Environmentalists try to block logging near Tahoe

In 2008, a commission empaneled by Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reported on the causes of the previous year's Angora Fire in northwest Nevada, which wrought $140 million in property damage, including the destruction of 254 South Lake Tahoe homes.

The commission only confirmed what most local residents already knew, that unresponsive local, state and federal bureaucracies had imposed land-use restrictions -- under the guise of environmental protection -- that put their regulatory authority ahead of fire prevention and public safety

The commission's report zeroed in on the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board for failing to recognize that wildfires cause significantly more damage to the lake's clarity than fire prevention measures. The report said both agencies needed to streamline the permitting process for tree clearing "with priority given to protection of life, property and the environment, in that order." Overgrown forests in and around communities should be thinned within five years, and throughout the entire Tahoe basin within a decade, the commission said.

Four years have passed. Now, in keeping with those sensible recommendations, the Forest Service plans to allow logging of about half the 3,000 acres that burned in June 2007 is part of an overall restoration project intended to help speed regrowth and reduce the threat of future catastrophic fires.

Guess what?

The Earth Island Institute and Center for Biological Diversity promptly sued, saying they have no problem with cutting trees with a diameter of less than 10 inches, but the agency's plan to log some trees nearly two feet thick and to remove dead standing trees to reduce fire threats is unacceptable. Why? Because black-backed woodpeckers have now come down from higher elevations to harvest wood-boring beetles from the dead trees.

"The black-backed woodpecker is one of the rarest bird species in the entire Sierra Nevada, and the Forest Service is pushing it toward extinction," opines Chad Hanson, executive director of the institute's Sierra-based John Muir Project.

Note the careful use of the phrase "in the ... Sierra Nevada." In fact, black-backed woodpeckers are widespread across forested Alaska and southern Canada, as far east as Labrador. They are not federally listed as either endangered or threatened. As a matter of fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists this as a species "of least concern."

This is an old game, similar to declaring the alligator endangered "in Arizona" in order to block development under the guise of "protecting" some isolated pond where a few hitchhikers may have managed to survive.

Monday, a federal appeals court saw through the tactic, clearing the way for the Forest Service to start logging near Lake Tahoe. In making its ruling, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco specifically rejected claims that the project violates environmental laws and will jeopardize the survival of the woodpecker.

The Forest Service is hardly infallible. Yes, interested parties should challenge their assumptions. But the woodpeckers will head back to higher elevations before long, anyway. Meantime, how do the Earth Island Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity rank fire risks to human life and property, as compared to the convenience of the black-backed woodpecker?