Conserving national forests

With a positive vote on a single amendment, Congress this week can end a harmful welfare program and fix up national forests. The amendment, by Rep. Elizabeth Furse of Oregon, would end taxpayer subsidies for logging in the forests and use the money for conservation and park maintenance. It is a long-needed bill that deserves support.

Just over a century after the Congress created a national forest program to spread logging out and encourage settlement, the forests are veined with 380,000 miles of roads — more miles than interstate highway system — while taxpayers cover the cost of erosion and watershed and wildlife degradation. The Furse bill would take $80.5 million from the Forest Service’s timber sales program — roughly the amount the service says the program lost last year — and direct $60.5 million of it to watershed improvements and $20 million to recreation management.

The message behind the amendment is simple: The lumber industry’s sweet deal of getting cheap access and timber below market prices is, if not over, at least in its last days. The amendment makes sense both fiscally — no one has yet made the argument that the government should support these loggers over loggers who do not have access to the national forests — and practically. The trend in the national forests is clearly toward nonextractive pursuits — hiking, camping and sight-seeing.

Where logging in the forests accounted for approximately 76,000 jobs in the mid-1990s, according to the Forest Service, recreation contributed 2.5 million. Wildlife and fishing accounted for another 330,000. The forests’ contributions to gross domestic product are similarly lopsided toward recreation.

The public has expressed itself dramatically with these numbers, which is why a related proposal, which would allow double the logging quota in the Tongass National Forest, makes so little sense. The idea behind Tongass and the other national forests is conservation, not exploitation, not seeing how much can be cut down without entirely destroying wildlife populations. The greatest value of this publicly held land, increasingly, is found in leaving it whole.

Rep. Furse’s bill is bold in that it cuts into a program long-cherished by industry. But in another sense, it is merely following what forest visitors in overwhelming numbers say they want. Members of Congress should join the public by supporting this proposal.