43 



Can you give me an idea of even the four billion, not the billion, 

 but the four billion we thought we would get, what percentage that 

 would be of the total available harvestable timber to give these 

 folks an idea, just to show them what percentage it is? Can you 

 give me a ballpark figure? 



Mr. Geisinger. There are hundreds of billions of board feet of 

 standing timber on Federal lands in the Northwest. I can provide 

 that information for the committee. I san safely say it is probably 

 at least 450 or 500 billion board feet. 



Mrs. Smith of Washington. But it is not 100 billion, so the four 

 billion is not even four percent? 



Mr. Geisinger. No. It is a minuscule percentage of what is avail- 

 able on the entire land base. But again, the problem with Option 

 9 is we are left with about 12 percent of the Federal lands to man- 

 age in any kind of predictable fashion, and finding areas to put up 

 timber sales is not the least of the agency's problems, and then 

 once they do, they go through this incredible process to get final 

 approval. That is why the performance has been as poor as it has 

 been. 



Mrs. Smith of Washington. I want to have you address one 

 more thing. I listened to Ms. Phillips as she nobly tried to answer, 

 and I realized something again that kind of amazes me. What I 

 heard was the Forest Service referred to twice, once as if they had 

 no options in letting these sales and they would have to go into the 

 most sensitive wilderness areas, and the other was the Forest Serv- 

 ice has a lot of latitude. 



Clarify for me why it is bad to let this administration's Forest 

 Service under their direction select the sales environmentally. Why 

 would they choose bad sales? Why should she be afraid when there 

 is that much land mass? Why would she think this administration 

 would go after the most sensitive, and have they shown to do that? 



Mr. Geisinger. I think Ms. Phillips can speak for herself on that. 

 I think the people closest to the ground are the ones most capable 

 of making those decisions, and they have to be given some 

 empowerment to comply with the standards and guidelines that 

 have been imposed upon them. I think oversight in the Department 

 is perfectly legitimate, and I think that is why the authors of the 

 salvage amendment gave sole discretion to the Secretaries of Agri- 

 culture and Interior to approve or disapprove of any timber sale. 



The interference, frankly, is coming from above those levels, and 

 if we are ever going to be successful in implementing this plan or 

 some other plan, the agencies are going to have to be reempowered 

 to make a lot of those decisions on their own and to be allowed to 

 move forward with them. 



The Forest Service and BLM are the only two agencies that I am 

 aware of that gives the public access to challenging their decisions 

 the way they do. I mean, I think of the Defense Department. If you 

 could challenge some specifications on the construction of an F-18 

 fighter plane with a 32-cent stamp and a letter, I would hate to 

 think of what would happen to our nation's defense. But there are 

 layers upon layers of opportunities for people to challenge what is 

 happening in our natural resource managing agencies and I think 

 the public certainly ought to have access to asking questions and 

 challenging decisions, but not to the extent that they can bring ev- 



