Quincy Library Group

by Scott Schroder, Rancho Victoria

In July, the Quincy Library Group Forest Restoration and Economic Stability Act (H.R. 858) was introduced into the US House of Representatives. The plan is a management agreement reached between local government officials and the Sierra Pacific timber company of Redding, California. It mandates increased levels of logging in the Plumas and Lassen National Forests and one district of the Tahoe National Forest. In remarkably inadequate time, three days, the House passed the bill by a margin of 429-1. Without hesitation, public officials took the opportunity to advertise the act as an astonishing new precedent for collaboration between environmentalists and resource extraction industries; cheerful speeches were made.

Vocal proponents of the bill quickly argued that the whole scope of forest management and legislation would change to reflect the significance of this event. Activists on the national circuit scrambled to figure out what to do; heated debates between members of environmental groups ensued. Everyone interpreted the event differently, and the issues of "regional consensus" and rural community control of federal lands management became some of the most imminent concerns within the forest movement.

How was it then that after years of involvement in the environmental community in the northern Sierra, years of working with different groups, attending presentations, reading local publications, working on restoration projects and even being given information from friends in the Forest Service, I had never even heard of the Quincy Library Group (QLG).

There is nowhere in the continental United States so remote and so unpopulated that 25 people could reasonably be said to represent all the significant interests of the communities around 2.5 million acres of federal land and the northern Sierra is no exception. I spoke with Micheal De Lasaux of the QLG steering committee about a month after the legislation was introduced, and he put it into terms perhaps least likely to be misinterpreted: "The Quincy Library Group is not the Forest Service and is technically under no obligation to inform the public of its activities." The group advertised their "unique, regional" character and gained national support, but neglected to actually travel to the different communities and inform environmental groups and community forums that any such regional approach was happening.

For the most part, people who usually have a significant interest in public lands management in the area had simply never heard of the Quincy Library Group, and if they had, they had no idea that the proposal would become legislation. When national environmental groups objected to the plan, QLG participants accused them of attempting to exert unfair influence in what they perceived as a regional issue. But, Sierra Pacific, the third largest recipient of federal subsidies under the US Forest Service timber road purchaser credit program, is hardly a local business. Unlike a number of its counterparts, the company restricts its operations to one region, controlling a vast portion of the resources there. But they exert what can only be described as national influence.

The supporting "science" behind the Quincy Library Group bill is largely based on references to a document of the somewhat insidious US Forest Service Heyoka Pacific Southwest Research Station, "How Dense Aggregations of Understory Vegetation, Increased Ladder Fuels and Stand Overcrowding Decrease the Risk of Crown Fire." Activists should investigate the Heyoka Pacific Southwest Research Station, as they appear to make no effort to inform the public how to contact them and their research cannot be found anywhere.

The Quincy plan calls for the logging of 40,000-60,000 acres a year under a previously untested system called "Defensible Fuel Profile Zones". This scheme is promoted ostensibly to reduce the risk of fire in the crown of trees. The system will thin canopy cover by 30 to 40 percent, increasing sunlight in the stands, promoting the growth of woody brush and ground vegetation and significantly boosting the risk of stand-replacement fire.

Altering the landscape composition of the Sierra Nevada may have effects even more far ranging than in most places. With relatively arid conditions, soils that are often termed "low-productive," and the presence of unusually opportunistic exotic vegetation, the forest structure and native landscape composition may never recover to the way they were before being subjected to industrial forestry. Road proximity, edge effects and fragmentation can all be pronounced in the Sierra. The greater the disturbance (i.e. logging), the more likely it is that shrub-like vegetation and invasion by exotics will give way to crown fire.

I have worked years clearing out this kind of brush during restoration projects, removing excessive fuels and allowing for native plant communities to return after logging. Brush and non-native species inevitably accumulate in areas where logging road construction has occurred. I have studied the various regenerative effects of stand-replacement fire and timber harvest, as well as the forest composition effects associated with ground fires and fire suppression, and I do not recall anyone ever suggesting that the removal of canopy cover would reduce the occurrence of high-intensity fires!

The Sierra Nevada, which typically experiences fires every six to 22 years (the fire-return interval), has been drastically altered by the effects of long-term fire suppression. Fires with a 100 percent mortality rate for mature trees are far more likely now than 100 years ago; ground fires are relatively unlikely but the presence of exactly this kind of logging, whether under previous kinds of harvest or as "Defensible Fuel Profile Zones," has played no small role in increasing the chance of crown fires.

For these fuel breaks to remain viable, they would have to be maintained rigorously, every three months, eight or nine months out of the year-an incredible amount of labor. And for every fuel break cut, there is only a one-time economic benefit, whereas the maintenance for every area implies an open-ended economic expenditure. The Forest Service already maintains a system of fuel breaks in the area-19,000 of them within the lands covered by the QLG proposal. These are rarely maintained due to lack of money and do not accomplish their intended outcome. If QLG is passed, the need for labor, in the form of ongoing manual maintenance, would have a greater impact on jobs in the region than the logging would. In very little time, the necessary expenses would literally outweigh the net revenue generated from the timber.

Even setting aside the notion of such an absurd management scheme, the sheer volume of wood to be removed should be scrutinized. At 60,000 acres a year, the five-year pilot project period will log 300,000 acres. It will take exactly 45.3 years before every designated wilderness, riparian reserve and critical habitat unit in all of the 2.5 million acres has been logged to ensure that it doesn't burn down!

For years, timber cutting levels on federal lands have been falling drastically. What the Quincy proposal would do, essentially, is return the annual timber cut back up to wildly unsustainable levels. The most alarming aspect of the QLG bill is, of course, the sweeping approval it received from Congress. Representatives were entirely willing to set aside science and reasonable economics to pass legislation, so long as the plan purported to be an agreement between environmentalists and resource extraction industries. This bill is winning support regardless of the lack of regional collaboration throughout the plan's development and regardless of the objection of virtually every major environmental group in the country.

The Quincy proposal is such a bad idea that even the most uniformly "moderate" of environmental groups, like the National Audubon Society, have publicly opposed it. If politicians are willing to look with such favor on a plan, despite its utter incongruence with everything its purported accomplishments, there's no reason to assume they won't do so again. The Western Ancient Forest Campaign testified to Congress that two other such plans had come to their attention since H.R. 858 was introduced. There's little reason to assume a central Idaho or southwestern Oregon version of the QLG bill won't come up soon.

The danger of this proposal should not be understated. It essentially allows federal forest management by whatever small group of people decides to call itself a collaborative effort-people who cannot participate in such a consensus process or cannot come to an agreement with the interested parties will simply be excluded.

Since there were no ardent activists supporting zero extraction from public land involved in the process, I doubt I was represented; chances are you weren't either. I've also had the fortune of consulting with a resident black bear on the southern border of the Tahoe National Forest. It has expressed opposition to such an arbitrary and absurd management practice being proposed for the northern Sierra. So should you. If a proposal is approved simply because it calls itself a representation of the interests of all parties, and the widespread objection of a majority of the environmental community is not enough to dissuade such a stance, then the danger is imminent.

The bill has experienced some fortunate delays in the Senate and tentatively will be voted on sometime in October. (The Senate version of the bill is being championed by both California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein).