
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 26, 1994                   TAG: 9405260082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

FOREST BEST FOR PLAYING, NOT LOGGING

Recreation in the southern Appalachian national forests contributes more than 10 times as much economic benefit to the region as does logging in those forests, the Wilderness Society said in a report Wednesday.

The report is based on a two-year study of economic conditions in an 88-county region of five states, including Virginia. It estimated that recreation benefits to the region total $379 million annually, compared with $32 million a year in benefits from logging.

Wilderness Society President Jon Roush said the study shows that protecting the biological diversity of the six national forests in the southern Appalachians ``makes sense on purely economic grounds.''

But the forest-products industry disputed the report, arguing that by the Forest Service's own accounting, logging in the southern Appalachian national forests provides $49 million in local economic benefits and $7 million in federal taxes.

``One must question the validity of their assertion that you can get everything from service industries,'' said Deborah Baker, director of the Southern Timber Purchasers Council. ``The bottom line in any economy is you have to have a strong manufacturing base in order to have a strong service sector.''

The report said the southern Appalachian region has been moving rapidly away from logging and other resource-extraction industries in recent years. Since 1969, the region's service industries added eight times as many jobs as those involved in extracting resources.

Despite that trend, the report said the Forest Service has continued to devote the lion's share of its resources to the timber program rather than recreation and tourism, even though timber-sale losses in Southern national forests run into the millions of dollars each year.

In the Chattahoochee National Forest in north Georgia, for example, the Forest Service spent 37 percent of its budget from 1986 to 1990 on logging and road-building activities, and 16 percent for recreation and tourism. But the timber-sales program in that forest lost $3 million in 1992.

Eliminating money-losing logging in national forests would have minimal impact on the forest-products industry in the Southeast, the report said, because national-forest logging accounts for less than 1 percent of the region's total annual harvest and provides less than 0.1 percent of the region's jobs.

Baker acknowledged that national-forest logging represents only a small fraction of the annual tree harvest in the Southeast, but she said it's an important fraction that means life or death for some small mills.

Other forests in the study were the Cherokee in Tennessee, the Pisgah and Nantahala in North Carolina, the Jefferson in Virginia and the Sumter in South Carolina.

by CNB