Order bars 170 sales of timber in region

A federal judge's injunction says harvests and other activities violate the Northwest Forest Plan

Michael Milstein / Oregonian 9dec00

A federal judge on Friday blocked more than 170 federal timber sales, along with dozens of road and trail projects, in Western Oregon, Washington and Northern California after finding that they pose immediate harm to threatened and endangered fish.

A sweeping injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle halts both planned timber sales and others where logging already is under way in federal forests throughout the Cascades and westward to the Coast Range. It also suspends road and trail maintenance, bridge construction, prescribed fires and other projects approved under the same biological reviews as the timber sales.

An appeals court ruling that could overturn the injunction and an earlier decision by Rothstein is expected within the next few months.

Because Rothstein's Friday decision applies to nine national forests and five U.S. Bureau of Land Management districts, however, it looms as perhaps the broadest regional suspension of timber harvests since another judge in 1992 halted logging in many forests to protect the northern spotted owl.

It also declares that federal agencies have not complied with the mandates of the Northwest Forest Plan, President Clinton's 1993 attempt to protect threatened species and sustain the logging industry.

"It's going to stop a lot of timber sales, but it also shows the extent to which we have to repair the federal logging program," said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the conservation groups that had sought the injunction. "They have to put away the rubberstamp they have been using to approve logging and get out the magnifying glass to make sure they're not harming protected species."

Friday's injunction expands on a ruling Rothstein handed down in 1999 curtailing cutting in Oregon's Umpqua River Basin. In both cases, the judge found that National Marine Fisheries Service biologists had approved logging in federal forests on such a wide scale that they overlooked how individual projects threaten protected fish.

"There is a discrete and immediate harm posed" to threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead when federal foresters proceed with logging based on opinions "that fail to properly assess the potential environmental harm associated with such forestry actions," Rothstein wrote in Friday's ruling.

The Endangered Species Act requires the U.S. Forest Service and BLM to obtain clearance from the National Marine Fisheries Service before permitting timber sales that may affect protected fish. Because the judge has invalidated that clearance, however, the agencies cannot legally proceed with logging plans in drainages where threatened fish dwell.

Federal agencies could not immediately say just how much lumber the suspended timber sales involve. But federal officials said it probably would total in the hundreds of millions of board feet, further depressing the already declining timber yields from federal lands in the Northwest.

"This doesn't represent our entire timber program, but it is certainly a big chunk of it," said Rex Holloway, a Forest Service spokesman.

Rothstein also found that the fisheries service had not made sure forest managers were protecting streamside zones known to be important to fish.

Federal attorneys have appealed Rothstein's earlier ruling on the Umpqua Basin to a federal court in San Francisco, which, in a decision expected soon, could overturn both that earlier ruling and Friday's injunction. If the San Francisco court upholds her earlier ruling, though, that ruling likely would apply not only to the Umpqua River Basin but also to most federal forests covered in the 1993 Northwest Forest Plan.

Affected forests
Those include the Mount Hood, Umpqua, Siuslaw, Siskiyou and Rogue River national forests in Oregon; the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington; and the Klamath, Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers National Forest in California. Those Western forests have long been among the Northwest's biggest producers of federal timber.

If the appeals court sides with Rothstein, the fisheries service would have to re-examine each individual timber sale to make sure it would not harm fish, a process that could be expensive and time consuming, and limit timber yields.

"It could turn out to be a bump in the road, or it could turn out to be a major realignment of the way logging is carried out on public lands, depending on the appeals court," said Jan Hasselman of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which had sought the injunction on behalf of conservation groups.

Both timber industry and conservation groups tried to distinguish Friday's ruling from the 1992 decision that halted logging to safeguard the spotted owl, capping a timber crisis that had consumed the region for years and led to the Northwest Forest Plan.

Authority questioned
Chris West of the American Forest Resources Council in Portland questioned whether Rothstein has authority to halt logging on federal forests, because her ruling applied only to the fisheries service. Land management agencies would be "going overboard" if they suspended logging because of the injunction, he said.

"To say this has the effect of stopping all activity is extreme, because it shouldn't," he said.

Forest activists also said the ruling would not drop timber sales entirely but should put them on hold until federal agencies fully weigh their threats to protected species.

"This is not a train wreck, and it doesn't mean you cannot have timber management going on," Hasselman said. "The problem is the agencies ignored their obligation to make sure they are not harming species that are already in trouble."

Seattle-based Earthjustice sought the injunction on behalf of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, Umpqua Watersheds and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, based in Sacramento, Calif.

You can reach Michael Milstein at 503-294-7689 or by e-mail at michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com

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