Clear-cut choice for forest
Times Union
February 13th, 2013
Clear-cut choice for forest
Environmentalists urge APA delay in new rules
By Brian Nearing
ALBANY — New rules on potential clear-cutting of Adirondack forests are on the verge of being adopted by the Adirondack Park Agency, with environmental groups warning changes could fuel much more logging.
On Tuesday, an environmental coalition urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo to put the brakes on Thursday's planned vote by the park agency, while a spokesman for the timber industry said fears of rampant clear-cutting are unfounded.
Clear-cutting is the taking all trees in a parcel, rather than selectively cutting trees, and was rampant in the Adirondacks during the 19th century. Public concern over large areas of clear-cut forest and the environmental destruction it caused helped foster the political consensus to create the Adirondack Park more than a century ago.
Under existing rules, the APA conducts an environmental review before its commissioners consider permits to clear-cut 25 acres or more. Permits are rare, with only three sought and then issued in the last two decades.
Under the changes, which could affect hundreds of thousand of acres of privately owned forests, logging permits for clear-cuts of any size would be granted routinely to forest owners whose property was certified as environmentally sustainable by either of two outside not-for-profit groups — the Forest Stewardship Council or the Sustainable Forest Initiative.
Existing requirements for public notice and comment prior to a permit being issued would be discontinued, and a vote by park commissioners would no longer be required before permits were issued.
Opponents likened that to the APA outsourcing authority over logging in the Adirondacks to the two certification programs, while also leaving the public uninformed about potential clear-cuts until after logging had already started.
"Any debate over clear-cutting as a tool is not the point. It can do some good in some habitats," said Dan Plumley, a partner with Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve, a Niskayuna-based environmental group. "The point is public transparency and maintaining the authority and role of the park agency. People want to know that the agency is still watching."
That group was joined in opposition to the new rules by Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club – Atlantic Chapter, Protect the Adirondacks, Adirondack Mountain Club, Adirondack Wildlife Refuge and Rehabilitation Institute, Northeast Ecological Restoration Society, and Champlain Area Trails network; the groups combined have 100,000 members in New York.
Keith McKeever, a spokesman for the park agency, said changes would give loggers a "greater sense of predictability" and encourage more property owners to join two certification program that have "the highest forestry standards in the world."
He said the changes would mean "healthier forests and longer-term investments in the region's forest product industry."
Eric Carlson, a spokesman for the Empire State Forest Products Industry, an Albany-based lobbying group, said he didn't foresee the new permits unleashing a surge of Adirondack clear-cutting.
A provision that the APA review the proposed permit system after three years would prevent forest owners from "doing anything strange or provocative ... the fears and concerns being expressed by some won't come to fruition."
He said the park agency environmental reviews are a "disincentive" to forest owners who want to clear-cut, and predicted more clear-cuts would be 50 acres or less.
John Sheehan, a spokesman for the Adirondack Council, said the two private certification programs are not identical, which could encourage property owners to go with the less-stringent option. The Forest Stewardship Council has stronger environmental credentials, Sheehan said, while the Sustainable Forest Initiative was crafted by the logging industry.
"Neither one is equal to the Adirondack Park Agency environmental review that they are currently required to perform," said Sheehan. Logging is "not a crop that suddenly goes bad, so a couple of months of review at the park agency should not mean anything at all. We wonder why there is a need for this new system."
Sheehan added: "A lot of damage can be done in three years." Less than a dozen corporations and timber investment management organizations own nearly a million acres in the Adirondack Park that could be opened up under the proposed new rules, said Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks.
