THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION
OF
FISHERMEN'S
ASSOCIATIONS
From Fishermen's News, March, 1996
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Back to PCFFA Home Page Salmon fishermen! Imagine -- if you can -- that Congress has just passed a bill requiring the destruction of the Northwest’s last best remaining salmon spawning areas and banning any further public participation in public lands management. Imagine also that Congress required this destruction to proceed regardless of the environmental consequences by suspending every single environmental law on the books. Imagine also that, under this new law, citizen’s will no longer have the right to appeal federal agency decisions on public lands, even though these lands were paid for by their tax dollars. Finally, while you are at it, imagine that you will be forced to help pay for this destruction, in effect using your own money to put you out of business.
You say Congress would never do any such thing in a democratic society? Think again. Congress just did! This abomination is called the “Timber Salvage Rider,” and its full effect is just about to bite you where you live.
Most salmon (and coho salmon in particular) need old-growth riparian forests in order to spawn and thrive. However, the Northwest has already lost between 90% and 95% of all its original old-growth forests as a result of a timber harvest feeding frenzy that lasted several decades, ending only in the early 90's when finally halted by court order. Just about all old- growth on private lands is long since gone. What little remains is almost entirely on public lands.
For years the US Forest Service and BLM pumped up timber survey figures to show far more available old-growth timber than was really there, and violated their own laws to make sure as much as possible was cut regardless of the consequences to old-growth dependent fish and wildlife. After seeing species after species go extinct as whole watersheds were literally strip- mined of old-growth, concerned citizen’s in the Northwest finally filed suit to stop this wave of extinctions -- and to their surprise, they actually won! The species that finally caused the courts to draw a line in the forest duff was a small little bird called the “Northern spotted owl.”
These court victories became the “spotted owl” cases, now used perpetually by timber industry propagandists to press for the total repeal of the Endangered Species Act. Yet none of these cases were ever based on the ESA -- the injunction that from 1990 to 1993 closed down most public timber harvesting west of the Cascades in the Northwest and Northern California was won on the basis of agency violations of their own laws, the National Forest Management Act (16 U.S.C 472a et. seq.), not the ESA. The spotted owl was only the indicator species anyway -- its plunge toward extinction was merely an indication that something was very, very wrong with public forestland management. In fact, what was going on was simply not sustainable. In the 80's public forestlands were being cut down at about 8 times what we now know to be a sustainable rate.
One of the tragic results of these decades of overcutting was the decimation or extinction of quite a number of the region’s best salmon runs, particularly coastal coho salmon (the most dependent on federal lands). Fishermen are literally the victims of years of illegal agency timber giveaways fueled by bottomless timber industry’s greed and a pliant Congress.
After the owl injunctions, President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan was finally adopted in 1993 and approved by the court as a (barely) legal plan. What the federal court (Judge Dwyer) actually said in the owl case injunction was that no more public timber giveaways could proceed until a legally acceptable plan for a sustainable harvest was adopted. The timber industry, of course, screamed bloody murder -- and still does today. They have devoted much of their efforts in Congress and in the courts to turning back the clock to the “good old days” when Congress, rather than scientists, set timber harvest targets based on timber lobbyist clout rather than the biological needs of salmon and other forest dependent creatures.
While there is no doubt that it was pretty hard on innocent mill workers caught up in the sudden forced closures, even today nobody gives much thought to the thousands of salmon fishermen whose livelihoods have utterly disappeared as a result of widespread clearcutting of important salmon habitat in these same forests. Salmon too are an old-growth dependent species. When the mills took away most of the old-growth, they took away wild salmon as well. Today between 90% --95% of the original old-growth is gone, more than 106 major salmon runs are extinct, and another 214 (more than 90% of the remainder) are facing extinction in the near future unless things change. Over the past 30 years, the salmon fishing industry in the Northwest has lost an estimated 47,000 family wage jobs due to the collapse of coastal salmon stocks alone (i.e., outside the Columbia Basin).
While I feel empathy for out of work timber workers and wouldn’t wish a layoff on anyone, the companies they work for and the agencies that allowed it to happen had no right to extinguish the very existence of the salmon which supported the families of fishermen. Douglas fir trees can grow anywhere, but once a river’s irreplaceable wild salmon runs are extinct, they remain extinct forever.
The timber industry loathes the Clinton Forest Plan, and they saw their chance to undercut it with this new and strikingly anti-environmental Congress. Led by Jim Bunn of Oregon, Norm Dicks and Senator Gorton of Washington, and with the active support of Oregon Senators Hatfield and Packwood (now Chairmen of two powerful Senate committees) they introduced and narrowly passed the “timber salvage rider.” Rather than allow full and free debate on it as a standing bill, however, they managed to quietly slip it into an emergency disaster relief and anti-terrorism bill to try to make it “veto proof.” The original bill (H.R. 1158) was, in fact, vetoed by President Clinton the first time around because of the rider, but in a form of political blackmail Clinton had to sign it the second time around to get much needed disaster aid for Oklahoma bombing victims and flood victims in Southern California. It became law as Section 2001 of H.R. 1944.
What the rider does is to suspend every law on the books so far as public forestlands are concerned. Section 2001 specifically suspends a whole laundry list of environmental laws, including “any compact, executive agreement, convention, treaty, and international agreement, and implementing legislation related thereto,” and for good measure “all other applicable Federal environmental and natural resource laws.” Even guaranteed Tribal treaty rights are suspended under this provision.
Federal forest management agencies can literally now do anything they want to in national forests, regardless of the environmental consequences. Section 2001(f) also makes it virtually impossible to appeal these decisions, and even if they are appealed forbids the court from issuing any injunction until (in most cases) the trees have already been cut!
To give them some credit, the White House was honestly convinced that they could blunt its impact by ordering the agencies to operate “as though the laws were in effect.” However, the day after the law was signed the timber industry went straight to the courthouse, and since then have obtained ruling after ruling under the rider reviving over 100 previously canceled timber sales and forcing new sales to go forward in spite of likely environmental damage to salmon. Some of these now-revived sales were originally canceled because the agency broke its own laws in proposing them. Others were canceled specifically because they would likely drive more salmon runs to extinction. Now all must go forward under court order -- regardless of the environmental consequences!
In a nutshell, many of these now revived sales are known fish killers. Several of them are “clustered” in areas where coho salmon, searun cutthroat and steelhead (all ESA candidate species) are the most seriously depressed, including several runs of vital importance to both commercial and recreational fisheries.
While the US government (as well as the States of Oregon and Washington) are spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars trying to rescue salmon from extinction, simultaneously several logging rider operations expected to seriously damage (or even utterly extinguish) these same remnant runs are now proceeding full speed. If these old-growth sales go forward, it will make a coastwide ESA listing of coho salmon far more likely, make future recovery efforts far more difficult, mean more coastal fishing closures in order to protect these further weakened stocks, and cost tens of millions of dollars more loss to our industry.
Some of the worst impacts of the rider will be in the upper Columbia and Snake River watersheds, where several important salmon runs are already listed as “endangered” under the ESA, and where heroic efforts are being made to save them. The National Marine Fisheries Service, in condemning these sales, has this to say:
“Since the Snake River spring/summer chinook salmon were listed as threatened in 1992, NMFS has conducted numerous consultations with the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. One of the first formal consultations evaluated eleven timber sales in the Upper Grande Ronde River watershed. The Forest Service has identified nine of those same sales as ones that could be released with their pre-consultation terms [under the salvage rider].... By allowing these sales to be released with their pre-consultation terms, the level of incidental taking of these listed salmon species will be increased at a time when their condition is particularly precarious. If these nine sales are released with only their pre-consultation terms, their environmental effects could jeopardize the continued existence of the Upper Grande Ronde River populations of spring/summer chinook salmon....” (October 13, 1995, sworn declaration of Jacqueline Wyland, Ph.D., Chief of Environmental and Technical Services Division, National Marine Fisheries Service, Portland, OR)
Similar jeopardy opinions have been issued by NMFS for some of the severely depressed salmon and cutthroat trout runs in the Umpqua River basin, where many more of these sales are clustered. “Jeopardize the existence of,” in case you don’t know, is agency jargon for extinction.
Altogether there are something like ten square miles of old-growth clearcuts scheduled in “tier 1 key watersheds,” -- the last best salmon spawning refuges in the region. Typical stream buffer zones for these clearcuts are 25 feet to none in steep terrain virtually guaranteed to slide into the spawning beds in the next major rainstorm. Bye-bye salmon!
The remainder of the sales which will affect our industry are in the last remaining marbled murrelet habitat. If you think what happens to this elusive seabird doesn’t matter to us, think again! The marbled murrelet nests only in coastal old-growth forests, but it feeds at sea. Fishermen can in fact catch these birds in trawl and gillnet gear as incidental “bycatch.” Right now fishermen are making heroic efforts to conduct research to determine the extent of this bycatch problem and to minimize any bycatch which may occur. If this bycatch becomes significant, it may mean the closure of the whole fishery. The fewer of these birds tht exist, the more significant even small losses at sea become. The “Save Our Sealife” anti-gillnet campaign in Washington (I-640) in fact used this seabird bycatch issue heavily to try to turn folks against us. Now that they have lost on the ballot, they are sponsoring a court suit to shut us down on this same basis.
At least 59 rider-revived clearcut sales in murrelet nesting areas (canceled as illegal under the old laws, which now no longer apply) must now go forward under their original (previously illegal) terms, and they will wipe out 14% of all known marbled murrelet nesting sites in Oregon and Washington. In the Siuslaw National Forest, one of the best remaining refuges for the bird in the Northwest, these clearcuts will wipe out 25% of all known nesting sites in the refuge. Altogether, we are talking about 6.4 square miles of old-growth clearcut right in key nesting areas. All this is after the loss of almost 95% of its habitat already. According to USFWS sworn statements in court:
“In conclusion, it is my belief based upon the best available scientific information that serious and irreparable harm to the threatened marbled murrelet will occur if the Forest Service and BLM sales at issue are harvested.... Murrelet population trends are downward and continue to be of grave concern. We know of no areas where murrelet numbers are stable or increasing. Continued loss of occupied nesting habitat is a primary cause of this downward trend and is the greatest threat to the species’ continued survival. Therefore, it is critical to protect high quality occupied nesting habitat such as that contained in these sale units. From the perspective of marbled murrelet conservation and recovery, this high quality habitat is irreplaceable....” (Declaration of Michael J. Spear, Regional Director, USFWS Pacific Region)
These clearcuts make it almost certain that the marbled murrelet will be downlisted to “endangered” in the near future. As timber harvests wipe out more and more of its native old- growth habitat on shore, its numbers will continue to decline and additional pressure will be placed on the fishing industry to protect the remnants. Downlisting would likely terminate all incidental take permits for the Puget Sound net fishery, ending that fishery -- perhaps forever.
In other words, for every riparian old-growth tree taken by the timber industry to feed its mills, more fishermen will lose their livelihoods. What little riparian old-growth remains is far more valuable for producing salmon than sawlogs. Whether it be salmon runs wiped out directly, or increased closures required to protect species driven to extinction on shore, it is fishermen who are paying the price while others reap huge profits.
Oh yes, the costs. It turns out that virtually every one of these rider sales will be sold at a loss to the taxpayer. Yes, that’s right -- you, the taxpayer/fisherman, will be forced by Congress to help subsidize your own industry’s destruction. The Congressional Research Service has estimated the whole program will cost the federal taxpayer at least $210 million, and some other estimates range up to $1 billion in direct costs, not even considering the resulting environmental damages. But never mind -- the rider itself says these sales “shall not be precluded because the costs of such activities are likely to exceed the revenues derived from such activities.”
The rider has been opposed by nearly every sport and commercial fishing organization in the Northwest. It must be repealed. At present there are two bills in Congress to rid us of this abomination. One (H.R. 2745) co-authored by Congresswomen Elizabeth Furse (D-OR) and Connie Morella (R-MD) now has over 106 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House. Senators Boxer (D-CA) and Bradley (D-NJ) are co-sponsoring one of their own in the Senate soon. It is vitally important that you contact all your elected representatives and Governor and tell them as fishermen that you want them to support these repeal bills.
Especially send a copy of your letter to President Clinton. He must decide soon whether to push for full repeal in the budget process. Send a copy also to PCFFA at the address below. Do this one now -- another few days and it may be too late!
PCFFA is the west coast's largest organization of commercial fishermen. PCFFA's Southwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370 and by phone (415)561-5080. PCFFA's Northwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370 and by phone (541)689-2000. PCFFA's web site is at <http://www.pcffa.org> or PCFFA can be reached by email at <fish1ifr@aol.com>.