Instead, much of the debate has been subsumed by administrative process and fighting the onslaught of legislative attacks. President Clinton's 1994 Forest Plan was hailed by some as the definitive solution to westside forest management. However, the Clinton Plan allows timber cutting in both ancient forest reserves and streamside reserves, and Congress overrode even those modest protections with the savage Salvage Logging Rider in 1995-96. Only congressionally-designated wilderness areas were protected from the chainsaws unleashed by the Salvage Rider. Administratively-created reserves, like those designated by the Clinton Plan, simply do not provide permanent protection to the shrinking wild areas within our public forests.
Future administrations can simply reopen the reserves to logging.
Reducing our ancient forests to a complex series of acronyms was a brilliant ploy by the Clinton Administration and timber industry to deflate the public's emotional energy. That public concern has been proven repeatedly to be the foundation upon which wild places have been saved in the past. Conservationists understand and will fight to designate and defend wilderness because they understand it as an effective means of preserving clean drinking water and ancient forest habitat which nurtures our salmon and other forest-dependent species. Conservation biologists tell us that wilderness provides intact core areas which are the basis for long-term sustainability of ecosystem functions. Wilderness is the best means to insulate our common heritage from the corporate-sponsored politicians who value the forest first and foremost for what can be cut and hauled out on a truck .