U.S. Plans to Ease Logging Restrictions on Private Lands

Hoping to head off opposition to the Endangered Species Act, the Clinton Administration proposed Tuesday to lift broad restrictions on logging of private timber in areas of Northern California and Washington that are home to the threatened northern spotted owl.

Although it affects all non-federal land owners, including states and Indian tribes, the new policy would offer the most relief to small land owners, those with less than 80 acres. But in many places it would also free timber companies and other large land owners to cut trees, providing they leave 70-acre buffer zones around known owl nesting sites.

About 30% of the known sites are in Northern California, with the highest concentration in coastal forests, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The owl’s range in California extends over about 5.7 million acres of non-federal land. The proposal would ease logging restrictions on about 85% of non-federal land in the state.

Administration officials said they want to show another side of the Endangered Species Act, which critics blame for unreasonable restrictions on vital commercial activities, especially logging, on public and private lands.

“We’re trying to show that there is authority under the act to provide relief where it is warranted,” said Donald Barry, an assistant to the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“In other words, we’re trying to demonstrate everything this particular vehicle is capable of doing so that people won’t be in too great a hurry to trade it in,” he said.

Barry also said the proposed change in policy, which will not take effect for several months, is a direct result of the Clinton Administration’s Northwest forest plan that governs logging on federal lands. That plan, approved by a federal judge in December, reduces allowable timber harvests by about 1 billion board feet a year in old-growth forests in California, Oregon and Washington.

The Clinton plan lowers the overall cutting of trees in Northwest national forests to about one-fifth of harvest levels during the 1980s.

By sparing owl nesting areas on federal lands, Fish and Wildlife officials said, the plan relieves pressure to protect habitat on much adjacent non-federal land.

The proposed rule does not apply to Oregon, where negotiations continue with private landowners and state officials. Until an agreement is reached, landowners there will be subject to restrictions in place since 1990.

A spokesman for California Gov. Pete Wilson, an outspoken critic of the Endangered Species Act, praised the Clinton Administration for easing restrictions on private landowners, calling the move “potentially a step in the right direction for balancing ecosystem and economic needs.”

But the spokesman, Assistant Secretary for Resources Terry Barlin Gorton, said the proposed change did not eliminate the need for “substantive revision” of the Endangered Species Act.

Environmental groups took a wait-and-see attitude toward the federal proposal.

“Whether it leads to the recovery of the northern spotted owl depends on several unknown factors,” said Steve Whitney, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society. “It will work if there is full funding and implementation of the Northwest forest plan, if states do a responsible job of managing non-federal lands under their jurisdiction and if the large, private owners do their part to protect the forests.”

Under the new change, the federal government hopes to promote voluntary conservation efforts by private landowners who control current or potential owl habitat. By entering into cooperative conservation agreements with the government, landowners would be shielded from any future restrictions on land use.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Forest Service offered a compromise plan for logging on federal lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in part to provide protection for the California spotted owl, a more numerous relative of the northern spotted owl.

Under that plan, logging in national forests could be reduced by nearly 90%. However, cutting of some large, old trees would be allowed, and under the Forest Service’s preferred approach, timber harvests would be cut by a little more than 50% from 1980 levels.

Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.