U.S. to Let Logging Continue if Firm Helps Protect Woodpecker

WASHINGTON —  The nation’s biggest forest products company won a government promise Thursday not to interfere with its timber harvesting as long as the company protects an endangered woodpecker living in its trees.

Georgia-Pacific Corp. and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced agreement on the company’s efforts to help save the red-cockaded woodpecker from extinction in four Southern states.

In the first-of-a-kind agreement between the government and a private landowner, Georgia-Pacific promised to locate and mark woodpeckers on its land, keep buffer zones around the pine trees where the birds live, provide adequate foraging habitat and prevent road-building in their area.

Georgia-Pacific owns more than 4 million acres of Southern timberland, of which 56,000 acres have been identified as habitat for the eight-inch birds in Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi.

The company’s president, Peter Correll, said Thursday that logging would likely continue to some extent on three-fourths of that acreage without harming the bird.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said the arrangement involved “an extraordinary degree of cooperation” and set a precedent in the Administration’s efforts to avoid the kind of stalemate between environmentalists, government and loggers that exists in the Northwest forest habitat of the threatened spotted owl.

“The agreement is designed to anticipate problems and work them out in a management framework which is entirely outside the traditional adversary legal framework that is invoked in the latter stages of the administration of the Endangered Species Act,” he said.

Michael Bean, an endangered-species expert from the Environmental Defense Fund, a major environmental group, joined Babbitt and Georgia-Pacific officials at a news conference. He called the agreement “a major step forward” in saving the woodpecker.

“Creative solutions like this are necessary if we are to succeed in preserving this endangered species,” he said.

Separately, the White House announced creation of three task forces to help solve the Pacific Northwest owl dispute within the 60-day deadline President Clinton set at his April 2 forest conference.