news story / By Japhet Weeks

Life Preserver

Will a new environmental initiative help keep small timberland owners afloat?

(Feb. 28, 2008)  On a clear day in Petrolia, long-time environmental activist Richard Gienger and Seth Zuckerman, forestry director for the Mattole Restoration Council, sit outside of the council’s office at a weathered picnic table explaining what Zuckerman calls the “vision of stewardship” his organization has for the entire Mattole River watershed.

Presently, that vision is focused on small timberland owners and the economic pressures they face, which, according to the council and many of the landowners themselves, make sustainable “light touch” logging practices impossible.

Fog and forest: a view from the road into Petrolia. Photo by Japhet Weeks.

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For the past 10 years, Gienger says, the costs associated with logging for small landowners have been increasing, and that’s made it necessary for them to cut down more timber rather than less in order to cover expenses.

Zuckerman and Gienger explain how the watershed has changed since 1947, when a post-war housing boom, the proliferation of Caterpillar tractors and an ad valorem property tax, which caused landowners to favor clearcutting, combined into a perfect storm. Almost a third of the entire 300-square-mile watershed was logged by 1962. And by 1988, 91 percent of the area’s old growth forests were gone.

But within the next 10 years, according to Zuckerman, many trees will be mature enough to be harvested. “We’re in this window right now,” he says. And that’s why “a mechanism to log with a light touch needs to be put in place.”

To that end, the council is floating a Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report (PTEIR), as its new watershed-wide plan is known. The council argues that the PTEIR will streamline the application process for sustainable Timber Harvest Plans (THPs) by providing umbrella environmental review. Under the plan, the council will bear the brunt of the costs and the time spent filing tedious paperwork, deflecting those expenses from small landowners.

In turn, landowners must agree to log selectively rather than clearcut, and to other restrictions. For example, an area that has been logged with a PTHP (a THP filed under the PTEIR) can’t be logged with a regular THP for at least 10 years. Zuckerman likens it to getting a piece of land certified organic. Also, stricter rules for operating heavy equipment and logging near streams than exist in regular THPs would apply.

Still, some aren’t happy with the plan. In a recent Times-Standard opinion piece, Robert Sutherland said that the PTEIR “seeks to make it much easier for every small landowner to commercially log their land, potentially prompting widespread rape.” He asked people to write to the California Department of Forestry to insist on a full evaluation of the “no project” alternative. Zuckerman argues that doing nothing is the real crime, robbing small landowners of a new paradigm provided for under the PTEIR, a choice beyond the business as usual model or clearcutting.

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