The Los Utes Case: Forestry Seeks Its Soul; Frank Talk about a Bungled Timber Sale Stirs Up Ghosts of Pinchot and Leopold and Poses Haunting Questions about Environmental Ethics

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Everyone knows that timber harvesting is a mess business a messy business, hard on sensitive soils and sensitive souls. A badly botched recent timber sale on the Santa Fe National Forest raised questions in my mind about where the ethical soul resides in today's practice of forestry. Can there-and should there-be an environmental ethic for foresters?

The father of the land ethic, Aldo Leopold, started his career here in New Mexico. In Leopold's day New Mexicans knew foresters as heros. They were responsible for the successful rehabilitation of our watersheds from the tragic 19th-century grazing and timbering frenzy that devastated our state. Since the days of Leopold, however, the Forest Service seems to have squandered its heroic stature. For example, last year the agency blundered on the 900-acre Los Utes timber sale in the Santa Fe Forest-and blew it in a fashion that has left everyone disturbed.

The logging began in the winter of 1989 near Los Utes Spring in the headwaters of Capulin Canyon, in the national forest's Jemez (pronounced Hay-muz") District about three miles upstream from the boundary of Bandelier National Monument. To complicate the picture, the Jemez Mountains are administratively fragmented. In addition to the naSkid trails made to access Los Utes oldgrowth timber head up 60-degree slopes to ridge tops and canyon walls.

National forest and a 100,000-acre private inholding, the 30,000-acre Bandelier is administered by the National Park Service.

The ethical aspects of the Los Utes sale troubled me enough to arrange visits with Maynard Rost, supervisor of Santa Fe National Forest; Bud Stephenson, district ranger; Mike Morrison, timber staff officer; and Craig Allen, ecologist for nearby Bandelier.

None of the horror stories I had heard from environmentalists prepared me for the sight of a logging road punched straight up a "protected" watercourse. Skid trails headed off at right angles up 60-degree slopes to provide access to oldgrowth timber along the narrow canyon walls and ridge tops. Nothing I had seen anywhere compared to the way these skid trails had broken the thin organic soil mantle, leaving four-foot-deep channels ground down into the soft pumice.

Mike Morrison said, "There were some …