Boise Says it Will Stop Logging Old Growth

Monday, March 18, 2002

Timber giant Boise, the largest public timber company still cutting old-growth trees in Northwest federal forests, plans to phase out the practice during the next two years.

The action is unlikely to satisfy anti-logging activists who have made the Idaho-based company, long known as Boise Cascade, a prime target of their campaigns. That's because the company's definition of old growth excludes many older forests that environmentalists want protected.

The policy change went unannounced except in a statement on the company's Web site. It comes as the company is unveiling an image makeover that drops Cascade from its name and touts the company as "about more than merely supplying wood, paper or office products."

Officials said last week that the phaseout of old-growth logging is unrelated to the reworking of its image or to protests such as one in which activists floated an inflatable dinosaur near Boise's headquarters to criticize what they called its "prehistoric" practice of cutting old growth.

Boise officials said it reflects a shift in federal forest management away from cutting old-growth trees, which last year made up less than 1 percent of Boise's timber harvest. Almost all old growth the company cuts comes off federal land -- much of it in the Northwest -- since the company's timberland generally hold younger trees logged on a shorter cycle.

"It seems to be where Forest Service management policy is going, and it's where the public attitude is going," company spokesman Michael Mosier said.

The company will finish logging old growth it has under contract through the next two years, Mosier said, but will buy no more unless it involves salvaging burned or diseased trees.

Boise developed its concise definition of old growth in consultation with researchers and conservation groups, he said. The company considers old growth to be forest areas 5,000 acres or larger, with trees predominantly at least 200 years old and undisturbed by human activities for more than 100 years.

Conservation groups in Oregon said that definition excludes much remaining old growth outside parks, wildernesses and other protected areas. Unprotected old growth often occurs in fragmented parcels, they said.

"I've never seen a definition like that, that would leave so much old growth vulnerable to the chain saw," said Regna Merritt of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. The group's computer mapping of old growth in Oregon suggests there are no federal
old-growth parcels larger than 5,000 acres still open to logging, she said.

Biologists generally define old growth not by acreage but as forests featuring a variety of characteristics that develop with age, such as varying layers of trees and fallen logs and wood used by wildlife. Those qualities develop at different speeds in different forests but typically appear in damp forests west of the Cascades after close to 200 years.

About half the trees cut in Northwest federal forests since approval of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, a compromise to allow logging while also protecting wildlife, have been old growth, according to the U.S. Forest Service. But the percentage of old-growth logging has declined in recent years as lawsuits over environmental issues have held up timber sales.

Boise bought about 7 percent of the 1.2 billion board feet of Oregon timber sold from 1995 to 2000 by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, one of the two main agencies that manage federal timber in the region.

The company gets about 10 percent of its timber from federal land, 40 percent from its timberland and 50 percent from state, county and other private land, Mosier said. Most other big timber companies, including Weyerhaeuser, do not cut timber on public land.

Michael Milstein

You can reach Michael Milstein at 503-294-7689 or by e-mail at michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com.

Source: The Oregonian

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