the land, everybody benefits. And that's what the American public is asking us to do. The reason that we've been involved in some of the level of controversy that we have is because that shift is occurring and change is occurring. And change is always difficult to deal with.
TOM BEARDEN: Meanwhile, the Idaho congressional delegation promises to take a hard look at the Forest Service's budget when it comes before Congress later this summer, about the same time the moratorium takes effect.
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