Oakland, CA., U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California:
Federal judge Claudia Wilkins ruled late February in favor of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, the Mendocino Environmental Center and other claimants that federal watchdogs had improperly opened the door to imports of timber products from forests outside North America.
Judge Wilkins granted plaintiffs' motion that an Environmental Impact Statement prepared by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to support rules it promulgated last year is inadequate. She ordered plaintiffs to submit a motion within thirty days defining possible solutions.
U.S. multinational timber companies eager to cut plantation and native forests on several continents sought rules allowing timber imports under minimal pest exclusion standards. Public interest groups and forest pest experts contended that timber imports allowed under the rule guarantee the entrance and dissemination of foreign forest pests capable of destroying entire species of native trees.
"Forest pests imported from outside the U.S. have already destroyed the American chestnut and the elm, which caused great economic and environmental losses. The white pine is currently under attack from a foreign pest, which in turn may cause the demise of the grizzly bear in the last of its habitat. And here in California we are helplessly watching our own native Monterey pine succumb to a pest brought in from forests on the other side of the continent," said Betty Ball of Mendocino Environmental Center, co-plaintiff in the lawsuit. "We're thankful Judge Wilkins recognized what's at risk and ruled in our - and the forests' - favor."
Wilkins ruled that an Environmental Impact Statement prepared to support timber import regulations was flawed because it failed to examine several key issues, including whether scientific evidence supports the use of methyl bromide to kill pests hitchhiking into the U.S. with the imports.
"Methyl bromide does not kill pests hidden deep in green logs - yet it is the only pest-killing requirement for logs currently being imported into West Coast ports from as far away as New Zealand," noted Patricia Clary, director of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Clary serves on a U.N. committee studying alternatives to methyl bromide for the international treaty on ozone depletion.
"We're gratified that Judge Wilkins noted the inconsistencies of methyl bromide requirements for timber imports, and that she ruled in our favor regarding the health impacts of pesticides used to kill forest pests once they come in," Clary said. "Rachel Carson wrote about the use of DDT in the failed attempt to stop the imported Dutch elm disease in her book Silent Spring; we don't want to see those scenes repeated with a different set of diseases, trees and pesticides." Attorneys Sharon Duggan and David Williams represented CATs and the MEC. Dr. Fields Cobb, a U.C. Berkeley forest pathologist and Dr. David Wood, a U.C. Berkeley entomologist wrote expert comments for the plaintiffs. Declarations were also submitted by three Northcoast county agricultural commissioners - John Faulkenstrom of Humboldt, Dave Bengston of Mendocino and Glenn Anderson of Del Norte. Falkenstrom described inspections of imported wood conducted by his office and a recent find of "thousands" of living nematodes - a microscopic round worm - in sawdust at the Schmidbauer mill in Eureka where fumigated logs from New Zealand were being milled. All three commissioners expressed concern that living organisms had survived debarking and methyl bromide fumigation required under the federal rule.
As Bengston stated, "The possibility of a pest being introduced into California through the importation of logs and other unmanufactured wood articles and wreaking havoc with the California forests and environment is very real."
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
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