Restoring an ailing forest

Tahoe Daily Tribune

July 27, 1997
By Rob Bhatt
Tribune Staff Writer

Among the policy decisions that resulted from the Lake Tahoe Presidential Forum were those that endorsed and increased financial support for the U.S. Forest Service's current policy to restore the forest health.

The reaction to Comstock-era clear-cutting was restrictions on virtually all logging and aggressive fire suppression - causing an unnatural forest of trees that went unthinned for most of this century.

Several years of drought that began in the late 1980s weakened the health of the existing trees and left them susceptible to bark beetle infestation.

The past several summers have seen catastrophic wildfires across the Sierra Nevada, and many foresters fear that the Tahoe Basin has been ripe for a similar event for most of this decade. The type of erosion that could follow a major wildfire could result in irreparable harm to the lake's water quality.

The Forest Service has embarked on an ambitious plan in recent years to thin the fuel load that involves timber sales and controlled burns.

Included in President Bill Clinton's policy announcement Saturday were the following pledges of support to continue and enhance these efforts:

• Over the next five years, the Forest Service will spend $2 million to clear brush and dead wood from more than 3,500 federally owned lots interspersed with private commercial and residential lots in the Tahoe Basin.
• The Forest Service will use prescribed fire and other means to reduce fuels on approximately 3,000 acres of open forest lands each year. About 1,000 acres will be burned per year.
• The Forest Service will continue efforts to acquire environmentally sensitive and valuable parcels of land in the Tahoe Basin through various authorities including the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Burton-Santini Act. These purchases, all done on the basis of willing seller/willing buyer, will help reduce development pressures in the Tahoe Basin. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will commit $1 million of new funds annually in addition to the $1 million currently provided.
• The president will support the Lake Tahoe Basin Forest Health Consensus Group's efforts to shape, monitor and update a comprehensive and widely supported forest management strategy and ask that recommendations from the group be forwarded to the administration for needed changes in law or policy.