From her office in Garberville on California's northern coast, Christine Ambrose keeps watch over four National Forests that are home to several threatened species and some of the largest stands of old-growth trees in the continental US.
A National Forest Monitor for the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), Ambrose says that the forests she looks over (The Klamath, Shasta-Trinity, Mendocino, and Six Rivers) are "probably the biggest, best, most beautiful forest left in the country short of Alaska ... it's just gorgeous. I could rave for hours about the amazing country that's up here." What's left, of course, is just a small slice of the great forests which once spread from the coast to the volcanic peaks of the southern Cascades, known as the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion.
"In northern California, we have the largest concentration of old-growth forest left. I don't know if you've ever been up through the forests of Washington and Oregon, but they have been logged to hell. They haven't got anything left like what we've got. And I think we're gonna increasingly see that this is where the fight is really gonna take place, in Northern California."
Ambrose's prediction is based on solid evidence. For the past two years, the Bush administration has been waging a relentless battle to open millions of acres of federal forests to large-scale commercial logging.
Adopted in 1994 by the BLM and Forest Service to resolve the violent disagreements about land use between logging companies and conservationists, the plan imposed sharp restrictions on logging in the region. In early 2002, claiming that logging in the Northwest no longer posed a threat to the endangered spotted owl, the Bush administration lifted the environmental survey requirements written into the plan. The Forest Service has proposed expanding its use of "categorical exclusions" to approve logging and road-building projects without public comment or environmental review.
"Typically, [a categorical exclusion] has been used for things like mowing the lawn of the barracks of the campground," explains Ambrose. "What they're doing now is taking categorical exclusions and applying them towards projects that typically would have gone through environmental review -- things like hazard tree removal or, now at this point, even small scale timber sales. So, under the bush administration, much larger projects would then be categorically excluded from environmental review... Under a categorical exclusion, they make the decision to do the project and there is no opportunity for public input."
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