Rocky Barker – March 4, 2103 Idaho Statesman
U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, presented numbers that appeared astounding as he made the case that state forestry is better.
Bishop, speaking at a hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation last week, said that the Idaho Department of Lands has 52 times the volume of timber harvested per acre on its 971,678 acres of forests than the U.S. Forest Service has on 20 million acres. That’s 239.4 million board feet per acre to 4.6.
Chairman Bishop said the annual revenue per acre is even more astounding – 917 times more for the state than the federal forests. That’s $55 per acre for the state to 6 cents per acre for the national forests.
What Bishop’s dinner-napkin math doesn’t say is that not all of those 20 million acres are forests. There are only 17.2 million acres of federal forests in Idaho, and a small part of that number is under the Bureau of Land Management.
Of that, more than half – 9 million acres – is roadless, and another 3.8 million is wilderness. Much of the roadless forest is technically open to logging. But, in reality, much of it is either too prone to erosion, too steep or covered in trees that are so low in value that they would not support road-building or the kind of active management practiced on state lands.
Finding different paths for forests
Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and Boise are looking at changing a federal management system that all but ended logging after the forest wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
The desire for new forest plans is driven by wildfires that are growing in intensity and cost, and by lawsuits that lead foresters to add time and pages to environmental reviews to avoid litigation.
In Idaho, the Legislature is studying whether to copy a Utah law that would try to force the federal government to turn over millions of acres of public lands.
In Washington, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation is looking at programs to mirror the forest trusts in 22 states – such as Idaho’s state endowments that produce revenue for schools and other beneficiaries – on 135 million acres.