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Court halts Northwest log harvest From staff and wire reports SAN FRANCISCO - In a blow to the logging industry, a federal appeals panel blocked the harvest of thousands of acres of old-growth forest in the Umpqua Basin, ruling Thursday the federal government did not adequately address the plight of protected salmon. The sweeping decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding an earlier ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle may also halt proposed logging of hundreds of thousands of acres throughout California, Oregon and Washington state - all idled pending the panel's ruling. "This could have implications on our sales here in Southwest Oregon," said Don Ferguson, spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management's Medford District. The agency won't know the entire ramifications until it studies Thursday's decision, he added. He was referring to some 45 timber sales in the Medford District as well as timber sales in the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests. The appellate panel said the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to adequately consider the harm logging would have on endangered salmon runs on 20 of 23 Umpqua National Forest and Bureau of Land Management parcels in the Umpqua Basin around Roseburg. Rothstein had stopped logging at the Umpqua sites on the same grounds as she did for the 180 timber sales throughout the Pacific Northwest, including those in Jackson and Josephine counties. The Umpqua basin, comprising those lands draining into the Umpqua River, is home to Umpqua cutthroat trout and threatened runs of coho salmon that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The suit by environmental and fishing groups contended endangered salmon runs in Oregon would be harmed by Douglas Timber Operators' logging. "This is a victory for salmon," said Patti Goldman, of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which sued the government on behalf of a host of environmental groups. Rothstein had ordered the timber sales halted until the government could show that fish would not be harmed and the sales complied with the Clinton administration's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan and the Endangered Species Act. Under the Act, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were required to get a "biological opinion" from the fisheries service before proceeding with any logging plans in the Umpqua River basin, where runs of cutthroat trout have dipped into single digits in some years. The court said the opinions did not address short-term effects on salmon, which run from the ocean to rivers to spawn, and the cumulative effects of all the proposed logging. Clinton's forest plan, in response to the federal listing of the northern spotted owl, is aimed at balancing the demand for timber from public lands with the need to protect habitat for dwindling populations of fish and wildlife. The plan, designed to an environmental management program for 24.5 million acres of federal forest lands throughout the range of the spotted owl, reduced logging in Northwest forests by about 80 percent from levels of the 1980s. The fisheries service issued biological opinions that logging in the Umpqua basin, which resides within the northern spotted owl's range, was not likely to jeopardize the cutthroat trout and the Oregon Coast coho salmon. The appeals panel found that the government provided no scientific evidence to support its conclusion that natural vegetation regrowth would adequately offset the degradation caused by the logging projects to ensure the continued existence of the fish in question. The court said that the government failed to consider short-term impacts and instead relied on the premise that the area would be restored in a decade, which ultimately would not affect anadromous fish, which migrate from the ocean to rivers to spawn. "This generous time frame ignores the life cycle and migration cycle of anadromous fish," the court said. "In 10 years, a badly degraded habitat will likely result in the total extinction of the subspecies that formerly returned to a particular creek for spawning." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.