Subject: Of interest, our forests
Date: Mar 28 07:08:44 1995
From: Peter Rauch - peterr at violet.berkeley.edu


Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 07:50:08 +0600
From: leland at straylight.tamu.edu (Leland Ellis)
To: Multiple recipients of list <bene at straylight.tamu.edu>
Subject: Hatfield and Senate Committee Suspend All Laws for Timber Sales
X-Comment: Straylight ListProcessor -- BENE Distribution List

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 24, 1995
WESTERN ANCIENT FOREST CAMPAIGN
202/939-3324 WAFCDC at igc.apc.org


Hatfield and Senate Committee Suspend All Laws for Timber Sales

In a rapid mark-up open to only five members of the general
public, the full Appropriations Committee approved a rescissions
bill waiving all law that applies to the sales of timber from
Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. The only
requirement for such sales is that they have some relationship
with some trees that have been or may imminently become burned or
diseased.

"The Committee adopted a definition that includes any timber
sale in any federal forest, since insects and fungus are natural
parts of a forest. They then waived all law and ordered the
agencies to sell timber as fast as possible at any price. That
waiver may be so broad as to permit activities that would
otherwise be violations of civil service, work place safety, or
public health laws or even subject to criminal prosecution," said
John Fitzgerald, Executive Director of the Western Ancient Forest
Campaign. Fitzgerald is an attorney and a former counsel to a
Subcommittee of the House of Representatives.

In 1994, even under current law, salvage sales went for as
little as $3 per thousand board feet in California, for example.
"The amendment approved today would allow even greater amounts of
healthy green timber to be sold at salvage prices with no regard
to the effect on the health of wildlife or humans. That means
that Seattle, Portland, and numerous other cities and towns across
the country that rely on forests to help filter their drinking
water are about to have mud, and in some cases, toxic heavy
metals, washed into their water supply from timber roads and steep
slope erosion. And there will be nothing they can do about it
under the law," said Fitzgerald.

The Senate rescissions package is expected to reach the floor
of the Senate as early as Wednesday next week. Conservation
groups expect the four senators who spoke out against the
Hatfield- Gorton forest law suspension in committee to lead an
organized opposition in the full Senate to the measure. Those
senators are Bumpers, Leahy, Murray and Reid.

The Clinton administration spoke out this week in a letter to
Senator Murray and in a release from seven agency offices in
Portland noting the massive economic aide aide already provided to
the northwest and opposing attempts to legislate timber sales and
waivers of law.