Conservation Agencies File Notice of Suit

Environmental and fishing groups filed notice Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Portland that they're prepared to sue the state to halt logging practices that they maintain are furthering the decline of endangered salmon.

The notice specifically targets logging near streams and on erosion-prone hillsides in the coho salmon habitat of the northern Oregon Coast Range, but could lead to changes in forest practices on all 11 million acres of state and private land regulated by the Oregon Department of Forestry.

David Bayles, conservation director of the Pacific Rivers Council in Eugene, said state regulations don't go far enough to protect salmon habitat. Washington and California each have adopted forest policies more restrictive than Oregon's, he said, and federal forests within the state already are governed by policies that comply with the Endangered Species Act.

"It's what I would describe as a serious problem," Bayles said. "But it would not be the end of the timber industry by a long shot. We think the timber industry can continue to thrive, while protecting salmon."

The Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund filed the notice on behalf of the Pacific Rivers Council, the Audubon Society of Portland, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, the Coast Range Association and the Native Fish Society. Such notices must be filed 60 days before any lawsuit against a government agency.

But Bayles said the groups are hoping the Oregon Board of Forestry will make a lawsuit unnecessary by committing to more effective salmon habitat protection.

Even if a lawsuit is filed, he said, it would seek to change specific forest practices and not to cause what he called a "blanket shutdown" of logging in state and private forests.

"That's really important," he said. "I'm concerned about this being perceived as inflammatory and overly broad."

Ted Lorensen, director of forest practices for the Forestry Department, said the threat of a lawsuit is unlikely to affect the state's policies.

"We'll see how it goes, but certainly at this point, we don't intend to alter our plans," he said.

Lorensen said a forest practices advisory committee - which included representatives of a couple of the groups behind Wednesday's notice - recommended several revisions to state regulations that are likely to be adopted later this year.

He described the committee's proposals as "well-reasoned and scientifically based," but acknowledged they didn't go as far as some committee members preferred. There were differences over the width of buffer zones in riparian areas, for instance, and whether regulations should seek to prevent landslides altogether or only their adverse effects.<

"Ironically, landslides sometimes produce really critical fish habitat - but one of the components that has to be there is wood (debris)," Lorensen said.

The groups' decision to push for further changes through legal action could actually cause more damage by prompting woodlot owners to quickly harvest their timber before a court decision prevents it, or to convert their land to nonforest uses, he said.

"Whether this is a good strategy that meets the interests of those people proposing it is arguable because of the possible negative consequences," Lorensen said.

A timber industry spokesman said that a lawsuit is unnecessary because the state already has tough forest protection laws.

"It's disheartening," said Tim Wigley, executive director of the Oregon Forest Industries Council.

"Oregon has one of the more stringent forest protection laws out there," Wigley said. "And it is enforced, no doubt about it. We try to make rules based on science, not political science."

But environmental groups and fishing interests have been frustrated by what they consider half-way attempts to revise the Oregon Forest Practices Act.

"This lawsuit is the citizens' way of holding the state to those requirements and hopefully the state will redo the Forest Practices to include those items so the individual land owners won't be on the hook," said Patty Goldman, a lawyer for Earthjustice.<

The Forest Practices Act currently allows private timber owners to build roads in areas prone to landslides, log in the sensitive riparian zones along small- and medium-sized fish-bearing streams, and cut over streams that do not bear fish in headwaters areas.

Environmentalists argue that such logging harms fish by removing shade that keeps waters cool enough for fish and promotes erosion that allows sedimentation to choke spawning gravels.

Lawsuits by environmentalists brought logging in spotted owl habitat on national forests to a halt in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A federal injunction wasn't lifted until the U.S. Forest Service revised its logging practices through the Northwest Forest Plan, which reduced logging on federal lands by 80 percent.