Subject: FW: SW BODIVERSITY ALERT #35


Subject: SW BODIVERSITY ALERT #35

* ************* Southwest Biodiversity Alert #35 *****************
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*            southwest center for biological diversity           *
*                      ksuckling@sw-center.org                   *
*             http://www.envirolink.org/orgs/sw-center           *
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1. ENVIROS INTERVENE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DEVELOPMENT BATTLE

2. APPEAL VICTORY: ARIZONA TIMBER SALE WITHDRAWN

3. EDITORIAL: ENVIROS HAVE RIGHT TO 'UNLOG' SALVAGE TIMBER SALE


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1. ENVIROS INTERVENE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DEVELOPMENT BATTLE

The Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, the Carmel Mountain
Conservancy, and Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve have
filed to intervene in a suit brought by two developers against the
City of San Diego. A rival developer has intervened on the City's
behalf. The City and all the developers are opposing our our
involvement.

In 1995, the City decided to essentially remove an important
wildlife area (Neighborhood 8A / Carmel Mountain) from development
plans. While pursuing aquisition funding, however, it allowed Pardee
Construction to begin development. At the same time, it put two other
developers (Mesa Top Properties and the Torrey Pines Investment
Group) on hold. When it was learned that Pardee was counting the
other developers' land as "open space" in its plans, the deal blew
up. All construction is on hold while the two developers sue the
city. Pardee has intervened to insure it will be sole developer. The
Southwest Center is trying to intervene to prevent a settlement
whereby all three are allowed to carve up San Diego's little
remaining open space. The City' opposition to our involvement
indicates that a deal in the works.


2. APPEAL VICTORY: ARIZONA TIMBER SALE WITHDRAWN

Following an appeal by the Southwest Center and the Northern Arizona
Sierra Club, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest has withdrawn the
Gentry Timber Sale. The controversial sale also drew interventions
from the White Mountain Conservation League and the Arizona
Department of Game and Fish.

The old growth timber sale was issued despite a standing court order
on all logging on every National Forest in Arizona and New Mexico.
The Apache-Sitgreaves has a history of violating court orders and
settlement agreements. Several months ago, it began to log
despite the injunction, bringing down the rath of a federal judge on
Jack Ward Thomas.


3. EDITORIAL: ENVIROS HAVE RIGHT TO 'UNLOG' SALVAGE TIMBER SALE

AZ Daily Star, Sept. 27, 1996

`Un-LOGGING'


It may seem a stunt, this month's refusal by a Tucson environmental
group to cut down 714 dead trees it purchased in the Chiricahua
Mountains in a U.S. Forest Service ``timber salvage'' sale.

But think again.

In truth, the environmentalists have mounted a serious bid to reform
the government's flawed administration of the public's land using
markets as well as regulations.

Tucson's Southwest Center for Biological Diversity initiated its
challenge last month when it entered a USFS lottery to buy - for $5
apiece - 1,600 trees left scorched but standing after 1994's
monthlong Rattlesnake forest fir e.

On that occasion, the Forest Service offered the logs as one of a
half-dozen sales in Arizona and New Mexico authorized by the
disastrous ``salvage'' rider passed by Congress last year. Promptly
thereafter, the center won a portion of the burned ponderosa and fir,
and paid for it.

However, when the ecology group reiterated it planned to leave the
trees in place to foster biodiversity, the Forest Service demurred.
Log the trees by Oct. 14, required the Douglas District of the
Coronado National Forest, or forgo them.

The implication: Only loggers have a right to buy federal timber.
Only timber-cutting composes a legitimate use of sale-allotment
timber. Which is why the Southwest Center now challenges that
implicit dicta as other environmental groups have challenged timber
sale practices in Washington state federal forests and grazing permit
auctions on New Mexico state ranges.

It may seem hard, from one perspective, to question the Forest
Service stipulation here. Salvage permits, ``non-use'' penalties,
requirements for ``resource removal'': These remain the basic
machinery of the commodity-oriented bureaucracies that for 60 years
have managed the West's trees and grass to produce lumber and
livestock. Such rules and contracts, in fact, compelled loggers and
ranchers to adhere to the superior vision of progressive
conservation.

However, that was then. Today a virtual consensus in the West holds
that federal management has been flawed management, and that the
agencies' myriad permitting rules have failed to protect forests,
streams, and rangelands or to allocate them efficiently and equitably
among competing users.

Given that, the government should honor the Southwest Center's
``un-logging'' proposal and accept other
environmentally-progressive, market-sound resource contracts. No
method offers so fair or swift a way to move land uses in
environmentally aware directions while maximizing economic returns
from taxpayer resources.

The Forest Service should allow those who will pay to do it to leave
trees alone, just as the Bureau of Land Management should make
grazing permits transferable to people other than ranchers. This
would end the monopoly resource-extraction has enjoyed across the
public West. Likewise, it would open the diverse lands of a changing
region to a diversity of possibilities.

The Southwest Center could allow dead trees to decay naturally,
providing it paid top-money for the privilege.

Sportsmen's clubs, as resource consultant Karl Hess suggests, could
lease grazing allotments for hunting preserves.

Ranchers could remove cattle from their ranges and see if people
would pay more for wildlife-watching in cow-free meadows, or fishing
in green stream bottoms - entrepreneurial activities now forbidden a
lease-holder.

Ultimately, the sheer size of the emerging New West recreation
demand would likely shift much public land use to higher-valued,
greener activities than grazing and tree-cutting without reducing
federal income. This would be real and lasting change.

One final reason remains for the new market-worshiping Congress to
require agencies to embrace green markets and successful green bids.

It would honor the idea that the federal lands belong to all
Americans, not just the loggers and ranchers. Sometimes forgotten,
this signal motion needs remembering.