-- Campaign For Old Growth | Reference Article --

Even in rural timber-dependent communities, a new poll shows strong support for protecting old-growth trees on national forests in the Northwest.

The poll, commissioned by six Northwest environmental groups, showed 75 percent of 600 respondents supported a proposal to protect old-growth forest from logging on national forest lands. Even in rural counties that depend more directly on the wood products industry, support was at 67 percent.

"That's pretty surprising," said Susan Jane Brown, executive director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, one of the poll's sponsors. "I would have expected a lot lower percentage than that."

The Portland firm Davis & Hibbitts Inc. polled 360 people in Washington and 240 in Oregon in May. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The poll was commissioned by the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, American Lands Alliance, Oregon Natural Resources Council, Pacific Crest Biodiversity Project, Cascadia Wildlands Project and Northwest Ecosystem Alliance.

Environmental groups have pushed for an end to logging in the last vestiges of old-growth forests in the Northwest.

Representatives of the region's wood products industry say smaller trees within those stands need to be thinned to reduce the risk of losing the old-growth forests to wildfire or disease.

The poll strictly focused on the question of old growth, said Adam Davis, a partner in the Davis & Hibbits.

"This was not a question about shutting down the timber industry, it was not a question about ending all logging on national forests," he said. "It was a question about protecting the remaining old growth."

And on that question, he said, the results were clear.

"As far as protection of old-growth timber, I consider this a significant finding," Davis said.

Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group based in Portland, said his organization agrees with public sentiment that centuries-old trees should be left alone. But he said the nation will lose those ancient trees if the Forest Service fails to thin out younger trees susceptible to wildfire.

"Without management, they're going to burn up," Partin said.

Logging on national forests in the Northwest has ground to a virtual halt, tangled in a slew of lawsuits and procedural snags.

The Northwest Forest Plan, brokered by former President Bill Clinton, has a goal of cutting 811 million board-feet of timber a year from 24.5 million acres of national forest lands in the spotted owl forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.

To hit that target, agencies project they will have to cut 240,000 acres of late-successional forest over the next decade, said Rex Holloway, a spokesman for the Forest Service's regional office in Portland.

The Pacific Crest Biodiversity Project, Gifford Pinchot Task Force and Northwest Ecosystem Alliance have identified 22 timber sales on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest alone that would involve old-growth forests.

Last year, congressional Democrats from the region called on the Clinton administration to examine whether it could harvest the same amount of timber from second- and third-growth stands.

Holloway noted that at the time Clinton announced his forest plan, the president considered one option that would have left intact all old growth. But Clinton rejected that option primarily because it fed only a negligible amount of timber to local sawmills in the first decade of the plan.

"If we're going to readdress that issue, it needs to be done in some sort of public process," Holloway said.

Earlier this year, former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck directed forest managers across the nation to map old growth remaining on federal lands.

In a resignation letter to newly appointed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Venemon, Dombeck reiterated the point.

"It makes little sense to harvest old-growth forests simply to bring their short-term economic values to market," Dombeck wrote. "The greatest good for these remnant forests is found through their research and study, conservation and restoration."

Heidi Valetkevitch, a Forest Service spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said new Chief Dale Bosworth has been consumed with other matters, such as the Forest Service's initiative to ban logging in roadless areas. The broader issue of managing old-growth forests hasn't yet been addressed, she said.

"The new Forest Service chief has indicated he'd like to continue the vision of Mike Dombeck in terms of getting a better definition of old growth and properly mapping areas," Valetkevitch said.