By Pete Sorenson

Back in the 1970s, one of my first jobs was working in Washington, D.C., as a legislative assistant to Rep. Jim Weaver. As a staff member for a congressman who represented a big chunk of Western Oregon, we heard from average folks and lobbyists alike on all sorts of issues ­ including federal forest management.

Commissioner Faye Stewart’s column in the Sept. 21 Register-Guard, “Let’s get the facts straight about county timber payments,” reminded me who some of my most frequent visitors were back in those days ­ county commissioners and timber industry lobbyists. You can guess what the message was: “Get out the cut.”

Their request had a simple motivation. County government funding was tied to revenue generated from clear-cutting public forests on Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands.

In 1964, cutting on these federal public lands in Oregon had reached an all-time high of over 5 billion board feet. That’s the equivalent of 1 million log trucks heading out of Oregon’s forests in a single year. Much of it consisted of old-growth logs.

By the 1970s, Congress had passed laws, with overwhelming support, to protect clean water, endangered species and the general health of our nation’s environment. County commissioners and their timber industry backers in Oregon saw a threat to their free ride.

I remember them flying out to Washington once a month to demand an increased cut on federal land. Not surprisingly, they used the same tired arguments that they still use today.

The timber industry and some county commissioners may want you to believe that environmentalists are to blame for our impending county funding problems ­ which are very real ­ but they need a history lesson.

For nearly two decades, federal agencies ­ enabled by politicians eager to get out the cut ­ violated federal laws and kept logging at unsustainable levels. By the 1990s, Oregon’s ancient forests were reduced to one-tenth their original size, our coastal streams were nearly inhospitable to native salmon, and an ecological crisis was fast unfolding.

In those days, many organizations and individuals warned of the consequences of such an irresponsible logging program. One of those groups was Oregon Wild, then called the Oregon Natural Resources Council. It makes Stewart’s claim that Oregon Wild is somehow “short-sighted” all the more ironic.

In reality, schemes that rely on liquidating federal forests to supplant the current county payments system are so untenable it’s shocking that Congress is even considering them (as they did in a hearing Sept. 22 for a harebrained bill that would mandate drastic increases in logging at the expense of all environmental laws).

Even if we set aside the still-depressed domestic market for wood products, an analysis by Headwaters Economics shows that we’d have to log up to 48.2 billion board feet per year across the nation to make up for Secure Rural Schools payments.

And to accomplish that logging, the federal government would have to spend up to 17 times more than it currently does. In Lane County, this would mean logging 10 times more on federal lands than the past 15 years’ average.

Of course, the case for not drastically increasing clear-cutting in our public forests goes beyond the purely economic. We rely on these forests for clean drinking water. We take our children and grandchildren hiking amidst their towering trees. More and more, we realize that clear-cutting our forests puts us on a one-way track to climate catastrophe.

Going back to rampant over-cutting of these forests is not the only way. Groups such as Oregon Wild are teaming with local watershed councils, progressive timber operators and management officials to find common ground on restoring Oregon’s forests while also producing merchantable timber.

A Sept. 19 column in The Register-Guard, “Siuslaw forest stewardship a model for entire region,” highlighted the award-winning work of the Siuslaw National Forest and its partners in blazing the trail towards this restoration paradigm.

While that work will help to provide jobs and keep our forests healthy, we still need to tackle the vexing issue of county funding. Reauthorization of the Secure Rural Schools Act is the best solution, but in a fiscally tight Congress, we can’t expect the money to continue to flow.

We may have to search for new ideas like shifting management of the interspersed BLM forests to the U.S. Forest Service and saving a huge chunk of the $110 million per year currently spent to manage the O&C lands.

We could also look at stemming the flow of timber (and jobs) that heads overseas and deprives Oregon mills of much needed work. We can promote green jobs through forest and watershed restoration. And we should explore opportunities for payments from the carbon sequestration our federal forests do naturally through their growth.

Whatever the solution to our county funding issues, history has taught us that we can’t cut our way to prosperity.

We’ve tried that route, and this is the mess we’re left with.

Pete Sorenson represents south Eugene on the Lane County Board of Commissioners.