[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 152 (Thursday, November 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12997-S12999]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  OMNIBUS CONSOLIDATED AND EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR 
                  FISCAL YEAR 1999--CONFERENCE REPORT

  (In the Record of October 21, 1998, on page S12785, a page of the 
text of Mrs. Feinstein's remarks was inadvertently omitted. The 
permanent Record will be corrected to reflect the following:)

[[Page S12998]]




                    Quincy Library Group Legislation

 Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I am very pleased that the 
Quincy Library Group bill has been included in the Omnibus 
Appropriations bill. This legislation embodies the consensus proposal 
of the Quincy Library Group, a coalition of environmentalists, timber 
industry representatives, and local elected officials in Northern 
California, who came together to resolve their long-standing conflicts 
over timber management on the national forest lands in their area.
  The Quincy Library Group legislation is a real victory for local 
consensus decision making. It proves that even some of the most 
intractable environmental issues can be resolved if people work 
together toward a common goal.
  I first met the Quincy Library Group back in 1992 when I was running 
for the Senate, and was then very impressed with what they were trying 
to do.
  The members of the Quincy Library Group had seen first hand the 
conflict between timber harvesting and jobs, environmental laws and 
protection of their communities and forests, and the devastation of 
massive forest fires. Their overriding concern was that a catastrophic 
fire could destroy both the natural environment and the potential for 
jobs and economic stability in their community. They were also 
concerned the ongoing stalemate over forest management was ultimately 
harming both the environment and their local economy.
  The group got together and talked things out. They decided to meet in 
a quiet, non-confrontational environment--the main room of the Quincy 
Public Library. They began their dialogue in the recognition that they 
shared the common goal of fostering forest health, keeping ecological 
integrity, assuring an adequate timber supply for area mills, and 
providing economic stability for their community.
  One of the best articles I have read about the Quincy Library Group 
process recently appeared in the Washington Post. Mr. President, I ask 
unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record at the end 
of my statement.
  THE PRESIDING OFFICER: Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See Exhibit 1.)
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, after dozens of meetings and a year 
and a half of negotiation, the Quincy Library Group developed an 
alternative management plan for the Lassen National Forest, Plumas 
National Forest, and the Sierraville Ranger District of the Tahoe 
National Forest.
  In the last five years, the group has tried to persuade the U.S. 
Forest Service to administratively implement the plan they developed. 
While the Forest Service was interested in the plan developed, they 
were unwilling to fully implement it. Negotiations and discussions 
began in Congress. This legislation is the result.


                  The Quincy Library Group Legislation

  Specifically, the legislation directs the Secretary of Agriculture to 
implement the Quincy Library Group's forest management proposal on 
designated lands in the Plumas, Lassen and Tahoe National Forests for 
five years as a demonstration of community-based consensus forest 
management. I would like to thank Senators Murkowski, Bumpers, and 
Craig, Representatives Herger and Miller, as well as the Clinton 
Administration, for the thoughts they contributed to the development of 
the final bill.
  The legislation establishes significant new environmental protections 
in the Quincy Library Group project area. It protects hundreds of 
thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive lands, including all 
California spotted owl habitat, as well as roadless areas. Placing 
these areas off limits to logging and road construction protects many 
areas that currently are not protected, including areas identified as 
old-growth and sensitive watersheds in the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem 
Project report.
  However, in the event that any sensitive old growth is not already 
included in the legislation's off base areas, the Senate Energy and 
Natural Resources Committee provided report language when the 
legislation was reported last year, as I requested, directing the 
Forest Service to avoid conducting timber harvest activities or road 
construction in these late successional old-growth areas. The 
legislation also requires a program of riparian management, including 
wide protection zones and streamside restoration projects.
  The Quincy Library Group legislation directs the Forest Service to 
amend the land and resource management plans for the Plumas, Lassen, 
and Tahoe National Forests to consider adoption of the Quincy Library 
Group plan in the forest management plans. The legislation does not 
require the Forest Service to continue implementing the Quincy Library 
Group pilot project once the forest plans are revised. The Senate 
Energy and Natural Resources Committee adopted an amendment, which I 
supported, to ensure that there is no conflict between the pilot 
project and the most current and best science reflected in any new 
forest plans.


                  Misinformation About The Legislation

  There have been a number of inaccurate statements made the Quincy 
Library Group legislation. I want to clear up three important points:
  First, every single environmental law, including the National 
Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act, will 
be followed as this proposal is implemented. The legislation explicitly 
states, ``Nothing in this section exempts the pilot project from any 
Federal environmental law.''
  The legislation requires an environmental impact statement to be 
completed before any resource management activities occur. It also 
provides for full public participation and input throughout the pilot 
project's implementation.
  Second, the Quincy Library Group legislation does not double the 
volume of logging on the affected national forests. The intent of this 
proposal has always been to replace, not supplement, current logging 
activity, and the legislation will provide for timber harvests similar 
to current levels.
  In a letter to me dated October 22, 1997, Ronald Stewart, Deputy 
Chief of Programs and Legislation for the Forest Service, states, 
``based on the agency's current estimates, the potential timber outputs 
that would be generated by this bill, if fully funded with additional 
appropriations, would not double but would remain consistent with the 
outputs provided from these forests over the last five years.''
  Third, the legislation explicitly prohibits the funding of Quincy 
Library Group projects through reallocation of funds from other 
national forests. The legislation explicitly states, ``The Secretary 
may not conduct the pilot project using funds appropriated for any 
other unit of the National Forest System.''
  The bottom line is that the Quincy Library Group legislation will 
provide strong protections for the environment while preserving the job 
base in the Northern Sierra--not just in one single company, but across 
35 area businesses, many of them small and family-owned.
  This Quincy Library Group legislation is strongly supported by local 
environmentalists, labor unions, elected officials, the timber 
industry, and 27 California counties. The House approved the Quincy 
Library Group legislation by a vote of 429 to one last year. The Senate 
Energy Committee reported the legislation last October. The legislation 
has been the subject of Congressional hearings and the focus of 
nationwide public discussion.
  I thank my colleagues for ensuring that this worthy pilot project has 
a chance.

                             Exhibit No. 1

               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 11, 1998]

                    Grass-Roots Seeds of Compromise

                (By Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer)

       Every month since 1993, about 30 environmentalists, 
     loggers, biologists, union representatives and local 
     government officials have met at the library of Quincy--a 
     timber town in northern California that has been the site of 
     a nasty 15-year battle over logging.
       Out of these monthly meetings has emerged a plan to manage 
     2.4 million acres of the surrounding national forests. 
     Instead of leaving the forests' ecological fate solely to 
     Washington-based agencies and national interest groups, the 
     once-bitter adversaries have tried to forge a compromise 
     solution on the ground--a green version of Jeffersonian 
     democracy. When the House of Representatives, notorious for 
     its discord on environmental legislation, approved the plan 
     429-1 in July 1997, the Quincy Library Group became the 
     symbol for a promising new means of resolving America's 
     intractable environmental disputes.

[[Page S12999]]

       The Quincy Library Group is one of scores of citizens' 
     associations that in the past decade have brought together 
     people who previously met only in court. Sometimes called 
     ``community-based conservation'' groups, they include the 
     Friends of the Cheat River, a West Virginia coalition working 
     to restore a waterway damaged by mining runoff; the Applegate 
     Partnership, which hopes to restore a watershed in 
     southwestern Oregon while keeping timber jobs alive, and 
     Envision Utah, which tries to foster consensus about how to 
     manage growth in and around Salt Lake City.
       Like many similar organizations, the Quincy Library Group 
     was born of frustration. In the 1980s, Quincy-based 
     environmental advocates, led by local attorney Michael B. 
     Jackson, attempted with varying success to block more than a 
     dozen U.S. Forest Service timber sales in the surrounding 
     Plumas, Lassen and Tahoe national forests. The constant 
     battles tied the federal agency in knots and almost shut down 
     Sierra Pacific Industries, the biggest timber company there, 
     imperiling many jobs. The atmosphere was ``openly hostile, 
     with agitators on both sides,'' says Linda Blum, a local 
     activist who joined forces with Jackson in 1990 and aroused 
     so much opprobrium that Quincy radio hosts denounced her on 
     the air for taking food from the mouths of the town's 
     children.
       Worn down and dismayed by the hostility in his community, 
     Jackson was ready to try something different. He got a chance 
     to do so late in 1992, when Bill Coates, a Plumas County 
     supervisor, invited the factions to talk to each other, face 
     to face. Coates suggested that the group work from forest-
     management plans proposed by several local environmental 
     organizations in the mid-1980s. By early 1993, they were 
     meeting at the library and soon put together a new proposal. 
     (The Forest Service eventually had to drop out because the 
     Federal Advisory Committee Act, which places cumbersome 
     requirements on groups who meet with federal agencies.) Under 
     this proposal, timber companies could continue thinning and 
     selectively logging in up to 70,000 acres per year, about the 
     same area being logged in 1993 but drastically lower than the 
     1990 level. Riverbanks and roadless areas, almost half the 
     area covered by the plan, would be off-limits.
       The Quincy group asked the Forest Service to incorporate 
     its proposal into the official plans for the three national 
     forests, but never got a definite answer. Convinced that the 
     agency was too dysfunctional to respond, in 1996 the group 
     took its plan to their congressman, Wally Herger, a 
     conservative Republican. Herger introduced the Quincy 
     proposal in the House, hoping to instruct the agency to heed 
     the wishes of local communities. It passed overwhelmingly--
     perhaps the only time that Reps. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), a 
     vehement property-rights advocate, and George Miller (D-
     Calif.) one of the greenest legislators on Capitol Hill, have 
     agreed on an environmental law. Then the bill went to the 
     Senate--and slammed into resistance from big environmental 
     lobbies.
       From the start, the Quincy group had kept in touch with the 
     Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council and 
     the Sierra Club. The three organizations offered comments, 
     and the Quincy group incorporated some. Still, the national 
     groups continued to balk, instead submitting detailed 
     criteria necessary to ``merit'' their support. When the 
     Quincy plan became proposed legislation, the national groups 
     stepped up their attacks. The Quincy approach, said Sierra 
     Club legal director Debbie Sease, had a ``basic underlying 
     flaw'' using a cooperative, local decision-making process to 
     manage national assets. Jay Watson, regional director of the 
     Wilderness Society, said: ``Just because a group of local 
     people can come to agreement doesn't mean that it is good 
     public policy.'' And because such parochial efforts are 
     inevitably ill-informed and always risk domination by rich, 
     sophisticated industry representatives, the Audubon Society 
     warned, they are ``not necessarily equipped to view the 
     bigger picture.'' Considering this bigger picture, it 
     continued, ``is the job of Congress, and of watchdog groups 
     like the National Audubon Society.''
       Many local groups regard national organizations as more 
     interested in protecting their turf than in achieving 
     solutions that advance conservation. ``It's interesting to me 
     that it has to be top-down,'' said Jack Shipley, a member of 
     the Applegate Partnership. ``It's a power issue, a control 
     issue.'' The big groups' insistence on veto power over local 
     decision-making ``sounds like the old rhetoric--either their 
     way or no way,'' Shipley says. ``No way'' may be the fate of 
     the Quincy bill. Pressured by environmental lobbies, Sen. 
     Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) placed a hold on it in the Senate.
       Despite the group's setback, community-based conservation 
     efforts like Quincy provide a glimpse of the future. Under 
     the traditional approach to environmental management, 
     decisions have been delegated to impartial bureaucracies--the 
     Forest Service, for example, for national forests. Based on 
     the scientific evaluations of ecologists and economists, the 
     agencies then formulate the ``right'' policies, preventing 
     what James Madison called ``the mischief of faction.''
       But today, according to Mark Sagoff of the University of 
     Maryland Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, it is 
     the bureaucrats who are beset by factions; big business and 
     environmental lobbies. For these special-interest groups, he 
     argues, ``deliberating with others to resolve problems 
     undermines the group's mission, which is to press its purpose 
     or concern as far as it can in a zero-sum game with its 
     political adversaries.'' The system ``benefits the lawyers, 
     lobbyists and expert witnesses who serve in various causes as 
     mercenaries,'' he says, ``but it produces no policy worth a 
     damn.''
       In contrast, community-based conservation depends on all 
     sides acknowledging the legitimacy of each other's values. 
     Participants are not guaranteed to get exactly what they 
     want; no one has the power to stand by and judge the 
     ``merit'' of the results. Although ecology and economics play 
     central roles, ecologists and economists have no special 
     place. Like everyone else, they must sit at the table as 
     citizens, striving to make their community and its 
     environment a better place to live.
       In short, Quincy's efforts and those like it represent a 
     new type of environmentalism: republican environmentalism, 
     with a small ``r.'' This new approach cannot address global 
     problems like climate change. Nor should it be routinely 
     accepted if a local group decides on irrevocable changes in 
     areas of paramount national interest--filling in the Grand 
     Canyon, say. But even if some small town would be foolish 
     enough to decide to do something destructive, there's a whole 
     framework of national environment laws that would prevent it 
     from happening. And, despite the resistance of the national 
     organizations, the environmental movement should not reject 
     this new approach out of hand. Efforts to protect the 
     environment over the past 25 years have produced substantial 
     gains, but have lately degenerated into a morass of 
     litigation and lobbying. Community-based conservation has the 
     potential to change things on the ground, where it matters 
     most.

                          ____________________