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Timber decision hits region hard By Paul Fattig More than half of the 178 Pacific Northwest timber sales temporarily blocked by a federal court judge�s ruling in Seattle are on the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests and the Bureau of Land Management�s Medford District. The ruling to protect salmon habitat affects 45 timber sales on the two forests and roughly the same number on the BLM district, said Jan Hasselman, Seattle attorney for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. It is not known how many board feet of timber are affected. Citing the need to protect salmon habitat, U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein on Thursday ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to follow proper regulations in 20 biological opinions that cleared the way for the federal timber sales in Oregon, Washington and Northern California. The Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund sued on behalf of several environmental groups as well as the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen�s Association. The ruling prevents NMFS from permitting the sales to proceed in areas that affect salmon protected under the Endangered Species Act. Some of the sales haven�t been awarded while others already have been harvested, Hasselman said. "They are all over the map," he said. "Some are done. Some still have folks on the ground. Some are unawarded. The unifying theme is they have already received approval from NMFS." The BLM�s Medford District has more than 40 timber sales in which the NMFS has been consulted, confirmed district spokesman Don Ferguson, although some aren�t scheduled to be awarded until 2003, he said. The Forest Service is waiting to study the ruling and confer with NMFS before commenting, said Mary Marrs, spokeswoman for the two local forests. NMFS spokesman Brian Gorman also declined to comment on the ruling but said that the agency felt it had done a sufficient job of protecting salmon. Judge Rothstein wrote that the NMFS was still doing many of the same things that led her to halt 27 timber sales in the Umpqua Basin in October 1999. At the time, the judge said that NMFS� timber sale decisions were invalid. The agency has appealed the 1999 ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As a result, Thursday�s order was expected to remain in effect pending 9th Circuit resolution of the earlier appeal. The NMFS again failed to measure the effects of the timber sales it approved and did not insist that loggers meet standards for logging along stream banks, Rothstein wrote Thursday. The goal of the lawsuit isn�t to stop logging but to protect the fishery, said Glen Spain, spokesman for the PCFFA, the West Coast�s largest organization of commercial fishermen. "Salmon fishing has been seriously damaged by logging practices over the last couple of decades," Spain said. "We know both can coexist. But there has to be careful timber management." "Obviously, the watersheds is where fish come from," he added. "We want trees upright rather than horizontal, at least in riparian areas." Both coho salmon and wild steelhead depend on watersheds that are primarily on federal land, he said. "If we are ever going to restore our nation�s salmon runs, we have to start stream by stream and fish by fish," Spain said. "The best place to start is on federal lands. The timber sales have to be reoriented to protect and restore the salmon, not just kiss it off with a rubber-stamp kind of approval." In addition to the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests, the timber sales are on the Umpqua, Siuslaw and Mount Hood national forests in Oregon; the Klamath, Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers national forests in California; and the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest in Washington. In addition to the Medford District, other BLM districts affected include Coos Bay, Salem, Eugene and Roseburg. Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.