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Tree Huggers

Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign

by Kathie Durbin (more about this book and author)

Part 1: Getting out the Cut 1946-78
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“In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them until they fall beneath the hatchet.”
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, 1835

“It was the intoxicating profusion of the American continent which induced a state of mind that made waste and plunder inevitable.”
—STEWART L. UDALL, The Quiet Crisis, 1963

“ For more than 150 years, the lumber and forest products industry has provided a prime example of migrating capital, rapid liquidation of resources, and boom-and-bust cycles for towns dependent on the forest bounty.”
—WILLIAM ROBBINS, Hard Times in Paradise, 1988


On Earth Day 1970, when the modern environmental movement made its debut, loggers had been at the task of leveling the Pacific Northwest's virgin forests for a century. By the end of World
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War II, the timber industry had liquidated most of its own timber holdings and was turning to the federal government to help supply its mills. Congress and the U.S. Forest Service complied by opening the national forests to commercial logging. The rate of logging increased steadily over the next quarter-century.

The grassroots environmental groups that sprouted in the aftermath of Earth Day to fight for protection of wilderness on the national forests faced formidable odds. Environmentalists' early lawsuits and appeals slowed the leveling of old-growth forests, while organizing by national conservation groups built a network of support for saving some of the roadless wilderness.

 
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Chapter One

The Glory Days of Logging


Drive along stream corridors shaded by elegant fronds of western red cedar. Climb a wide gravel washboard road leading into the high country on the east side of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The vista begins to open as soon as you enter the national forest lands. But wait. To get the full effect, you must press on to the high ridge road above Lebar Creek.

At Lebar Creek, an entire roaded and logged watershed yawns before you Roads cut 65-degree slopes near the ridgelines, at midslope, and near the valley bottom. Above the roadcuts, the slopes are unraveling. Roads built to haul thick logs off the mountains for 40 years now bleed dirt into unnamed tributary streams. The clearcuts staggered across the slopes between the roadcuts are geometric: diamonds, trapezoids, triangles. At first glance they seem nearly continuous. But a closer look reveals subtle differences in the greens that gradually overtake the browns as conifer seedlings take hold and grow.

This is the infamous Shelton Sustained Yield Unit. In 1946, the Forest Service signed a 99-year contract with Simpson Timber Company giving the Washington company exclusive cutting rights on the entire forested southeast quadrant of the Olympic National Forest. Under this arrangement, the only one of its kind in the national forest system, Simpson combined 250,000 acres of its own cutover land with 110,000 acres of publicly owned virgin public forests. Simpson won the right to cut trees from national forest lands at a rate far exceeding the ability of those lands to regenerate. In exchange, Simpson agreed to process the logs from the national forests—and, in time, from its own second-growth lands—at its mills in Shelton and McCleary, Washington.

The Forest Service held the Shelton Unit exempt from the laws and rules that Congress passed to guide management on the rest of the national forest lands. For 40 years, the unit was roaded and logged like no place else in the national forest system. Many roads were built on loose soil dug from the mountainsides. After logging, workers burned the slash, leaving bare soil open to erosion. Slash burns frequently got away from overworked timber sale administrators.

Today the naked-shouldered mountains of the Shelton Unit, and the landslides that scar its slopes, bear witness to the glory days of logging.
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AN OCEAN OF FIR
As a monopoly blessed by Congress for the benefit of a single company, the Shelton Unit is unique. But as a paradigm for the history of logging on the national forests of the Pacific Northwest from the end of World War II until the late 1980s, it is instructive. To the Forest Service, timber barons, and their benefactors in Congress, the great unlogged forests of the Pacific slope were vast, faceless, and seemingly inexhaustible oceans of massive conifers waiting to be mapped and measured and roaded and clearcut to provide wood for the nation, profits for millowners, and jobs for the small timber towns scattered at the forest's edge.

Many of the same entrepreneurs who cleared the forests of the Great Lakes between 1860 and 1890 came west in the latter decades of the 19th century to stake their claim to the great Pacific forests. They bought up vast tracts of virgin timberland granted to the railroads by the federal government to encourage homesteading, often acquiring the land by fraudulent means.

As they set about leveling the virgin forests, loggers were limited at first by the sheer size of the conifers, the remoteness of the region, and the primitive logging technology of the times. They nibbled away at the formidable green wall of trees, working close to coastal rivers near natural harbors: Grays Harbor in Washington, Coos Bay in Oregon, Humboldt Bay in California. They built primitive railroads into the heart of wilderness to haul the behemoths out and floated them down rivers to waiting ships or sawmills When diesel-powered log trucks supplanted railroad logging, the higher-elevation forests became accessible and an orgy of overcutting and mill construction began. By 1916, Washington had half again as many sawmills as the woods could supply.

This overproduction drove prices down, eroded corporate profits, and played havoc with the economies of small timber towns. By the 1930s, abandoned timber communities were a ubiquitous part of the Northwest landscape. Towns thrown up to log and roughly mill the logs lost their purpose once the forests surrounding them were gone.

Between 1926 and 1960, government-subsidized logging roads would penetrate nearly 35 million acres of virgin forest in the Northwest. As early as 1937, Forestry Dean Hugo Wllikenwerder of the University of Washington warned, "We are cutting our timber three and one half times faster than we are replacing it by reforestation. It is evident that only a disastrous result can be the outcome of this practice."

By the end of World War II, the major timberland owners of the Northwest had logged most of their accessible old growth. Nearly gone were giant conifer stands on the west end of the Olympic Peninsula, in southwest Washington's Willapa Hills, on the west slopes of the Oregon Coast Range, and in California's coastal redwood zone.

But the promise of the national forests, which lay higher in the Olympics, the Cascades, the Oregon Coast Range and the Klamath Mountains, remained largely untapped. Much of this high country was still unroaded and inaccessible to the public. It was terra incognita.
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THE TIMBER TRIANGLE
In the late 1940s the Forest Service launched a commercial timber sale program on the national forests. For the next 40 years, the timber industry, Northwest lawmakers, and federal forest managers worked together in a powerful timber triangle, steadily leveling the great, biologically diverse natural forests and converting them to plantations of young Douglas-fir. The region's entire political and academic apparatus, from colleges of forestry to state forestry boards to local communities kept alive by timber receipts, supported this arrangement.

With passage of the 1897 Forest Management Act, Congress had clearly stated that the purpose of the nation's newly created forest reserves—its future national forests—would be "to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States." In 1944, with the Sustained Yield Forest Management Act, Congress formalized the responsibility of the Forest Service to sustain rural timber communities. In the postwar period, old-growth timber from the federal lands became the federal pork that Northwest congressmen brought home for their constituents.

The "timber triangle" worked this way: Wealthy timber executives and timber industry associations donated to the campaigns of U.S. senators and representatives from the Northwest and lobbied the Forest Service chief directly. Congress, through House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees, set annual timber sale targets. Seats on those subcommittees were earmarked for Northwest members. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management were judged by how well they met the targets. This imperative to cut timber was communicated down the line to district rangers in rural communities, who formed natural alliances with timber companies.

Though the national forests belonged to all the American people, the decision to liquidate the old growth on these public lands was made largely without public scrutiny, debate, or an understanding of the ecological consequences or the scope of the conversion already underway on the industry's own lands.

The rate of logging on the national forests climbed slowly at first, as private companies accelerated cutting on their own lands to meet the postwar housing construction boom. In Oregon, total timber harvests peaked in 1954, when the volume cut soared to 8.9 billion board feet—a level that has never been surpassed.

THE SCIENCE OF FORESTRY
Forestry in the postwar era followed an industrial model. Forestry research at Oregon State University in Corvallis focused on efficient ways of clearcutting commercially valuable Douglas-fir, which regenerates best in the open.

"Virtually all the biological research was funded by the timber industry," said John Beuter, a forest economist and longtime member of the Oregon State University College of Forestry faculty. "It was research

 

 
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on Douglas-fir, Douglas-fir, Douglas-fir—and some ponderosa pine. A research advisory committee was dominated by industry. They made their preferences known."

Future foresters learned techniques for burning the slash left after logging, poisoning the shrubby plants and hardwoods that colonized the logged-over land, and using fertilizers to enhance the growth of Douglas-fir plantations.

"People were driven by budgets and regulations to do things that they wouldn't do if it were their own forests," Beuter said. "Where are the incentives? Follow the money."

The goal from the 1940s until well into the 1980s was to liquidate the old growth and replace it with what foresters referred to as a "fully regulated forest." "Their mindset didn't include keeping any old growth," Beuter said. "That wasn't a flaw in their thinking. In the 1930s there was more old growth than anyone thought could be used up."

The 1964 Wilderness Act, passed after an eight-year battle by the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, declared the intent of Congress to set aside wilderness areas "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." It required the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct inventories of their roadless areas and determine which ones warranted protection as wilderness. But the Forest Service actively opposed designating wilderness in areas that contained commercially valuable timber. It had no incentive to do so; the agency's budget and sense of mission came from selling timber.

In 1966, Oregon voters elected Mark Hatfield, a moderate Republican and two-term Oregon governor, to the U.S. Senate. Hatfield's allegiance to the timber industry, and his assignment to the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, assured that the cozy arrangement among the industry, federal forest managers, and Congress would continue.

FILLING THE GAP
In the 1960s, only a few naturalists, hikers, and mountain climbers glimpsed the full import of what was occurring in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

By the early 1970s, however, the frenetic pace of logging in the national forests no longer could be ignored on Sunday trips to the mountains. Mills in the Northwest operated around the clock, employing tens of thousands of workers. Timber jobs continued to be the mainstay of the rural Northwest economy. But because most companies had not reforested their lands, they faced a gap of several decades before their second-growth plantations would be ready for harvest.

In 1974, Eric Allen, the respected editor of the Medford, Oregon, Mail Tribune, wrote an editorial warning that forest regeneration in Oregon was not keeping up with logging. Oregon Governor Tom McCall, a popular Republican, read it and demanded to know from

 
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the Oregon Board of Forestry whether it was true.

Soon after, Forestry Dean Carl Stoltenberg, who chaired the Board of Forestry, asked John Beuter to conduct a study that would answer the question: "Is logging in Oregon sustainable at the current rate?"

Beuter cajoled timber companies into providing closely guarded proprietary information about the age of their timber. The Beuter Report, released in 1976, concluded that a timber supply gap of at least 20 years loomed beginning in the early 1990s, because companies had depleted their older stands and their second-growth plantations would not be of harvestable age for decades. In the meantime, the report concluded, the only timber available to fill the gap was on federal land.

"The industry operated on the assumption that if the national forests could sustain them, they would not have to worry about cutting their own timber too fast," recalls George Leonard, retired associate chief of the Forest Service. "It was not an outlandish assumption at the time."

The Forest Service, the timber industry, and the Northwest congressional delegation embraced the Beuter Report. Federal timber harvests began ratcheting up soon after.   

PAYING THE PRICE
Over 30 or 40 years, the massive stumps that anchored the steep mountainsides of the Shelton Unit gradually rotted and lost their grip on the soil. When the rains came, landslides accelerated. Roads washed out. Streams ran muddy. With 800 miles of logging roads, the Shelton Unit is the most densely roaded tract in the national forest system. At least 15,000 road failures have occurred on its scarred slopes.

The extent of the damage is hard to fathom. Start with this: Lebar Creek is but one of many tributaries of the South Fork of Skokomish River. The South Fork is but one of four major rivers draining the Shelton Unit. Each of those has several tributaries, several Lebar Creeks. Multiply the vista at Lebar Creek many times over and you begin to comprehend the magnitude of what was done here.

It was the early 1990s before the Forest Service faced the full environmental consequences of this deal consummated in an era of undisguised timber mining. "In the Shelton Unit, we went way over what the landscape can tolerate," said Jan Henderson, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton closed the door on future clearcutting of the Shelton Unit. Under his Northwest Forest Plan, only selective thinning of younger trees is allowed. Congress gave the Olympic National Forest $2 million for watershed restoration. That allowed work on Lebar Creek to begin.

Workers using heavy equipment pulled up unanchored dirt, laid down coconut fiber matting, and planted natural grasses. They built "cribs" of live willow to catch the soil from upslope slides. Though much of this work was experimental, it seemed to help stem the erosion.

But to fix just a few of the worst road sections in the Lebar Creek

 
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drainage cost $750,000. David Craig, the district ranger who oversaw the Shelton Unit in the mid-1990s, calculated that it would take $100 million to repair all of the unit's unraveling roads.

In 300 years, if they are left alone, the mountainsides of the Shelton Unit may be blanketed with old forest again—not the original forest, which can never be replaced or restored, but trees large enough to hold the soil, and shade the streams, and reweave the fabric of life here.

There is hope that time may heal even the Shelton Unit. Hope, but no guarantee.
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Chapter Two

Stopping the Juggernaut


In the late 1960s, as logging was accelerating in the Northwest's virgin forests, Brock Evans, an Ohio native newly graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, arrived in Seattle. Evans joined the Mountaineers, a hiking and mountaineering club, so he could learn the new country at his back door. As he hiked in the Washington Cascades, he noticed that logging roads and clearcuts were obliterating his favorite trails. "Gradually it dawned on me," he said, "that they were going to destroy it all."

Evans became a citizen activist. And in March of 1967 David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, hired him as the club's Seattle-based Northwest representative, to oversee Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

Evans quickly deduced that Oregon's reputation as an environmentally progressive state was not entirely deserved. "Oregon did the easy things, like recycling, but when the gut industries like timber were at stake it was the worst of the four states," he said. The timber industry dominated Oregon politically, economically, even culturally. As he traveled around the region, trying to set up meetings with local Sierra Club members, Evans found the atmosphere so hostile in some Oregon timber towns that activists did not want to be seen with him in public.

SAVE FRENCH PETE
Still, Evans found one group of battle-weary warriors who did want his help. In late 1967 he visited Eugene, met with tem, and took a hike in a vallry called French Pete.

Eugene and the neighboring mill town of Springfield sat at the edge of some of the world's most productive tree-growing country. To the west lay the fast-growing forests of the Oregon Coast Range. To the east and south, the Willamette National Forest, big as New Jersey, stretched for 110 miles along the western slope of the Cascades. Within the Willamette's boundaries six high Cascade peaks rise, alpine basins cradle clear lakes, and fast cold trout streams course through valleys forested with giant Douglas-fir. Hikers, campers, fishermen, wildflower gatherers, river-runners, rock collectors, and mountain climbers loved the Willamette. And because it yielded far more timber annually than
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any other national forest, scores of mills depended on it for a steady flow of timber. The Willamette was a forest ripe for conflict.
The battle lines had been drawn there in Oregon's first big battle over old-growth forests. The disputed turf was the narrow, 30,000-acre watershed of French Pete Creek, a low-lying valley 40 miles east of Eugene that bloomed with wildflowers in spring and offered year-round hiking.  Once, western Oregon had been graced with many valleys like French  Pete. But because these low-elevation forests had the biggest trees and the gentlest terrain, by the 1960s nearly all of them had been logged.

In the 1930s, the Forest Service included French Pete and the surrounding watersheds in the Three Sisters Primitive Area. But in 1953 the U.S. secretary of agriculture withdrew protection for 53,000 acres, including French Pete. The regional forester justified the decision by explaining that the area contained no unique flora and that harvesting some of its 1.5 billion board feet of timber would help to prevent mill closures. Local environmentalists appealed, but the agriculture secretary upheld the decision. By the late 1960s, French Pete was all that remained of the former primitive area.

Wilderness had a small but vocal constituency within the Many Rivers Group of the Sierra Club and the Oregon Cascades Conservation Council, but the early efforts of these groups were no match for the state's politically powerful timber industry. In the fall of 1967, Evans met with two dozen activists who wanted to protect French Pete. "They had tried everything," he said. "I told them, 'We can do this.'" As he recalls it, "There was a magic turning point in that meeting, where one of these old warriors said, 'Okay, Brock, if you say so, we can save it.'"

Soon after, Willamette National Forest Supervisor David Gibney announced a timber sale in French Pete. The locals petitioned for withdrawal of the sale, but Gibney formed a hand-picked citizens' committee that endorsed his proposal. Armed with this expression of the public will, he denied the petition.

"I said, 'We need a hook," Evans recalled. "What was most striking to me was the space of French Pete. In Washington there were lots of big intact valleys left to hike in." But he suspected that was not the case in Oregon. So he spent three days in January of 1968 poring over maps of the national forests in western Oregon. He counted 70 valleys 10 miles or more in length. Only three, including French Pete, remained unlogged.

This revelation of how much had been lost and how little remained struck a nerve. Local conservationists formed the Save French Pete Committee. In November of 1969, 1,500 protesters gathered outside the Federal Building in Eugene to demand that French Pete be saved. The protest drew the attention of the national conservation groups. Michael McCloskey, executive director of the Sierra Club, said that if environmentalists could win protection for French Pete, they could win anywhere.


 
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A NATIONAL HERITAGE
If Oregon's forests were a national sacrifice zone, Washington's—at least some of them—were recognized as a national heritage. The filtered green light of the Olympic rainforest, the austere beauty of the sheer-faced North Cascades, the soft grandeur of Mount Rainier, visible from downtown Seattle on clear days, were recognized early as gems worthy of showcasing in the national park system.

It didn't take Evans long to discern that Washington was different from Oregon both culturally and politically. "Portland was dominated by the regional offices of the Forest Service and other federal agencies. Seattle had Boeing, a tradition of saving places, a much more urban culture and more educated people." Seattle also was the Northwest base of operations for the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. Though timber giant Weyerhaeuser Company wielded immense political power, timber did not dominate Washington's economy as it did Oregon's. The Washington congressional delegation reflected the state's more evolved conservation ethic as well.

The establishment of Mount Rainier National Park in 1899, Olympic National Park in 1938, and North Cascades National Park in 1968 protected the crowning peaks of the Washington Cascades and the Olympics. The boundaries of these parks were drawn to include as little commercial forest land as possible. Still, Evans once calculated that the creation of Olympic National Park alone saved 100 billion board feet of fine old-growth forest with one stroke, more by far than had been saved in all of Oregon at that time.

SACRIFICE ZONE
Yet Washington had its sacrifice areas as well. The most dramatic and visible was the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, which in the 1960s was a virtual timber colony, thinly populated and remote from the commerce and culture of Puget Sound. On private lands in the "west end," some of the Northwest's most egregious logging practices were given free rein. Timber companies logged 60,000 acres of old-growth western red cedar on the Quinault Reservation between 1950 and 1980, leaving only stumps and deified salmon streams. Private lands bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the peninsula's northern shore were cut with no regard for fish, wildlife, scenery, or recreational values.

In the early 1970s, Tim McNulty and Jerry Gorsline were partners in Olympic Reforestation, a company that planted burned-over clearcuts on private, state, and federal lands, including the Shelton Unit. "We were seeing units the spring after the loggers pulled out," McNulty said. "The roots holding these slopes together were charred, and the tributary streams choked with slash and debris."

This on-the-ground exposure gave them a clear-eyed view of what was in store for unprotected forests on the peninsula. It also gave them a chance to see the beauty of what remained. In the winter, when he wasn't planting trees, McNulty wrote articles advocating

 
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wilderness preservation and poetry about the material poverty of a tree-planter's life.

The Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwestern Washington was a timber basket, a forest that could be depended on to get out the cut. Its borders encompassed Mount St. Helens, a symmetrical Cascade peak. Interest in protecting Mount St. Helens dated from the 1960s, when a speleologist advocated a national monument to protect unique caves on the mountain's south side. But the likelihood that Mount St. Helens would gain protection diminished as clearcuts climbed higher up its slopes. Between 1949 and 1975, the system of logging roads within the forest nearly quadrupled in length, to 2,300 miles. Roads penetrated most of its large pristine watersheds and obliterated more than half its network of hiking trails.

In 1970, environmentalists in Longview, Washington, wrote to Brock Evans demanding, "What is the Sierra Club going to do to protect Mount St. Helens?" Evans agreed to meet with them. But he told them they would have to save Mount St. Helens themselves. That meeting was the genesis of the Mount St. Helens Protective Association.

Early on, the association and the Sierra Club worked together to fight a proposed road through an old-growth valley along the Green River, to the north of the mountain. Environmentalists walked the proposed right-of-way and wrote a report saying the valley was so narrow the logging road would have to be put in the river. The Forest Service later abandoned the project.

VANISHED REDWOODS
In California, home to the Sierra Club and a heavily urban population, enthusiasm for nature conservation was high. In 1890, with strong public support, Congress passed legislation designating three national parks in the Sierra Nevada Range: Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant (later to become part of Kings Canyon). Yet the California conservation ethic was no match for the timber industry in the remote redwood region and Klamath Mountains, in the state's northwest corner.

The modern conservation movement came too late to save significant stands of the coastal California redwoods. These behemoths rose more than 300 feet from the forest floor and grew to diameters of 15 feet or more in a narrow fog belt that extended 450 miles, from just north of the Oregon border to the southern tip of Monterey County.

Large timber companies began acquiring and liquidating virtually all of the giant redwood stands in the mid-19th century, working north from Monterey Bay to the Oregon border. Between 1905 and 1929, even with the primitive logging equipment of the times, timber companies leveled an average of 500 million board feet of virgin redwoods annually.

The extent of destruction did not become widely known until a party of San Francisco civic leaders visited the Redwood Coast in 1917.

When they learned that not one of these magnificent trees was protected for

 
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future generations, they founded the Save the Redwoods League, which launched a drive for donations to buy redwoods from private owners. Over 75 years, the League raised more than $75 million to purchase and protect more than a quarter-million acres of coast redwoods.

In 1968, 50 years after the idea was first seriously broached, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill that established a 30,000-acre Redwood National Park. By the 1970s, only a few old-growth redwood groves survived on private land. One was the Headwaters Forest, owned by Pacific Lumber Company. Another was a grove owned by Georgia Pacific Corporation adjacent to Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. Both eventually would become the subjects of passionate preservation campaigns.   

ROCKS AND ICE
The 1964 Wilderness Act conferred protection on most of the major peaks of the Oregon and Washington Cascades and the botanically unique heart of the Siskiyou Mountains. Little forest of commercial value was included within any of these wilderness areas, however. Across the Northwest, logging roads continued to penetrate unprotected wilderness.

The 1964 act created the enabling legislation for an expanded national wilderness preservation system. Lovers of wild places throughout the West soon inundated Congress with citizen-initiated wilderness proposals. In 1967, to get control over the process and limit the pool of potential wilderness areas, the Forest Service directed regional foresters throughout the nation to review and report by 1969 on areas that qualified for wilderness designation. The deadline for this Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, nicknamed RARE, soon was extended to 1972.

The Forest Service refused to withdraw any of its commercially valuable timberlands from logging during the wilderness survey, because to remove land from this "timber base" would mean that at some future date the pace of cutting on the remaining lands would have to slow. The Northwest delegation concurred in this decision.

The pressure to keep the cut high was political, but it was also institutional and cultural. Under a 1930 law called the Knutson-Vandenberg Act, forest supervisors got to keep a share of timber receipts for reforestation and other projects on their forests. The more timber they sold, the more money they had for projects. Most supervisors and district rangers had been trained as foresters and engineers. They saw their principal job as deciding which tracts would be opened to logging and where the roads would go. Until the Wilderness Act, they had given little thought to qualities the forests under their stewardship possessed beyond timber, alpine scenery, and habitat for big game.

George Leonard, retired Forest Service deputy chief, acknowledges as much. "Historically we looked at the goal of forest management as producing timber and game animals. If you look at those goals,

 
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management was a great success. Everything that was viewed as important to humans was being managed.

A GOLDEN ERA
Between 1969 and 1976, Congress passed a series of landmark environmental laws that would prove critical to the forest preservation campaign. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed by President Richard Nixon in January of 1970, required federal agencies to disclose to the public the environmental impacts of all major projects and to involve the public in the decision-making process. The 1973 Endangered Species Act established strict protective measures for plants and animals threatened with extinction and for habitat critical to their survival. The 1976 National Forest Management Act required the Forest Service to adopt forest management plans balancing timber, grazing, and recreation and to protect the diversity of plants and animals found within national forests.

The modern environmental movement, which began to coalesce in the late 1960s, was a manifestation of this golden era of ecological awareness. It made its national debut on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, an event that began as a kind of national teach-in and became a spontaneous outpouring of commitment to the ecological health of the planet. The movement popularized recycling, won a law banning the pesticide DDT, and scored significant gains in reducing air and water pollution. In the Northwest, many high-school and college students were inspired by Earth Day to become involved in saving forests.

A number of grassroots forest protection groups sprouted in the years following Earth Day. One of the first was the Northcoast Environmental Center, established in 1971 in Arcata, California, to work for protection of roadless forests in the remote Six Rivers, Klamath, and Shasta—Trinity National Forests. The Oregon Wilderness Coalition, based in Eugene, followed soon after.

In the early 1970s, wilderness politics dominated debate about the future of the national forests, and the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society dominated the national wilderness campaign. After Earth Day, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society helped to mobilize grassroots groups in the Northwest for the coming wilderness wars.


RARE I
As the Forest Service undertook its first roadless area review of national forests, initially the agency expected to set aside a few scenic areas unsuitable for commercial timber production in the Pacific Northwest as wilderness, then proceed with the task of converting the nation's most productive forests to second-growth tree plantations.

Between the fall of 1971 and the summer of 1972, the Forest Service inventoried 1,449 roadless areas greater than 5,000 acres in size, 56 million acres in all. It applied a rigid and rigorous definition of wilderness to its lands. At the end, it announced that it had selected 274 areas

 
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totaling 12.3 million acres nationwide for further study. The remainder would remain open to logging.

The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society tore into the proposal. They accused the Forest Service of conducting a hasty review to justify liquidating most of the West's remaining forests and of arbitrarily splitting large wilderness tracts into smaller units to lower their wilderness value. The Sierra Club promptly sued in federal court under NEPA to stop the agency from offering timber sales in roadless areas it had found unsuitable for further wilderness study. In August of 1972, the club won a preliminary injunction preventing logging in these unprotected wild areas.

Bowing to the inevitable, the Forest Service put on the brakes. Each national forest supervisor was ordered to prepare an environmental impact statement that assessed the consequences of logging and road-building in roadless areas. NEPA required the agency to solicit public involvement at every step of the way. Suddenly environmental groups had standing to go head-to-head with the feds over logging.

"For the very first time in years, we are on an equal footing with the timber industry and the Forest Service with regard to our wilderness resource," Brock Evans exulted. "The de facto wilderness areas no longer belong to them first as they have thought for so long."
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Chapter Three

Paper Warriors

In 1972, Joe Walicki left his native Pennsylvania and moved west to Oregon to save wilderness. But during his first few weeks in Eugene, he wasn't sure he could take living in the belly of the timber beast. His response to logging was visceral. The sight of a log truck loaded with massive firs barreling down the highway gave him a stomach ache. The way logging was done in the Northwest—taking every tree, leaving a tangled, churned-up landscape of mud and slash—made his blood boil.

Walicki joined the Sierra Club and threw himself into the fight to save French Pete. Students at the University of Oregon were signing up for the environmental crusade in the euphoric aftermath of Earth Day. With a tiny stipend from the Wilderness Society, which was just beginning to pay attention to the Pacific Northwest, he began recruiting students and holding wilderness workshops around the state.

A more fertile base for organizing than Eugene would have been hard to find. The Vietnam War protests of the 1960s had consolidated the town's reputation as Berkeley North. Eugene in the early 1970s was a magnet for liberal arts majors and a favorite gig for the acid-rock Grateful Dead. It was a center for vegetarianism and alternative schooling; a city where the counterculture put itself on display at an annual Renaissance Faire and hippies sold hand-thrown pots at a weekly Saturday market redolent with incense and hashish. Eugene was the world's foremost track town, birthplace of the national jogging craze, and a magnet for hikers, rafters, and backpackers. Eugeneans young and old, from every walk of life, trekked regularly to the nearby mountains to feast at nature's banquet.

Eugene and Springfield, its blue-collar neighbor, were timber towns as well, where rusted metal wigwam burners glowed in the night sky, log trucks rolled down the main streets, and the sweet smell of fresh sawdust wafted on the breeze.

One day in 1974, over a few beers, Walicki and two friends from the Sierra Club, Bob Wazeka and Holly Jones, thought up the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. A front group for their respective national organizations, it would bind Oregon's fledgling cells of wilderness advocates together. "We put out a letterhead and off we went," Walicki said. "That was when it was simple and clean and pure. The early to
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mid-1970s was the golden era of the wilderness movement in this state." He turns nostalgic when he recalls those days before lawsuits, high-stakes lobbying, and divisive arguments split conservationists into bitter camps.

Fred Swanson, a Sierra Club activist who taught a wilderness course at the University of Oregon, agreed to become the coalition's first coordinator. In the fall of 1974, James Monteith, an intense graduate school drop-out, succeeded him.   

THE VISIONARY
Monteith grew up in the ranching and logging community of Klamath Falls, surrounded by the open ponderosa pine forest that grows on the arid east slope of the Cascades. Most of his classmates went straight from high school to jobs in the local sawmills or hired on at cattle ranches. But he had a different future in mind.

After high school, Monteith traveled and attended college, first abroad, at Oxford University, then at MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Alaska. In his youth, he had taken his place of origin for granted. When he returned to the West Coast after several years, he saw his state afresh. Now, he said, "I was totally stunned at what Oregon was."

As a student at Stanford, he became obsessed with wilderness. In 1970, he submitted a grant proposal to the Sierra Club, offering to conduct a wilderness study covering all the national forests of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho for $500, over summer break. The club turned him down, saying his price was too high.

After graduating from Stanford with a biology degree, Monteith enrolled in a graduate program in wildlife biology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He studied with Howard Wight, the director of an interagency wildlife research program, who had a strong interest in the ecology of old-growth forests. Across the campus at the School of Forestry, future foresters were being taught the dominant paradigm of the day—that the Northwest's old-growth forests were "biological deserts" of decadent trees, and that their highest and best use was to be clearcut, burned, and replanted with plantations of Douglas-firs.

Monteith loved wilderness for its own sake. But intuition, reinforced by his studies with Wight, told him there were other values locked in the old-growth forests. He dropped out of graduate school and landed in Eugene in June of 1974, where he was recruited to fill in as temporary director of the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. He planned to appeal a few timber sales, try to delay some logging operations, and then move on. But within weeks he was caught up in the campaign. Soon he became consumed by it.

THE STRATEGIST
Andy Kerr came of age in Creswell, a small timber and farming town south of Eugene. During summer vacations, he helped his father build
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houses. He paid little heed to the antiwar demonstrations taking place on the University of Oregon campus, but he was impressed when 1,500 people marched through the streets of Eugene to save French Pete. Young Andy had never been to French Pete, but he had seen plenty of clearcuts in the forests near his home. He recalled thinking, "What a novel idea! Part of the national forest system that you don't log!"

Kerr too enrolled at Oregon State, where he majored in American studies. He was a mediocre biology student and not much of an outdoorsman. He thought backpacking was overrated. Even in the 1970s he saw that protecting wilderness was not about recreation, that keeping wild places intact was intrinsically important even if people never visited them. But it was the politics of wilderness, not the science, that intrigued him most.

By late 1975, Kerr was spending most of his time volunteering for the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. In the charged political climate of the period, environmental politics seemed more relevant than school. Kerr's destiny was sealed the day he called Monteith to discuss appealing a timber sale on southern Oregon's Fremont National Forest. They met—and connected. In 1976, as the wilderness campaign moved into high gear, Kerr dropped out of college and Monteith put him on staff as the coalition's western field coordinator, based in Corvallis.

Kerr was to become the movement's political strategist, a role he would take to with relish. His short-cropped curly hair and pugnacious features, and his profile—which vaguely resembled that of a spotted owl—gave him an easy-to-recognize visage that would later appear on "wanted' posters in timber communities throughout the Northwest. As the power and influence of the movement grew, his cool, arrogant rhetoric and his knack for sound bites would make him a media hit.

THE EAST-SIDE
Tim Lillebo spent much of his childhood in Prairie City, a ranching and timber town surrounded by the spectacular rimrock canyon and pine forest country of central Oregon. In 1970, after graduating from Lewis & Clark College in Portland with a biology degree, he returned to Prairie City to work as a timber faller, road-builder and log truck driver.

Lillebo knew this sparsely populated land east of the Cascades from living, working, and playing on it. And he could see it changing before his eyes. "My buddies and I liked to hunt and fish," he said. "Like Aldo Leopold, we wanted to find the blank spots on the map. But we'd go to our favorite place and it would be logged. We'd go over the next ridge, but the next ridge would be logged too."

Lillebo began appealing timber sales to get the Forest Service to save some of the blank spaces on the map. But to his surprise, the agency ignored his appeals. He met Monteith in 1975 in the eastern Oregon town of Baker, where local activists and concerned ranchers were meeting to discuss protecting the nearby Elkhorn Mountains from logging. Monteith was put off by Lillebo's pessimism. But
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Lillebo refused to go away, so Monteith gave him a list of names. From that list Lillebo created a group called Friends of the Malheur, to appeal sales on eastern Oregon's Malheur National Forest. In 1976, Monteith hired Lillebo as the coalition's eastern field coordinator and began putting his local knowledge to work

SCRAPING AND SCAMMING
With Kurt Kutay, a land-use analyst and Sierra Club activist who was Monteith's first hire, the Oregon Wilderness Coalition now had a staff of four—and funding for one. Monteith shared his $400-a-month salary, giving Kerr, Lillebo, and Kutay each $100. All of them were subsidized by parents, girlfriends, and the university community.

As Oregon natives, Monteith, Kerr, and Lillebo knew the forests on a gut level and cared fiercely about their fate. "We all had that same sort of obsession, that this is the most special place in the world," Monteith said. "We grew up seeing how fast it was being cut down, and thinking it was normal, that it was an anomaly that we might save something."

In 1974, the coalition began working out of the Survival Center, a student club on the University of Oregon campus. Monteith and his field organizers hit the road to begin signing up recruits in Oregon's hinterland who would help them wage the coming battle for the forests. Walicki, now working full-time as a field organizer for the Wilderness Society, did the same. The response, as often as not, was hostile. But in every town they found two or three people who were willing to stand up for the forest. As the battle for the forests unfolded over the next 20 years, these groups would make their voices heard far out of proportion to their numbers.   

THE VISION
In the fall of 1974, Monteith, exhausted, took a break from wilderness recruiting to go camping in the Rogue–Umpqua Divide, a small roadless area straddling the Rogue and Umpqua River watersheds in southwestern Oregon. He had not slept for two nights and was churning inside over a dispute he was having with his board of directors about the coalition's wilderness strategy. Some board members believed the coalition should focus exclusively on saving the largest unprotected roadless areas. Monteith was convinced the coalition must fight to protect all remaining roadless areas, no matter their size, ifit hoped to preserve the biological integrity of the forested landscape.

Politically, Monteith's goal was naive. Oregon's timber industry had the state's political leaders on its side. No industrialized nation had saved a significant remnant of its native forests. There was little reason to believe the United States would be different.

During his wanderings in the Rogue–Umpqua Divide, Monteith hiked to the top of the ridge dividing the two watersheds. From there, the vista opened to buttes, peaks, and other small roadless areas on the Umpqua National Forest. Then he headed down into a river drainage

 
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he thought would take him back to his camp. Instead, several hours later, he found himself lost, hungry, and on the verge of hypothermia as darkness approached. Sitting on a knoll, eating his last piece of jerky and gazing downhill at an unfamiliar stream, he saw it: a beautiful, multicolored eagle, flying toward him.

"It veered to the right, up a small tributary," Monteith wrote later. "Its size diminished. It flew up the tiny stream, and it was a tiny bird. An hour later I saw it again, flying down the larger creek. As the stream grew larger, so did the eagle, even though it was flying away from me. I headed downstream, following the stream and the eagle. I saw my camp. And then, from the corner of my eye, the eagle flew by again, just off the water. It was very large now, and the colors were vivid. I watched it grow with the size of the stream, and shrink in size as it darted up the tributaries. It flew over the ridge, glanced back, as if to be sure I understood, and then rolled over on its back and dived out of sight. Two hours later I sat on the bank of the South Umpqua and it flew by, its wings spanning the river. It was huge."

"I understood. It was all connected. Large is small. Small becomes large. I had my answer."

In a letter to the board of directors, Monteith translated his vision into a political objective: The campaign would fight to save 100 percent of the unroaded virgin forests. "Regardless of so-called realities, it is this goal which will enable us to save maximum wilderness acreage," he wrote. "This goal, by rational perspective, is not unrealistic or unattainable."

GLOMMING ONTO THE SCIENCE
As a high-school student in Portland in the late 1960s, Randal O'Toole dabbled in the antiwar movement. But after Earth Day 1970, he decided to devote himself to the environmental cause and to enroll in the Oregon State University School of Forestry, so he could learn more about the "environmental ideas" of forest management. On the first day of classes in the fall of 1970, a forestry professor threw down a challenge: By the end of four years, only 8 of 100 freshmen would remain. The rest would have transferred out, dropped out, or flunked out of the rigorous program. O'Toole vowed he would be one of those eight.

With his shoulder-length brown ponytail, O'Toole stood out like some alien being among his cleancut classmates, who would come up to him in the halls and warn, "You're not going to be able to get along with long hair around here." This did not bother him. He studied for estry techniques and forest economics. He became convinced that if ilderness advocates were to prevail over the economic arguments of the timber industry, the environmental movement would have to transform itself. The more he learned about forestry, the more convinced he be came that he was the man to effect this transformation. "I could see all  the technical expertise was on the other side," he said. "I felt like I was

 
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helping the underdogs. At least if both sides had some expertise it would make things more fair."

At the time, opposition to clearcutting was an article of faith in Oregon environmental circles. But O'Toole refused to toe that particular party line. He had a strong aversion to the emotional faction of the movement. A few months after he graduated in 1974, O'Toole got a late-evening phone call from James Monteith, who soon showed up on his Warr doorstep and spread maps all over his living room floor. Monteith asked O'Toole to help the Oregon Wilderness Coalition save the Wild Rogue, a stretch of wild country along one of Oregon's premier whitewater rivers.

O'Toole was skeptical at first. "I don't feel comfortable with maps," he said. "I'm a quantitative person. I want to know how much timber there is, how much it's worth, how much it's going to cost to get it, how much fish are going to conflict with that, how much deer are going to conflict with that." But he agreed. He went to the Siskiyou National Forest and collected reams of quantitative data on timber, fish, and water quality that ultimately helped the coalition get the Wild Rogue protected as wilderness.

His opportunity to influence the environmental movement came at the coalition's 1975 meeting in the mountain hamlet of McKenzie Bridge. For the occasion, he was attired in his favorite costume: a floor-length, flowing blue cape with a fake-fur hood and a cowboy hat. On his belt he wore a big holstered Hewlett-Packard pocket calculator.

"The discussion turned to clearcutting," he says, "and there were all these people there who just had this emotional response: `Clearcutting is bad. We can't have any clearcutting in our forests.' And I remember someone got up and said, 'I don't want a single tree cut. It's immoral to cut a single tree!"

Finally, O'Toole couldn't take it anymore. "I stood up, I put my leg up on the bench, swung my cape back, and you could see this holster, and I remember somebody told me later she thought, 'My god, he's got a gun.' And I said, 'I'm a forester and I know about clearcutting. Clearcutting is good sometimes and it's not good other times, and what we should do is figure out when it's not good and fight that."

Monteith and Kerr were listening. They were already coming to believe that wild land was intrinsically valuable, even if no one ever laid eyes on it. They also knew they needed to make science their friend.

O'Toole went on to become the conservation movement's secret weapon. He challenged 70 national forest management plans His ability to penetrate the bureaucratic obfuscation of Forest Service planning documents and his mastery of FORPLAN, a computer program that employed a mechanistic formula to determine how much timber each national forest could produce, helped save 2 million acres from the chainsaw.

Over the years, he also grew to believe that the only way to change
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the Forest Service was to change the system of incentives that encouraged the agency to cut trees at the expense of all other resources.

"The wilderness movement in Oregon was changing from one based on emotion to one based on reason," O'Toole said. "It was people like me, saying, 'We have to come up with sound reasons for saving wilderness, sound reasons for saving old growth, sound reasons for stopping timber sales.' We can't just say, 'Woodsman, spare that tree, because in youth it sheltered me.' And this was the turning point, this meeting."

PENCIL DREAMS
Andy Kerr was fond of analogies drawn from military history. Holding down the fort in the Oregon wilderness campaign, waiting for the national conservation groups to enter the fray, was like being a member of the French Resistance in World War II, waiting for the Allies to storm the beaches at Normandy.

The task at hand in the mid-1970s required an approach closer to guerrilla warfare. It was a critical time in the history of the national forests. To slow the logging, wilderness activists had to become paper warriors, challenging each plan the Forest Service wrote to justify building new roads and carving new clearcuts into the mountainsides. It was quite literally a race, and wild forests were the prize.

In 1976, armed only with Forest Service fire maps, field reports, and adrenaline, the Oregon Wilderness Coalition appealed 200 timber sales and more than 70 roadless area plans James Monteith felt the destiny of the forests rested on his shoulders. "We inventoried every one of them," he said. "We went in on the ground, we worked with local people, we sent students, we burned ourselves out."

In those frenetic months, Monteith had a recurring dream. It became known around the office as his "giant pencil" dream. "I was looking down the landscape and here was this monster pencil, this big red pencil coming my way, and the guy drawing the boundaries of the roadless area coughs, and the pencil whips out, and about 14,000 acres of land just gets lost."

Much of the roadless country in Oregon was in mountainous areas accessible only by an arduous hike. Monteith and Kerr knew they would have to learn the country they hoped to save if they were to mount credible challenges. They needed bodies to deploy, and they needed them fast.

Energy was high, money was nonexistent, and scamming and scrambling were part of the game. Using the Survival Center as their base, Kerr and Monteith tapped into the Oregon State System of Higher Education long-distance line so they could communicate with other activists. A mole helped them keep their overhead down by feeding them the numbers of recently closed telephone accounts.

Monteith's resourcefulness knew few limits. He persuaded the university to offer an experimental course on wilderness and got himself
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appointed an instructor. Each student was assigned a roadless area and instructed to collect as much information as possible about it. Monteith used the students' field reports to appeal timber sales and environmental impact statements all over Oregon. Later, he used the same reports to make the case for wilderness preservation.

The debate over roadless areas was the debate over the future of the forests—the essential debate over how much would be opened to logging, how much left intact. The conservationists' campaign to hold the line on further penetration of roadless areas would continue into the 1990s under other banners. Over the years its tactics, rhetoric, and politics would change dramatically. What would not change was Monteith's ultimate objective: to go for maximum acreage, and to hell with political realities. 

 
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