BEND, Ore. -- With Eastern Oregon's timber industry struggling amid the deflation of the housing bubble, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden has asked the U.S. Forest Service to quickly approve logging in areas of Grant and Harney counties that were burned by wildfire in recent summers.

"The conservation community, the timber industry and the local elected officials in Eastern Oregon have proposed an agreement that will salvage valuable timber, provide needed product for local lumber mills and aid the ailing economies in a rural area of my state," Wyden, D-Ore., said in a letter Tuesday to Mark Rey, the undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the Department of Agriculture.

The proposed agreement between environmentalists and timber companies would result in the logging of nearly 40 million board feet of timber, The Oregonian newspaper reported.

Though environmentalists typically oppose salvage logging, Tim Lillebo, a field representative for the group Oregon Wild, said his organization wants to ensure local mills survive the current economic downturn so the timber industry can perform future thinning and conservation projects on public lands.

In the agreement, conservation groups would support salvage logging in parts of the Malheur National Forest if the timber companies promise not to log sensitive areas.

"If a project can stay out of those key areas -- the unroaded stuff, the Wild and Scenic River stuff, the core areas for wildlife -- maybe we can agree to this as a one-time thing," Lillebo said.

In 2006, the Shake Table fire burned about 14,500 acres near John Day. Last summer, the Egley complex of fires covered more than 140,000 acres near Burns.

Besides dropping challenges to the salvage sale proposed by the Forest Service for the Shake Table fire, environmentalists would encourage the agency to expedite an environmental review of the Egley salvage sale.

That would mean logging would start there as early as this summer.