Foresters call on Congress to establish landscape restoration program

SNW President Martin Goebel testifies before Congress in support of the Forest Landscape Restoration Act.

Members of the forest products industry called on Congress yesterday to clear the way for new restoration opportunities on national forests and other public lands.

The legislation,  <http://www.eenews.net/features/bills/110/House/020708174653.pdf> H.R. 5263, from Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), seeks to restore national forests and Bureau of Land Management properties by encouraging the thinning of some areas in an effort to reduce the spread of wildfires.

It would establish a forest landscape restoration program that would prioritize and fund ecological restoration treatments for forests. Federal land managers would work with state and local authorities to identify parcels of at least 50,000 acres comprised mostly of National Forest System lands that need active ecosystem restoration.

Advocates told Grijalva's Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee that in addition to removing some of the fuel that can lead to the uncontrollable spread of wildfires, the bill would help to create local jobs, provide a source of renewable energy, promote clean watersheds and protect forests against invasive species and the effects of climate change.

J. Martin Goebel, president of Sustainable Northwest, a regional natural resource organization, welcomed the restoration plan and the jobs it would provide in the Northwest.
"We have gone from an era of high-production management that over-harvested our forests and simultaneously suppressed fire, creating a host of ecological problems and a boom-and-bust economic cycle that has all but stopped active management on public lands and has had its own downward-spiraling effects on the land and on local communities," he said.

Interior Department and Forest Service officials offered support for the bill's landscape scale restoration efforts, but expressed some doubts about funding provisions.

"Our greatest concern with the bill is the funding mechanism," said Sally Collins, associate chief of the Forest Service. She said that if funding for restoration projects comes from the Forest Service's general fund, it could lead to an inability to fund other high priority projects.
Michael Degnan, Washington representative of Sierra Club, said that his organization has not taken a stance on the bill, but that it points toward what a new management policy for public forests could look like. It "does show a true desire to create a new restoration economy," he said in an interview.

In the past, the Sierra Club has opposed some landscape-wide logging efforts because "we don't believe that you can log a forest back to health," Degnan said.

Read Martin Goebel's written testimony on the Forest Landscape Restoration Act.