MEADOW VALLEY - Just above a sunny pasture 10 miles west of Quincy, a hillside rises under the shaded majesty of 6-foot-diameter firs and pines.

The forest floor is moist and mossy. The wind that stirs the treetops carries the faint bawling of cattle and honking horns from Meadow Valley, an adjacent Plumas County neighborhood of 600 residents.

How best to prevent catastrophic wildfire in this community, this forest and others like it is a controversy raging across the West. The resolutions may well be forged here in the Plumas National Forest, where an experiment in forest management is facing its first major test.

A coalition of environmentalists has sued the U.S. Forest Service over its plan to log more than 40 million board feet of timber from 6,400 acres of federal land surrounding Meadow Valley.

The project is part of a forest management strategy developed by the Quincy Library Group, a local coalition of diverse interests whose proposal became law in 1999 under legislation sponsored by Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Wally Herger, R-Marysville.

Experimental in concept and immense in scope, the 10-year Quincy plan encompasses 2.5 million acres in three national forests and involves cutting about 1.4 billion board feet of timber - enough to build more than a million two-bedroom houses. Along with reducing the risk of wildfire, it is designed to protect rural economies by providing lumber for local sawmills.

Environmentalists have fought the plan for nearly a decade. Now that the Forest Service is developing specific on-the-ground projects, they have launched the first of what they promise will be a series of court challenges.

The two sides fundamentally disagree over how to manage a forest to recognize the role of natural fire and reduce the threat to communities.

The Meadow Valley project is part of a national initiative to remove not only undergrowth and small trees but also medium and large trees. Opening forest stands lessens the chance of fire racing through the crowns of trees, said Jim Pena, Plumas Forest supervisor.

Environmentalists argue the opposite: that a closed canopy reduces growth of brush. Logging the larger, fire-resilient trees increases the long-term fire danger, said Craig Thomas, director of Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, one of four plaintiffs in the Meadow Valley lawsuit.

The Forest Service has the weight of federal policy - the Bush administration's Healthy Forest Restoration Act - behind its approach.

Last week, Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth upheld the 2004 Sierra Nevada Framework, which endorses the Quincy experiment as part of an aggressive program to manage excessive fuels in the 11.5 million acres of national forests in the Sierra range.
The Meadow Valley plaintiffs and others opposed to the agency's approach are relying on the courts. Last week, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said he would sue to block the Forest Service plan, calling it a "betrayal of treasured forests and the public trust."

In challenges nearly identical to those raised in the Meadow Valley lawsuit, federal courts recently ruled that federal agencies in Oregon had failed to investigate the cumulative impacts of timber sales and improperly outsourced the duty of marking trees to be logged.

Thomas and other environmentalists agree with Forest Service officials that many national forests across the West are overstocked with small trees and vulnerable to wildfire. But the lawsuit filed last month challenges the size and number of trees planned for removal around Meadow Valley.

The complaint filed by attorneys with Earthjustice and the John Muir Project says the Forest Service failed to evaluate the cumulative impacts of the Meadow Valley project combined with future timber sales planned in the area; to prepare a full review of the environmental impacts; and to mark all of the trees to be removed, instead leaving the job to contract loggers.

The combined effects would reduce the habitat available for the California spotted owl by cutting more than 4,000 acres of older trees, the environmentalist groups say in their 22-page lawsuit.

The Quincy plan calls for thinning in quarter-mile-wide strips, called defensible fuel profile zones. The Meadow Valley project designates 5,700 acres as fuel breaks, including 488 blocks where loggers would cut all trees up to 30 inches in 1-to 2-acre patches. Most of the blocks are in areas like the timbered hillside above Meadow Valley, with old, fire-resistant pines and firs dominating the stand now crowded with smaller trees and brush.

The logging would open up the stands to new seedlings, natural or agency-planted. These young plantations are "little time bombs scattered around the woods," fueling the flare-ups that explode ground fires into the forest crown, Thomas said.