Oregon: Cutting the forest down has the exact same benefits as not cutting the forest down?

If two management plans — one a logging ramp-up designed by the BLM,
the other a new recovery plan for the northern spotted owl designed by
the Fish and Wildlife Service — have got it right, this area above the
main Umpqua River near Tyee could one day teem with 15 to 20 pairs of
spotted owls.

And the timber industry will rebound. Rural Oregon —
especially Douglas County — will become self-sufficient again, weaning
itself off federal timber payments that for nearly a decade have kept
counties solvent. Designed to do what the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan
couldn’t, the BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revisions is a set of
management guidelines designed to provide clean water for fish,
diverse habitat for wildlife, and steady harvests for industry.
“There’s not only an environmental aspect to this, but there’s also a
business aspect to this,” said Jay Carlson, manager of the BLM’s
Roseburg District. About five years in the making, the Western Oregon
Plan Revisions stems from a lawsuit the Bush administration settled
with the timber industry. Better known by its acronym “Whopper”, the
WOPR is a very ambitious public lands management proposal. The draft
version alone received about 30,000 public comments. “We understand
there’s still a huge amount of controversy surrounding the Western
Oregon Plan Revisions,” Carlson said a few weeks ago following a
second lawsuit that had been filed against the plan. And that’s with a
scaled-back WOPR. Originally, the plan called for tripling the BLM’s
timber harvest on its 2.5 million acres in Western Oregon.But public
input and scientific reviews brought about a pared-down management
proposal, dropping the 727 million board feet of harvests a year to
500 million board feet. In the Roseburg District — 426,300 acres wide
— that would be 69 million board feet a year. “That’s not an
instantaneous thing,” Carlson said, noting the BLM would have to
increase staffing for preparing and consulting on timber sales, let
alone allow industry to bring on more jobs.
http://www.nrtoday.com/article/20081214/NEWS/812149982/1063/NEWS&ParentProfile=1055&title=Could%20WOPR%20resurrect%20industry%20and%20wildlife%3F

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