Even hard-liners want to experiment in Arizona

"We squashed the timber industry and the Forest Service, and dictated the terms of surrender" in the Southwest, says Kieran Suckling, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity. He's talking about a war that began in the 1980s, when the Tucson-based group charged that the U.S. population of Mexican spotted owls had shrunk to just a few thousand because of logging in the old-growth ponderosa pines. The group ultimately won a 1996 court injunction that temporarily shut down logging on all national forests in Arizona and New Mexico. Within a few years, applying more legal pressure on behalf of all affected species, it forced the Forest Service to reduce logging by 70 percent and limit the harvest to trees less than 16 inches in diameter. That explains the historic occasion last April 22: The Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Trust signed a deal with timber entrepreneur Pascal Berlioux. Berlioux's company, Arizona Forest Restoration Products, hopes to do restoration work on at least 600,000 acres over 20 years, cutting only trees that are smaller than 16 inches. In turn, the Center promises not to file lawsuits against his work, and to defend it in court if other groups sue...HighCountryNews