OPINION EDITORIAL
Contact: David A. Bischel (916) 444-6592
March 24, 2005
Ebbetts Pass Group:
Putting Itself Above the Law Means
Loss of Jobs and Taxpayer Dollars
By
David A. Bischel
President, California Forestry
Association
So you’re of legal driving age and the
law says you’re allowed to drive your car, which meets all emissions and other
regulations. But your neighbors
don’t want you driving your car because it isn’t a hybrid and therefore,
they believe, a threat to the environment.
So they take you to court. They
lose, so they appeal. They lose
their appeal and take you to the California Supreme Court, where they lose yet
again. All three courts determined
that your car met all California emissions requirements and is therefore legal
for operation.
But your neighbors decide to take the law
into their own hands and start a lobbying campaign in your community to apply
public pressure for you to ditch your car and get a hybrid.
Sound far-fetched?
Don’t be so sure. A local
activist group, Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, is using these very tactics against
Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) to try and stop its harvesting plans.
Over a three-year period, three trial
judges, three appellate judges, and the Supreme Court of California rejected six
lawsuits by Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch against the Calif. Department of
Forestry’s (CDF) approval of SPI’s harvesting plans.
The courts found that CDF and SPI followed
the laws that regulate harvesting plans — arguably the toughest laws in the
world for forest harvesting — and found sufficient evidence to support CDF’s
approval of the plans.
The trials cost hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, countless hours of court time and appear to have been intended not to protect the environment, but to interfere with harvest plans by anti-logging activists who fundamentally oppose harvesting trees ¾ even on private land ¾ and to cause as much pain and difficulty for SPI as possible.
Only the pain is now being felt by the 150
families of SPI employees that are on temporary layoff because of these costly
delays to harvest its own timber. SPI
operates on a sustainable basis to help supply Californians’ demand for wood.
Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch apparently doesn’t want you to have
sustainable California-grown wood from either private or public ownership.
The group continues to oppose approved
harvest plans in Tuolumne County in the 5th Appellate Court.
As SPI struggles to keep its workers on the job due to a decreasing
supply of federal timber in Tuolumne County, efforts by its “neighbors” to
circumvent the law in an attempt to stop legal harvesting on its private forests
is outrageous.
California law requires forest products
companies to submit a Timber Harvest Plan before harvesting any trees on their
land to show they are taking the proper precautions to avoid or correct any
significant adverse impacts on the environment.
Great attention is given for protecting water quality and animal
habitats, particularly for spotted owls in the Sierras.
The harvest plans serve as the functional equivalent of an Environmental
Impact Report (EIR) under the Calif. Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and costs
forestland owners about $30,000 each to prepare.
The public rightly has the opportunity to
comment on all harvesting plans. And
we all have the right to an opinion on whether trees should be harvested.
However, the efforts of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch’s frivolous lawsuits
and recently announced public relations campaign attacking SPI illustrates an
intention not to protect the environment but to impose its beliefs, and the
hardship they bring, on these 150 families and everyone else.
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David
A. Bischel, president of the California Forestry Association, is a Registered
Professional Forester
with a forestry degree from UC Berkeley and a natural resources degree from UC
Davis.