E Magazine Goes to Work for the Timber Industry
9/2/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: E Magazine Goes to Work for the Timber Industry
Source: E Magazine
Updated by webmaster@emagazine.com
http://www.emagazine.com/0997feat2.html
Date: 9/2/97
Author: Jim Motavalli, editor of E.
Copyright: 1997, Earth Action Network
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE TO FOREST ACTIVISTS WIDELY!
FROM www.emagazine.com:
We have to refute this outrageous pro-timber story in the current edition
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The Forest Primeval
In the Pitched Battle Between Loggers and Environmentalists, a Timber
Tinderbox Waits for a Match
Scene I: There is a 40-acre stand of ancient trees near Chester,
California in the heart of the dryland timber forest. The stand is
dominated by towering 500-year-old, 200-foot Ponderosa pines. These
trees, which were seedlings when Columbus landed in the Americas, are
lucky to have missed an appointment with the chainsaw, because they've
been owned by a logging company since the turn of the century.
In the 1930s, Truman Collins became the third generation of his family to
run Collins Pine Company, which then owned 65,000 acres of mostly virgin
forest around Chester. Like most American lumber companies, Collins had
been moving operations westward as local supplies of exploitable timber
were exhausted. But, seeing as they were almost to the Pacific Ocean,
Truman Collins decided to put roots down in Chester. And instead of
clearcutting the company's acreage, he decided to try the
then-revolutionary concept of single-tree selection-cutting some but
leaving the rest to grow. Collins land is now covered in dense stands of
Ponderosa pine, with shade-tolerant white fir struggling for space in the
canopy. The forests are logged, to be sure, but they're logged
selectively; the land still looks and feels like a living forest.
* * *
Truman Collins' sense of commitment to forest longevity is hardly a
universal one. Instead, as public dissatisfaction with the industry
grows, environmental concerns mount, and less and less federal land is
made available for "harvesting," something like a civil war is developing
in the western forests-the source of 30 percent of American timber. But a
better analogy might be to shooting sparks that threaten to set off a
conflagration, because fire-how it starts, how it burns, what it
consumes-is the central issue in a region where sometimes unstoppable
canopy infernos swallow up millions of acres a year.
Scene II: U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Timber Planner Tim Bailey's Wagoneer
is bouncing down a logging road in Oregon's huge Willamette National
Forest. He stops where the thick stands of Douglas fir give way to a
naked moonscape. It is the edge of the disastrous 1991 Warner Creek fire,
which burned up 9,000 acres of reserve land. Bailey, whose long hair and
beard make him look more like an Earth First! activist than a USFS
ranger, offered a variety of theories about the fire. Environmentalists
could have set it to embarrass the Forest Service, he says. Or loggers
wanting to generate work from the salvage sales that inevitably follow
big fires. Or even a disgruntled USFS employee. You'll get a lot more
certainty from veteran forest activist Kim Marks, who was among the young
protesters who successfully blockaded a timber sale in Warner Creek in
1996. "Torching the trees guarantees that 'salvage' timber sales go
through," she says bluntly. One thing is certain: it was arson, just like
the fire last Halloween that torched the USFS Oak Ridge ranger station
nearby. Any way you look at it, events like these make for tinder-box
conditions in the national forests.
* * *
With the last day of 1996, the Rescissions Act Logging Rider-also known
as the "forest health" bill-passed into history. While ostensibly
targeted at just the sick and diseased trees that impair forests' health,
the bill also included provisions for logging stands of healthy green
trees that had been protected by lawsuits since 1990. It was a harvest
windfall for an industry that's been reeling from a series of blows:
first the 1991 federal court ruling halting logging until a workable
program to protect the infamous spotted owl was in place, then the 1993
Clinton Forestry Conference, which resulted in drastic cuts in federal
timber volume. When the smoke cleared, small lumber mills started closing
all around the Northwest, and the timber rider was too little, too late
to save them.
Most environmentalists saw the logging rider as the single worst
environmental law passed in the 104th Congress, and Clinton is on record
as regretting his advocacy of it. Concerted citizen action-largely in the
form of lawsuits--blunted the rider's impact. According to some
environmentalists' estimates, more than a billion board feet of
rider-based sales were canceled or postponed because of legal challenges,
public interest lobbying and old-fashioned activism-including sit-ins to
stop the logging trucks.
Cut to the Core
Environmentalists need to realize that they can't oppose all logging, at least
as long as most of us live in wood houses and use paper.
From the perspective of someone who cares about forests, recent
history is pretty bleak. According to the World Wildlife Fund, only two
percent of the original old-growth forests remain in the continental
U.S., and much of what's left is under threat. We continue to consume wood
products at a rate unparalleled in the world, every year cutting down 800,000
acres of trees, throwing away 27 billion pounds of wood and going through
181 billion pounds of paper. U.S. consumption of forest products-aided
increasingly by imports--reached 16 billion cubic feet by 1987, and it's
expected to nearly double by 2040.
If it's going to maintain the cut, the timber industry will need to keep
its Washington lobbyists working overtime in support of proposed
legislation (see below). The other hope for renewing the chainsaw
massacre is fire, or at least the threat of it. Interviewed around the
Northwest, industry representatives and lobbyists are singing from the
same hymnbook about tinderbox conditions that, they say, are the result
of environmentalist hand-wringing and misguided USFS fire-prevention
policies. Their answer is "salvage" logging to lessen the "fuel" buildup
on the forest floor.
Scene III: Northwest Forestry Association lobbyist Ross Mickey, a
defector from 10 years with USFS, emerges from his station wagon at a
snow park in the Deschutes National Forest near Sisters, Oregon. After
wrinkling his nose at the overflowing public toilet (a product, he says,
of federal cutbacks), Mickey gestures at the surrounding timber stand,
which is dotted with dead and dying trees (victims of drought, spruce
budworm and bark beetles). "Fire has been a part of this ecosystem
throughout recorded time," he says. "Fire causes natural stand mortality
and it clears away dead material, leaving a mosaic. Fire is nature's way
of getting the system back in balance, but because we actively suppress
fires, the trees have gotten more and more crowded together and there
are hundreds of thousands of acres just waiting to burn."
John Allen, district ranger with the two-million-acre Deschutes Park,
just finished managing a 90-acre timber sale at nearby Lost Lake, and
he'd like to manage more. "The federal cash register is open for us to
put out fires, but not to suppress the conditions that lead to them," he
says. "We need more thinning, more underburning of natural fuels so that
we don't get huge, unstoppable fires that blow up into the crowns of the
trees."
* * *
A little history is in order. The USFS was founded in 1905 to manage the
national forests set up under outdoor enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt. Its
first head, Gifford Pinchot, was a pragmatic conservationist who believed
that the wholesale logging without replanting that had destroyed the
forests of the east should not be repeated in the west. He envisioned "a
timber famine so severe that its blighting effects will be felt in every
household in the land." The new service had its baptism in fire just five
years after its founding. In the summer of 1910, the
largest forest fire in U.S. history burned more than three million acres
in northern Idaho and western Montana, resulting in the deaths of 79
firefighters.
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The protests against logging in the western forests sometimes involve
demonstrations (top) and at other times more confrontational direct
action.
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The response from an outraged public put USFS into the fire-fighting
business in a big way and launched the career of Smokey the Bear, whose
"Only you can prevent forest fires" became one of the most successful
advertising slogans in American history. The logging industry claims that
Smokey and his pals have been too effective, suppressing fires that
should have thinned the forest and been allowed to burn out naturally.
There are still plenty of fires in the 191 million acres of national
forest land. In 1994, there were 23,873 forest fires in public tracts.
But because of high-tech fire prevention methods (that include air
assaults from planes and helicopters), the fires don't last as long or
consume as much acreage as they used to. A 1994 fire in the Wenatchee
National Forest in Washington burned 140,000 acres, not three million. A
fire in Idaho's Payette National Forest, also in 1994, set records, but
took out "only" 298,000 acres. Loggers claim what we should really be
worrying about is the fire next time-they raise the bogey of an enormous
fuel-fed inferno that will sweep across the drought-stricken timber east
of the Cascades, baking whole towns.
Environmentalists, while decrying the "forest health" issue as "voodoo
forestry," don't entirely discount the fire problem. Marc Evans,
Greenpeace's forest campaigner and a former USFS fire fighter, says, "We
agree that there needs to be some sort of selective logging to decrease
fire load. But they should just be taking the understory and leaving the
canopy trees."
Logging related landslides, like this one in Oregon, killed five people
in 1996.
Greenpeace, says Evans, "is trying to set international standards that
will be universally applied. We don't support logging where there are
still outstanding land claims. In the U.S., we never support
clearcutting, and we don't support logging in primary forests or roadless
areas. We do support selective logging, which surprises people.
The lumber companies are always trying to paint us as anti-logging, but
I've personally spent a lot of time with a chainsaw in my hand, fighting
fires."
Oddly enough, despite the current confrontations in the forest (at
presstime, Cascadia Forest Defenders was blockading a timber sale near
Detroit, Oregon and Greenpeace was scaling the columns at the Canadian
Embassy in Washington to protest old-growth logging in British Columbia)
a workable compromise might actually be possible. The two sticking points
are, clearly, clearcutting and old-growth logging. The forestry groups
acknowledge that old-growth-because so much of it has been logged, and
because most of the rest is protected--is really not that important an
issue for them. "It's virtually a done deal-the battle [over old growth]
is over and they won," says Craig Larson, director of international
marketing for the Western Wood Products Association trade group. And they
readily concede that cutting grandfather trees is a public relations
disaster, losing them the goodwill not only of environmental groups but
the general public as well. Since, as one timber spokesman put it, "We
could survive for 30 years on salvage logging alone," why doesn't the
timber industry, citing its new commitment to stewardship, simply declare that
it will no longer log old-growth forests?
Such a unified decision on the part of the logging industry would also
make good economic sense, in the light of building supply giant Home
Depot's very public decision to no longer buy old-growth redwood from its
suppliers, which include Louisiana Pacific.
Clearcutting is a much more complicated matter. The loggers are firmly
wedded to it, and even defend the wholesale destruction of trees on
environmental grounds. (You don't have to build as many landslide-prone
roads, they say).
Scene IV: Only stumps and the gnarled limbs called "slash" remain from a
Willamette Industries hillside clearcut on the Mohawk Tree Farm in
Marcola, Oregon. It is dramatically ugly up close. Although company
foresters insist that this messy jumble of stumps, deeply rutted muddy
trails and dead limbs discarded like pickup sticks is a healthy
ecosystem, soon to be replanted, environmentalists see it as a dead zone.
Last year Willamette paid Cavenham Forest Industries $1.6 billion for 1.1
million acres of timberland, making the company one of the top 10 forest
landowners in the U.S. In a dramatic move, it then announced that it will
no longer bid on USFS timber sales. Willamette, which had $3.8 billion in
sales in 1995, is now free of the restrictions placed on federal timber.
It can-and does-export its logs abroad.
Robert "Maggie" Magathan, a Willamette Industries manager supervising the
Mohawk clearcut, is quick to make assurances that this hillside, stripped
of its protective cover, is stable and not a landslide waiting to happen.
Such threats are very real: In the mid-1960s, landslides from timber
roads in the Salmon River watershed in Idaho nearly wiped out the salmon
runs. In Oregon last year, five people were killed by landslides directly
linked to clearcuts. Magathan bristles when he's also asked if the
spotted owl's interests were observed when the trees came down. Pointing
across the valley, he says, ""There's a pair of spotted owls right over
there. We have to check every year for spotted owls and [a similarly
endangered seabird that nests in old-growth trees] marbled
murrelets."
* * *
Loggers who'd never heard of the endangered spotted owls had to take a
crash course after 1991, when federal judge William Dwyer ruled that
Northwest timber sales had to stop until USFS could demonstrate that its
logging plan wouldn't wipe them out. That they were endangered was no
longer in doubt: By the late 80s, there were estimated to be only 500 to
600 nesting pairs in Washington. Intensive old-growth logging had
separated owl populations into small groups that had trouble finding
enough food. The most common cause of death for juvenile owls was
starvation.
These days, loggers say that the environmentalists seized on the spotted
owl as a convenient excuse for reducing timber volume. Still, even though
one owl got nailed to a tree in a Washington park, the industry has
mostly responded with elaborate owl protection plans, bending over
backwards to prove its effective "stewardship" of their habitat. Indeed,
you could accuse both sides in the habitat debate of focusing so
exclusively on owls and murrelets that the plight of other birds and
mammals is ignored. The Sierra Club, for instance, estimates that logging
during the nesting season kills 250 million songbirds every year.
"Nationwide, there is an indiscriminate slaughter that results from
logging," says Eric Huber, an attorney with the Sierra Club Legal Defense
Fund.
Import or Die
As environmentalists and loggers focus on spotted owls, are songbirds
being ignored?
Inevitably, government rulings, environmentalist lawsuits and habitat
considerations have dramatically reduced logging operations in the U.S.
Since 1987, western timber volume has been cut by a third, reduced by 8.2
billion board feet, but the demand for wood products certainly isn't
going down. More than a million new homes are built with wood every year,
and new housing starts grew 5.6 percent in 1996. USFS estimates that
domestic demand for wood fiber (including paper) will grow 50 percent by
2020. That means more imports, particularly from Canada. In 1987, the
U.S. imported 12 percent of its wood products from Canada. By 1995,
nearly a third of its wood was coming from the north.
But protecting American forests by shifting wood production to Canada is
a dubious environmental proposition. Only massive protests have prevented
wholesale cutting of the country's west coast old-growth temperate
rainforests, including the magnificent Clayoquot Sound. (A plan to log
two-thirds of Clayoquot, announced in 1993, led to the largest civil
disobedience protest in Canada's history, resulting in the arrest of 900
people.) Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has targeted the Canadian
forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel (unaffectionately known as "Mac-Blo")
which, RAN charges, "aggressively logs ancient primary forests."
Other international sources of wood products-like Indonesia-are even
worse. Indonesia lost an astonishing 145 million acres of forest land
between 1950 and 1982, replacing complex rainforest ecosystems with
monoculture softwood tree farms. Intensive clearcutting operations in the
Philippines, Malaysia, Burma, Chile and Thailand have few environmental
controls.
A Legacy Lost
Clearcuts form an ugly mosaic at Willamette Industries' Mohawk Tree Farm
in Oregon.
RAN estimates that only five percent of our ancient old-growth redwood
forests remain. What else have we lost? In 1923, the U.S. Forest Service
concluded that the original American forest had covered 822 million
acres; other estimates go as high as 950 million acres. White pines, 230
feet in height, grew in New England (their demise heightened by their
usefulness for ship masts). A single giant tulip poplar could yield
20,000 board feet of timber. These huge Eastern trees were almost
entirely gone by the turn of the century-Massachusetts, Rhode Island and
Connecticut were then 70 to 80 percent open land.
The U.S. had no forest policy at all during the frenzied period of
western settlement in the 19th century. Vast fortunes were made from
logging, but the lack of any sort of sustainable vision led to an endless
boom-and-bust cycle that left people out of work and turned thriving
communities into ghost towns when the timber ran out. The USFS was
created to sustainably manage the forests, but boom-and-bust cycles are
still devastating western towns.
Scene V: Logger Terry McCracken, a subcontractor on a Collins Pine cut,
sized up a white fir, trying to get it to drop just right, to avoid
killing nearby young trees, endangering a protected stream bed or landing
on his head. Although logging is considered to be the second
most-dangerous profession, McCracken feels lucky to be working, because
timber mills have closed all over northern California and Oregon. "Why
don't you get it out that loggers aren't the bad guys?" he asks. "I had a
girl say to me, 'How did it feel to kill that tree?' but I bet she lives
in a wooden house." McCracken's fir, probably over 100 years old and
damaged by a skidder in an earlier logging incident, came down as
planned. Before the day was out, he'd harvest 50 more.
* * *
Loggers like McCracken are good at what they do, but can we afford to
keep subsidizing their jobs? In 1994, according to the General Accounting
Office (GAO), timber sales on the national forest level lost more than
$176 million. In 1995, according to the White House Council of Economic
Advisors,the Forest Service spent $134 million more than it collected in
timber receipts. And The Wilderness Society found that, in 1995, the
agency failed to account for $200 million in road construction costs and
$257 million in payments to counties.
The 1976 National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which regulates timber
cuts on federal land, has been called "a two-toothed tiger" by the Forest
Reform Network. Passed in 1976, the law largely lets the Forest Service
determine policy, but it does contain a pair of important-though
routinely violated--environmental provisions. The first, known as the
Randolph amendment, requires USFS to actually carry out its protection
plans for soil, watershed and other natural resources. The second, the
Bumpers amendment, requires the agency to take steps to maintain tree and
animal diversity in the forests.
Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot established the US Forest Service in
1905.
In the 105th Congress, the timber lobby's priority is the gutting of
NFMA, and a bill introduced by Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), the Public
Land Management Responsibility and Accountability Restoration Act, is
the preferred vehicle. Craig, the new chairman of the GOP Task Force on
the Environment, gets campaign contributions from Georgia-Pacific,
Weyerhaeuser, Boise-Cascade and Champion International. He was the
principle force behind Senate passage of the salvage logging bill, and he
has now introduced legislation that would reduce NFMA to a shell. Among
its provisions, the bill would: establish a procedure for transferring
ownership of national forests to state ownership; allow the Forest
Service to impose fines of $10,000 for "improper" challenges to timber
sales; eliminate the role of the Fish and Wildlife Service from
overseeing threatened and endangered species in the forests; and
encourage more destructive salvage logging. According to Jim Jontz of the
Western Ancient Forest Campaign, "This bill mocks the Republican
leadership's announced goals of improving environmental protection. It's
a naked timber industry wish list."
Congressional greens, meanwhile, are engaged in an uphill fight to pass
the Save America's Forests Act, which would ban logging on 17 million
old-growth acres, and eliminate clearcutting on all national forests.
Expect an all-out industry assault if the bill shows signs of life.
* * *
As polarized as the situation is in the western forests, there appears to
be room for a workable compromise. Environmentalists need to realize that
they can't oppose all logging, at least as long as most of us live in
wood houses and use paper. And the lumber industry has to start thinking
sustainably, planting new, diverse forests to replace the ones it cuts
down, and give up its designs on our few remaining old-growth cathedrals.
For environmentalists, that last point is non-negotiable, and by giving
in to it, the tree-cutters could start rebuilding a relationship that
long since toppled over like a chainsawed Douglas fir.
CONTACTS:
Rainforest Action Network
450 Sansome, Suite 700
San Francisco, CA 94111
Tel: (415) 398-4404
Western Ancient Forest Campaign
1025 Vermont Avenue NW, 3rd Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Tel: (202) 879-3188
Western Wood Products Association
522 SW Fifth Avenue
Portland, OR 97204-2122
Tel: (503) 224-3930