In the wake of the fires in New Mexico, the timber industryis mobilizing its P.R. machine to try to convince the public of theneed to increase logging on our national forests, supposedly toprotect them from catastrophic fires.

 To imagine timber executives sitting around their quarterlyboard meetings talking about the pressing need to save forests is torealize the absurdity of this posturing. The U.S. Forest Service isnow parroting this doublespeak, using it as a means to sell hugevolumes of public timber to logging corporations under the guise of"forest stewardship."

 The truth is that commercial logging doesn't preventcatastrophic fires, it causes them. The 1996 scientific study of theSierra Nevada forests, which was commissioned and funded by Congress,found that "timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure,local microclimate and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severitymore than any other recent human activity."

 Another Forest Service report, "Forest Resources of theUnited States" (1994), revealed that tree mortality in the West dueto both fire and disease increases in logged areas. The worst rateswere on private lands where logging levels are highest and where theleast natural forest remains. For example, in western forests from1986 to 1991, mortality due to fire and disease on private landsincreased 20 percent, while it increased only 3 percent on nationalforests and decreased 9 percent on other public lands. Logging makesforests more susceptible to both fire and disease.

 Forests that have been logged are drier, have less shade andhave accumulated flammable debris known as "slash piles" comprisingunsaleable branches and limbs left by logging crews. Fires tend tostart in logged areas and occasionally spread into old-growth stands,which are naturally fire-resistant due to the thick bark of oldertrees. If a fire does kill an old-growth stand, the burned treesstill provide valuable nesting habitat for birds of prey andcountless other forest species. Wildlife has little use forstumps.

 In April 1999, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), afederal department that often watchdogs agencies at the request ofcongressional leaders, released a report on the Forest Service'sapproach to fire management, calling into serious question the use ofthe timber sales program to address fire issues. The GAO noted that"most of the trees that need to be removed to reduce accumulatedfuels are small in diameter and have little or no commercialvalue."

 The report nevertheless found that Forest Service managers"tend to (1) focus on areas with high-value commercial timber ratherthan on areas with high fire hazards or (2) include more large,commercially valuable trees in a timber sale than are necessary toreduce the accumulated fuels." The "low-value materials," said theGAO, "are unattractive to timber purchasers." So much for the timberindustry's rhetoric about "thinning understory brush."

 In fact, the Forest Service's own documents state that itfights fires not to protect forest ecosystems, but rather to preventburns from reducing the commodity value of trees that the agencyintends to sell to logging companies. It's all about economics, notecology.

 Former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas candidlyacknowledged this in 1994: "Relatively high levels of mortality in anarea from which you do not expect to extract timber, for example,might be perfectly acceptable. ... For example, to isolateYellowstone [as an example] ... it burns up; it burns hot,and the system that's associated with it comes back. We didn't wantanything from it. It's perfectly OK. It's a national park. It'sinteresting, and we can observe the wildflowers, and it'sbeautiful."

 Our national forests will never be safe from the logging industry's deceptions until we end the federal timber sales program,and redirect current timber subsidies into ecological restorationjobs, as HR 1396, the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act,would do. Future generations will thank us.

(Chad Hanson is executive director of the John Muir Project, andis also a national director of the Sierra Club. The John Muir Projectcan be reached by phone at (626) 792-0109; by letter at 30 N. RaymondAve. No. 514, Pasadena, CA, 91103; by e-mail at chadhanson@juno.com;Web site, www.johnmuirproject.org.)