Tree Huggers

had for fine vertical-grain Douglas-fir. By 1990, private companies in the Northwest were exporting 3.6 billion board feet of raw logs annually from state and private lands—more than the Forest Service expected to sell annually from all the national forests of western Oregon and western Washington under its new forest plans. Mountains of logs piled up at ports in Aberdeen, Longview, and Astoria.

After passage of the 1984 wilderness bills, some forest activists began laying the groundwork for a litigation campaign that would use the northern spotted owl as a legal stand-in for wild forests. In late 1987, environmentalists took the government to court in the first of a series of lawsuits to force compliance with environmental laws.

The region erupted in early 1989, when a federal judge blocked logging in national forests inhabited by the owl until the Forest Service adopted a credible plan for preserving its habitat. The timber industry responded by organizing timber towns and encouraging workers to blame the owl, blame environmentalists, blame anything but its own rapacious and short-sighted practices. However, some federal employees who had warned privately for years that the pace of logging in the Northwest was unsustainable now found the courage to speak the truth.

In 1989, in an exercise of raw power, Northwest lawmakers pushed a bill through Congress that released 1.1 billion board feet of timber from the federal injunction and exempted 8 billion board feet more from environmentalists' lawsuits.

Confronted with a crisis in the Pacific Northwest, the Bush administration appointed a committee of scientists to devise a strategy for protecting the owl's old-growth forest habitat across 24 million acres of federal land. The plan's release triggered protests in logging communities throughout the region. Polarization accelerated in 1990 after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as a threatened species and undertook steps required by the Endangered Species Act to save the subspecies from extinction.

The Forest Service seized on "new forestry," a less brutal alternative to clearcutting, to defuse opposition to the continued logging of old-growth forests. But President George Bush refused to grapple with the fundamental cause of forest gridlock—decades of overcutting on federal lands. Instead, he pursued a cynical "train-wreck" policy designed to weaken support for the Endangered Species Act and build political support in disaffected timber towns.

 

University of Oregon, to suggest a conservation biologist he could talk to. His father recommended Russell Lande, a University of Chicago population geneticist who specialized in the esoteric science of modeling wildlife populations and habitat conditions.

Stahl tracked Lande down in Maine Over a meal at a lobster shack, he explained what was known about the owl's relationship to the old-growth forests. He showed Lande the Forest Service's latest plan for protecting the owl. The 1984 plan, known as a regional guide, called for setting aside small reserves across the bird's range, each large enough to support a single breeding owl pair. He asked Lande to assess whether the plan was adequate and to develop a mathematical model predicting how habitat loss might affect the owl's viability. Lande was intrigued by the subject and had time on his hands. He agreed.

As Lande checked the scientific literature cited in the regional guide, he discovered that it relied heavily on work he himself had done on mathematical modeling of genetic variability for his doctoral dissertation. He realized that the Forest Service assumed it could guarantee the owl's survival across 24 million acres by maintaining a population of just 500 mating pairs—a number more appropriate for animals in zoos than species in the wild.

Stahl sent Lande a sheaf of published and unpublished reports by owl biologists. Lande studied the reports and maps of forest habitat, talked to the biologists, and critiqued the regional guide. He concluded that the habitat reserves set aside for the owl were severely deficient. "It was clear they were shaving it down to a minimum and spacing the reserves too far apart," he said.

Lande spent three months in the spring of 1985 writing a paper detailing his findings, submitted it for peer review, and later published it in the professional journal Oecologia. In the paper, he concluded that the Forest Service's long-term plan for the owl was likely to lead to its extinction.

AMMUNITION
Lande's findings were all that Stahl had hoped for. With Terry Thatcher, a lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation, he paid a visit to Northwest Regional Forester Jeff Sirmon. Thatcher and Stahl told Sirmon they now had ammunition to shut down logging on national forests west of the Cascades. But they said they would hold off on filing a lawsuit challenging the existing owl protection plan until the Forest Service completed a new one—if Sirmon would agree to withdraw six old-growth timber sales in Oregon and Washington. Sirmon did agree. They sealed the deal with a handshake.

Lande said he was only vaguely aware in 1985 of the legal weight his paper might carry. "I knew that the owl was important not only for itself but for other species and for its habitat," he said. "We were talking about owls, but I knew they had other purposes."

Not every owl biologist agreed with Lande's conclusions. In 1985

 

Instead, the opposite happened. The litigation campaign launched in 1987 quickly leveled the playing field and assured that the Northwest delegation would have to deal with environmentalists one way or another.

ENFORCING THE LAW
The strategy Sher, True, and Stahl and their clients decided on was as simple as it was devastating. Federal natural resource laws and the rules implementing them were written broadly, and federal agencies had seldom taken them literally. SCLDF would sue to hold the agencies to the letter as well as the spirit of the law.

Though the Endangered Species Act would later grab all the attention, the law that provided the key to ending the logging of old-growth forests was the less celebrated National Forest Management Act. The 1976 act requires the Forest Service to "provide for diversity of plant and animal communities." However, it was a rule called the "viability standard," written in 1979 by a committee of scientists to provide guidance on the act's implementation, that provided the key the legal team was looking for. The rule requires the Forest Service to protect "viable populations" of vertebrate species, well distributed throughout their range. What constitutes a "viable population" is a matter for biologists, not politicians or timber sale managers, to decide.

The National Environmental Policy Act also was critical to the success of the litigation campaign. NEPA is a process law. It does not dictate to government agencies what actions they may take, but it does require them to lay out various options for conducting major projects and to assess their environmental impacts.

Taken together, the two laws were to ensnare the Forest Service in a legal Catch-22 of its own making. By suing under NEPA, environmentalists could force the agency to state clearly the environmental consequences of a timber sale project. By also suing under NFMA, they could require the Forest Service to choose an action that met the strict "viable populations" standard.

The third major law available was the Endangered Species Act. Unlike other natural resource laws, which attempt to balance protection and exploitation, the ESA clearly and unequivocally puts threatened and endangered plants and animals first. It was a loaded gun. Northwest activists feared wielding it prematurely.

FORCING THE ISSUE
Debate over whether to petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the owl as a threatened species was at a high pitch as Sher and True set up shop in Seattle. The national groups in particular worried that if they were successful, the political impact of shutting down the forests could threaten the very survival of the act, which would be up for reauthorization by Congress in 1992.

That debate became moot overnight when a maverick group in

It was Hatfield 1, environmentalists 0.

The development sent a clear message that litigation alone would not save the forests. From the beginning, Sher and True had warned their clients that court victories were not permanent that they must build public support for saving old-growth forests at the same time they sued the government to protect them. The task was made more difficult because at that point the disparate forest protection groups in the Northwest had no formal coalition to speak for them.

ARBITRARY AND CAPRICIOUS
Meanwhile, biologists in the Fish and Wildlife Service began reviewing more than 10 years of owl research in response to the petitions. Their review found overwhelming evidence of the owl's precarious status. It concluded that logging was destroying 62,000 acres of spotted owl habitat each year. But the review was abruptly cut short when Frank Dunkle, the Reagan administration's director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, summoned the biologists to Washington, D.C., and told them to bring all their notes. The report was rewritten under directions from Reagan political appointees in the Interior and Agriculture Departments. In December 1987 Rolf Wallenstrom, the service's regional director, announced under orders from his bosses that the owl's situation did not warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.

In May of 1988, SCLDF sued the Fish and Wildlife Service, arguing that the agency's decision not to conduct a full-scale study of the owl's situation was "arbitrary and capricious" without scientific basis. In November of 1988, U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly agreed, saying the decision "disregarded all of the expert testimony on population viability, including that of its own expert, that the owl is facing extinction." He ordered the service to go back and try again.

It was now Hatfield 1, environmentalists 1.

TERMS OF ART
In December, in a speech to the Association of 0 & C Counties, a coalition of counties dependent on timber receipts from BLM land, Hatfield recounted the events of the previous 12 months and their likely effect on federal timber sales. He lashed out at environmentalists, warning that "there are many who do not share the values we hold important."

"These people have little or no stake in the outcome of the conflicts they cause," Hatfield said. "In fact, many times I'm not sure these people have any understanding of the effect these actions have on Oregon and Oregonians—our human resources, our most important resource."

Hatfield warned that environmentalists were now employing such "terms of art" as "long-term productivity" and "biological diversity." "It is clear these phrases reflect a new, sophisticated, legalistic approach by those who make 'preservation at all costs' their exclusive emphasis," he

It was Hatfield 1, environmentalists 2.

In the Oregon Legislature, the Dwyer ruling overshadowed a hearing rural legislators had scheduled to hold the Forest Service's feet to the fire over reduced timber sale levels in the new national forest plans. At the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, where biologists from all over the West convened March 29-31 for a symposium to share their research on spotted owls and other wildlife associated with old-growth forests, the Forest Service hired security guards to keep an eye out for trouble.

At the 1989 University of Oregon Environmental Law Conference in March, the mood was jubilant. John Bovine of the Law School faculty, one of the conference's founders, asked 700 pumped-up activists to join hands in a big lecture hall at the closing session. To the tune of the civil rights anthem, they sang We Shall Save the Earth.

In the rapidly evolving history of the forest preservation campaign, it was a transcendent moment.

 

The Sweet Home rally came on the heels of two mill closures in the community. The town of Sweet Home, far up the Santiam Valley and isolated at the edge of the Willamette National Forest, had languished since the recession of the early 1980s, never entirely recovering. Empty town this night.

A BROADER AGENDA
That same week a less raucous event, sponsored by Willamette Industries, a company that owned several mills in the Santiam, took place down the valley in Lebanon. Instead of loggers, this meeting featured civic leaders, state legislators, Forest Service officials, and Larry Irwin, the biologist hired by the timber industry to study the northern spotted owl. Though yellow ribbons were everywhere, the intent of this community meeting was to inform rather than inflame Irwin carefully explained what was known about the owl's habitat needs and what federal law required. Mike Kerrick, the supervisor of the Willamette National Forest, predicted how the Dwyer injunction might affect timber sales. The only inciting done that night was by Mark Rutzick, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney with a Harvard Law degree, who had been hired by the timber industry to fight environmentalists head-to-head in court. It was an extraordinary performance.

"You have a problem which could hurt your ability to make a living," Rutzick said. "We're not exactly dealing with the spotted owl problem. The groups involved have a much broader agenda than the spotted owl." In Texas, he said, these same groups had shut down one-third of a national forest to protect the red-cockaded woodpecker. "It's an agenda to try to shut down not just logging but mining, grazing, and productive use of water. They want to turn all public land into parks."

Ultimately, Rutzick said, it was the responsibility of Congress to manage the public land. "You're voters. You can make your voices heard. It's citizens like you who have a stake in whether there's a forest industry in Oregon."

If people hadn't been afraid before, they were now—and they knew who to blame.

"My husband took a $12,000 drop in wages," one woman said tearfully. "How am I going to feed my unborn child? I deserve food on my plate, not an owl."

"How many acres do you need for the things you do in your ancient forest?" a young boy asked. "I just don't see how you can put the spotted owl over your own people. It don't make sense to me."

One young man in the rear of the auditorium found the courage to speak out for the forests. "I'm not a preservationist. I'm a woodworker," he said. "I'm willing to talk to anyone who's willing to talk to me. Ancient forest is what we're trying to preserve a little of. There are old trees out there. There's no need to take all of them. Some

industry, fought to get the government to sell off the federal domain to the states, with the ultimate goal of delivering timber, range, and mineral resources into the hands of private developers.

The new western lands insurgency, christened the Wise Use movement at a Reno conference in 1988, had a broader pro-property rights, pro-resource extraction agenda. The name "Wise Use" came from Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, who advocated a utilitarian role for the national forest system.

Ron Arnold, founder of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a conservative think tank in Bellevue, Washington, organized the Reno conference to bring together disaffected loggers, ranchers, miners, and developers. He invoked Pinchot's phrase to describe the political philosophy he believed would be necessary to counter the environmental movement's victories.

Bill Grannell, a former Oregon state representative, and his wife, Barbara, a former legislative aide, also helped launch this incipient movement. In 1988, after moving to Colorado, the Grannells founded the Western States Public Lands Coalition with backing from oil, timber, mining, and uranium companies and the National Association of Counties. When the forest conflict hit the headlines in late 1988, they thought up the Oregon Project, and Barbara Grannell returned to Oregon to mobilize loggers, millworkers, and local business workers against this threat to their way of life. She found no shortage of willing recruits.

Associated Oregon Loggers launched its own organizing effort, forming "yellow ribbon coalitions" in timber towns like Roseburg and Springfield. In Washington state, the Washington Contract Loggers Association mounted a similar effort, based in the Olympic Peninsula timber town of Forks.

Meanwhile Valerie Johnson, a sales representative for Portland-based Stimson Lumber Company and the daughter of a prominent mill owner in Oregon's Douglas County, had grown alarmed about restrictions on federal timber sales. She asked Stimson's staff forester to make a presentation to the sales staff. "His message," she said, "was, 'This is serious. We have to take it seriously.'"

THE OREGON LANDS COALITION
On August 31, 1989, the various pro-timber groups met in Eugene and agreed to form a statewide coalition to increase their visibility and political clout. "We chose the name Oregon Lands Coalition because right then we knew that our job was bigger than just timber," Johnson said.

Tom Hirons, the coalition's first president, and Valerie Johnson, its first salaried coordinator, became rural Oregon's fiercest advocates. The coalition, financed primarily with timber industry money, worked closely with the Yellow Ribbon groups and, at first, with the Oregon Project. But the Grannells' top-down style did not sit well with locals.

getting the shaft?" asked Melanie Rowland, a Seattle attorney who worked for the Wilderness Society during those years.

Others insist the effort would have been futile in any case. Unions representing timber workers had lost members throughout the 1980s because of mill automation. Faced with the threat of mill shutdowns, they had agreed to deep wage cuts. By 1989, they had lost most of their power as well. "Timber workers identified with their captors," said Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. "Was there a missed opportunity? Sure. We could have spent years trying to make inroads into labor. We didn't have time."

Instead, the timber industry succeeded in turning workers against environmentalists. The Timber Labor Coalition, an affiance of five unions that enjoyed active support from management, made its public debut September 8, 1989, in Salem, Oregon, when it held a rally and march that drew 1,500 workers. Several timber companies chartered buses to carry workers to the rally. Some gave their employees an unpaid day off to attend.

Labor officials insisted they had not become pawns of the timber industry.-But whether by tacit or formal agreement, over the next several years organized labor remained silent on the export of billions of board feet of raw logs—and timber processing jobs—from the Pacific Northwest to Japan.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Years later, Tom Hirons recalled the moment he knew he would have to take a stand. It had come in a flash, the culmination of three events that struck close to home in his North Santiam Canyon community-Judge Dwyer had shut down the forests. Earth First! demonstrators had buried themselves up to their necks on a snowy logging road to block a timber sale, attracting national news media to their cause. But the final straw had been the defection of a friend and former business partner, George Atiyeh, who had launched a campaign to preserve an intact old-growth valley called Opal Creek in Hirons' back yard.

"Atiyeh called me up and said, 'You'd better wake up and smell the roses. The environmental movement, and I'm one of 'em, is going to put you out of business.' My reaction was, 'This is war. You have just declared war.' "

Hirons may be quick to anger and slow to give up a grudge, but he's a reasonable man and not blind to his industry's mistakes. Pressed for his opinion about whether the breakneck pace of logging on the national forests in the 1980s could have continued, he said in 1992, "I concede a lot more than most people do. The cut was coming down anyway."

Some mills were bound to go out of business even if the owl hadn't come along, Hirons admitted, once the glory days of the mid-1980s passed and companies had to compete for scarce federal timber. "We had a bunch of cheap timber, a cheap labor pool, and cheap mills. If

Chapter Eleven

Mutiny in the Ranks

When Jeff DeBonis began working as a timber sale planner on the Willamette National Forest in 1989, he experienced what was known in the Forest Service as "westside future shock." The Willamette, the premier timber-producing forest in the national forest system, was a good place to experience clearcut logging on a scale unequaled anywhere else on the nation's public lands. To DeBonis, the extent of forest fragmentation and the cumulative impacts of logging on soils and streams were a revelation.

As a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, DeBonis had seen the destruction of tropical rainforests. As a Forest Service timber planner, he had seen logging practices on Montana's Kootenai National Forest, where clearcutting and slash-burning on steep slopes regularly triggered debris slides and dumped thousands of cubic yards of sediment into streams. He told his co-workers there, "You guys are doing the same thing they're doing in Third World countries."

DeBonis made the remark partly in jest. It took a transfer to western Oregon's realm of big timber for him to realize that his initial apprehension had been correct.

FREE SPEECH
DeBonis first spoke out in early 1989, testing the limits of free speech within the Forest Service. His epiphany came after he attended a conference of forest activists in Eugene. There, he finally understood that conservationists, of whom he considered himself one, widely regarded the agency he worked for as the enemy.

Fired by indignation, he sat at his computer terminal in the Blue River Ranger District and composed an internal memo to Forest Service Chief F. Dale Robertson. "We, as an agency, are perceived by the conservation community as being an advocate of the timber industry's agenda," he wrote. "Based on my 10 years with the Forest Service, I believe this charge is true. I also believe, along with many others, that this agency needs to retake the moral "high ground."

The memo became public and drew the ire of a timber industry hired gun, Troy Reinhart, who demanded in a letter to the supervisor of the Willamette National Forest that DeBonis be formally reprimanded for

importance of free speech rights for government scientists and resource specialists. "If government can muzzle its scientists—if it can assert that it 'owns' the scientist simply because it employs him or her—then the government will control the debate on difficult policy choices. This danger is particularly acute in cases where federal employees discover that scientific objectivity precludes political neutrality."

In late February of 1990, DeBonis announced that he would leave the Forest Service and his job as a timber sale planner and devote all his time to the seven-month-old insurgency movement he had founded. He had the look of a man whose warring sides at last were at peace.

"The cognitive dissonance was just getting to be too much," he said. "It was hard for me to go to work every day on liquidating the temperate rainforest."

DeBonis had tapped a deep well of anger, frustration, and professional indignation. People sent him stories of solid biological evidence agencies had ignored, of critical reports they had deep-sixed, of retaliatory disciplinary actions they had experienced for speaking out.

Some federal employees wrote anonymously. Others found courage to speak out openly. Charlie Thomas, a wildlife biologist nearing retirement with the Bureau of Land Management, went public in 1990 with his opposition to his agency's plan to allow logging of old-growth bald eagle habitat in the heavily cutover Coburg Hills, east of Eugene. He took television crews into the hills to show them how little habitat was left. He gave reporters the letters he had sent to his superiors, and the responses he had received.

"Everybody knows about DeBonis," Thomas said. " His paper is out in all of the western United States. Because of him, I know there are people out there who support what I do."

OUT OF TOUCH
DeBonis's effort was only one sign of growing dissension within the ranks. In May of 1989, seven BLM managers in western Oregon wrote an internal report naming specific areas where it was now "very difficult or impossible" to find places to sell timber because the BLM had never adjusted its cutting quotas to reflect the withdrawal of forests for spotted owl reserves. "We are trying to carry out timber management on greatly reduced intensive timber bases without reductions in the annual allowable cuts," they wrote. They urged their bosses to reduce logging levels until the final BLM plans for the 1990s were completed.

However, the report surfaced only in February of 1990, after Congress had passed a measure mandating continued unsustainable levels of logging on BLM land for at least one more year.

In the fall of 1989, national forest supervisors from several western states went public with memos to Forest Service Chief Robertson declaring that the agency was "out of control" and out of touch with the land stewardship values on which it had been founded. Supervisors from 63 national forests signed a letter to Robertson

Chapter Twelve

The Rider from Hell

In June of 1989, with timber industry rhetoric rising feverishly across the Northwest, Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt and the entire Oregon congressional delegation staged a timber summit at Oregon's Capitol in Salem to deal with Judge Dwyer's owl injunction. There, after a half-day of testimony, Republican U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield and Democratic Representative Les AuCoin presented forest preservationists with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition written in advance: agree within 48 hours to a courtroom deal that would release most of the timber sales from the injunction that had locked up the forests, or Congress would do it for them.

A FRAGILE ALLIANCE
For forest activists, the Salem summit was a wake-up call. The various forest preservation groups in the Northwest had been working together for only a few months. Under the umbrella of the newly formed Ancient Forest Alliance, five national groups—the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund—had agreed to join grassroots groups in Oregon, Washington, and California in a campaign to save ancient forests. But the alliance remained a loose coalition of independent-minded activists. It had no national political strategy, no formal agenda, no process for collective decision-making.

For Bonnie Phillips of Pilchuck Audubon in Everett, Washington, the summit was the beginning of a warp-speed introduction to environmental politics. She had recently agreed to spearhead formation of a Washington Ancient Forest Alliance that would pull together grassroots forest activists in her state and communicate with similar statewide coalitions in Oregon and California.

In May, the fragile new alliance began preparing for the Salem summit. At a meeting in Portland, where Phillips met leaders of the national groups and Oregon forest activists for the first time, she was struck by the fact that no one seemed to grasp what was at stake in the upcoming summit. "I don't think anyone understood that this would be more than a flash in the pan."

Her intuition proved prescient. The alliance was ill-prepared to

the environmentalists' counterproposals, including one that required federal agencies to acknowledge for the first time the ecological value of old-growth forests.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat with a progressive record on environmental issues, believed the Northwest should solve its own problems, but he also had a strong aversion to court-stripping bills. Leahy chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee, which had jurisdiction over national forest issues. In the summer of 1989 he hired Tom Tuchmann, a political operative with a degree in forestry, and assigned him to kill the Hatfield-Adams rider. But Hatfield wooed the national conservation groups by asserting that he too now understood the ecological value of old-growth forests. At the last minute Brock Evans, now a lobbyist for the National Audubon Society, withdrew his opposition to the rider, undercutting Leahy’s efforts.

Tuchmann did persuade Hatfield to take part in a colloquy with Leahy on the Senate floor. In the carefully scripted exchange, Hatfield stated that the rider was a onetime emergency measure, "an action of last resort," and promised to work through Leahy's committee for a permanent fix. Though he may have been sincere at the time, no permanent solution ever emerged from Congress. And six years later, Hatfield would resort to this court-stripping strategy again.

In September, more than 100 congressmen signed a letter to Representative Sid Yates, the Illinois Democrat who chaired the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, warning that the rider "threatens to remove administrative decisions—no matter how illegal—from effective judicial remedies." A coalition of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, denounced laws that took away the citizens' right to sue.

Hatfield and AuCoin went to work in their appropriations committees, calling in all the political chips owed them. During the last three days in September, as the fiscal year was running out, a select subgroup of the conference committee, which included all the major Northwest power-brokers, met behind closed doors to work over the final language of the rider. Besides giving lip service to the ecological value of old-growth forests, it provided slightly increased protection for spotted owls in sales released from the injunction and directed the Forest Service and BLM to try to avoid increased fragmentation of intact forests.

But it also contained dreaded "sufficiency" language, stating that sales sold under the rider would automatically be considered to be in compliance with all environmental laws. This provision insulated all sales sold under the terms of the rider from legal challenges forever.

Hatfield summoned timber industry lobbyists. They weren't overjoyed, but they said they could live with it. Brock Evans of National Audubon and Syd Butler, a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society, signed off on it as well. Significantly, neither National Audubon nor the Wilderness Society was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that had won the injunction that Congress was about to overturn.

Ninety-five percent of the Section 318 sales were in spotted owl habitat. Despite language in the rider, neither the Forest Service nor the BLM could meet the measure's timber targets without further fragmenting owl habitat.

The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund challenged the Rider from Hell on constitutional grounds, arguing that it violated the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches of government.

But in 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of Congress to pass such riders.

Many lawmakers nonetheless were uncomfortable overriding the courts on such a volatile issue. Senator Brock Adams vowed he would not support such a measure again. At least for the time being, Hatfield and AuCoin had used up their political capital doing a final favor for their friends in the timber industry.

PUBLIC SCRUTINY
The Rider from Hell had at least one unanticipated positive consequence for the forest preservation movement: It required each national forest and BLM district to appoint a citizens' timber sale review panel to make recommendations about which sales should go forward in 1990. The experience of serving on these committees opened the eyes of many environmentalists to the cost of logging for the first time. For most federal forest managers, it was a first as well—the first time their timber sale programs had been held up to careful public scrutiny.

Each national forest and BLM district had a timber quota to fill. Citizens often were not even given reports by biologists describing how the 1990 sales. would affect spotted owls. When they did get the information, it simply confirmed their worst suspicion—the agencies couldn't keep cutting at the rate the rider allowed without further harming the owl.

In March of 1990, the citizens' advisory board for the Eugene BLM District publicly rejected the timber sale review process when it refused to approve enough sales to allow the agency to meet its quota. "It is increasingly clear that the timber sale advisory board system is a sham," said the panel's chairman, Allan Sorenson.

Jim Britell of the Kalmiopsis Audubon chapter on the southern Oregon Coast was shocked to learn while serving on the Coos Bay BLM District advisory board that one of the sales the agency planned to award had 16 owls living within units scheduled for cutting. "The BLM did not take the owl reports as anything but a ticket to be punched on the way to selling the timber," Britell said.

The Rider from Hell contained another little-noticed provision that would have repercussions long after it expired. It instructed the Forest Service to adopt, within 12 months, a scientifically adequate plan for the conservation of the northern spotted owl.

Charles Philpott, the director of the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, said Thomas was an obvious choice for the job. "The person had to be credible not just with the scientists but with environmentalists and other interest groups. We've probably got 5 to 10 people in the Forest Service who can do that. Jack has a knack for explaining complex things in good, simple English. And he can get folksy when it's appropriate."

His bosses told Thomas he could select whomever he wished, follow the research wherever it led, and develop a conservation strategy free from the political interference that had dogged owl conservation efforts throughout the 1980s. Thomas took them at their word. However, his bosses turned him down when he suggested that the strategy be expanded to include other old-growth species besides the spotted owl.

Thomas picked five of the best owl biologists he knew for his team: Eric Forsman, whose research Thomas had funded and who now worked for the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Oregon; Barry Noon, an expert on mathematical modeling of bird populations, from the Forest Service's Redwood Lab in Arcata, California; E. Charles Meslow, Forsman's academic adviser and the leader of the Oregon Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit; Jerry Verner of the Forest Service's Fresno, California, research station, who had done extensive owl studies in California; and Joseph Lint, a biologist for the BLM. All but Lint had Ph.D.s. A second tier of 11 biologists included representatives from academia, the timber industry, and the environmental community.

To this day, members of Thomas's team are at a loss to explain the broad mandate they were given. "I don't think the higher-ups in the agencies had any idea what they were doing," said Forsman. "They put six scientists on it who were all very concerned about wildlife issues."

"I don't think they recognized what they had created," Meslow added. "If they had recognized, I think they would have shut it off."

SEARCHING FOR A PARADIGM
The scientists met for the first time in a dim basement room at a Portland hotel in early October. Some of them agreed to take a week off in the fall for elk season. Then they set to work. For the next five months, they worked 12-hour days conducting an exhaustive review of all owl studies. They took field trips to the California redwoods, the Oregon Cascades and Coast Range, and the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. They organized seminars and invited presentations from anyone with credible information about the owl.

They realized early in the process that this was their chance to put science in the driver's seat and create a new paradigm for management of federal lands in the 21st century.

One of their first decisions involved setting what Thomas called "sideboards"—the parameters within which they would operate. In December of 1989, in formal comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

close together the islands must be to assure that young owls could traverse the hostile terrain between these habitat islands, where great horned owls might swoop down and kill them, or where they might starve for lack of prey.

Ultimately they rejected the small, museum-like reserves the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management had previously set aside for individual owl pairs. Saving the owl, they concluded, would require redesigning the entire forest.

A BAND OF BROTHERS
All the scientists except Thomas were put up at the same northeast Portland motel. Thomas had an apartment on the other side of the river. They worked late into the evening and spent their few leisure hours working out together, eating together, drinking beer together, and talking about owls. Over time, they developed a strong esprit de corp and a spirited, consensus-building working style. "You get that many highly charged people in one room and there's every reason in the world to get testy," Thomas recalled later. "Everyone was forceful. But by the time it was over, we were like Henry V and his men in battle: 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.'"

Barry Noon saw himself as a bridge between the empiricists like Forsman, who gathered and analyzed field data, and the theoreticians like Verner, who devised conceptual models to predict wildlife behavior. Noon himself had little field experience with spotted owls; he had spent the first 12 years of his career studying neotropical migrant birds for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and had taught ornithology at Humboldt State from 1981 to 1987, with an emphasis on biometrics, statistics, and analysis of ecological data.

"I think there was mixed enthusiasm for what I was doing initially," Noon said. He sensed that Forsman and Thomas in particular were skeptical of the principles of conservation biology, which used mathematical modeling to predict wildlife demographic trends. "Someone who is grounded in field studies is uncomfortable with things that are abstract and intangible."

When biologists attempt to solve problems involving wildlife demographics, Noon explained, they need an integrative tool—a set of assumptions—that allows them to use past behavior to predict the future. This means taking a leap beyond what can be documented in the field.

LARGE VERSUS SMALL
The principles of conservation biology pointed inexorably toward large reserves that could support multiple pairs of owls, allowing them to interbreed. But the scientists had incomplete data on the owl's range requirements and dispersal habits and on which areas had enough old forests to support multiple owl pairs.

At a key meeting on February 3 and 4, 1990, several outside scientists   were brought in to review the team's work. During the presentations,

 

approach politically and practically. From that point on, there was never any discussion of starting over."

In the end, there was no dissent, not even from team member Larry Irwin, a wildlife biologist employed by the timber industry.

CONNECTING THE DOTS
The issue of how to connect these large blocks of habitat remained unresolved. One option was to designate corridors—in effect, pathways through the logged landscape along which young owls could disperse to establish new nests without starving in the clearcuts or getting eaten by great horned owls. The scientists knew that would require withdrawing even more land from logging.

Wilcove called Thomas from Washington, D.C., one day and demanded to know, "Where are the corridors?" Thomas told him there weren't going to be any, because studies showed young owls leaving the nest took off in all directions. Wilcove protested that he would not sign off on the plan unless it provided a way for owls to fly safely between reserves.

What finally evolved from this discussion was the arcane but critically important 50-11-40 rule. It said that agencies must manage the land between the habitat reserves so that at least half the trees were 11 inches or more in diameter and 40 percent of the forest canopy remained intact. Simply put, that meant logging no more frequently than every 80 years.

For the Bureau of Land Management, this rule would have major implications. Because BLM lands were interspersed with private lands that were logged as often as every 40 years, the landscape in these checkerboard-ownership areas was far outside the 50-11-40 standard. That meant no logging could occur in many areas until young trees grew larger and the forest canopy began to close.

THE BRIEFING
Until the scientists began writing their conservation strategy, their deliberations had been open to anyone who cared to sit in. Then the curtain dropped.

In March of 1990, the heads of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service flew to Portland for a briefing on the progress of the Thomas team. Only then did they begin to comprehend what was coming—but it was too late to shove the genie back into the bottle. Timber industry supporters, sensing that something momentous was about to happen, staged a rally outside the hotel where the briefing was taking place and delivered a petition to the agency heads, asking for a guaranteed supply of federal timber no matter what.

At the closed briefing, Forest Service Chief Robertson reportedly gulped at the scope of the plan and the wholesale reductions in logging it would require. But he recovered enough to say, "Well, if it's

 
a blueprint for protecting important remnants of the entire old-growth ecosystem—if policy-makers chose to broaden their vision.

"A balanced assessment of this strategy's various impacts must consider water quality, fisheries, recreation, soils, stream flows, scenic values, biodiversity, and balance," he wrote in the plan's conclusion. "The issues are not limited to questions of owls and timber supply, as important as those are. The matter is not that simple—it never has been."

Environmentalists were ambivalent. The interagency plan might save the owl, but it left many of their most cherished roadless areas open to logging. As it turned out, the owl had its own agenda—and it did not necessarily match theirs.

But it was too late for second thoughts. In June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the northern spotted owl as a threatened species due to destruction of its habitat by logging, and the Endangered Species Act kicked into high gear.

 

PLAYING THE DEMAGOGUE
Bob Packwood, Oregon's junior senator, was next to the microphone. Packwood, a Republican, had once courted environmentalists with his support for wilderness. But today, in a speech pundits would call one of the most demagogic of his career, he staked out the position that would carry him through his 1992 reelection campaign. He derided arguments that old-growth forests were disappearing. The people who were battling to save old-growth forests, he said, were the same people who had fought for gun control and against the Vietnam War.

"I've been dealing with these people for 20 years and I know what they're driving at," he shouted. "And it's not what Oregon is driving at! I have been to the limit of my patience on this!"

"Folks, the owl is not the issue," Packwood continued in a calmer voice. "If the natural predator of the owl swept in tonight and ate all of the little devils, this issue wouldn't go away. Their goal is no jobs. Whatever is left we'll now negotiate about until we've set it all aside. We'll let Canada supply our timber!"

Packwood's decision to embrace the timber industry was a calculated political strategy urged on him by his formidable chief of staff; Elaine Franklin. According to Lauri Hennessey, Packwood's speechwriter during this period, Franklin had told her boss it was time for him to choose between environmentalists and jobs. "Elaine said she would advise him to come down in favor of jobs and labor, because that was where the money was."

This was timber's day in Portland. A few foolhardy tree huggers taunted the loggers and got roughed up in the process. But environmentalists who had any sense stayed away. Some of them were wondering what sort of victory their strategy had wrought. The owl plan wasn't the panacea they had hoped for. And the backlash was growing. Events had outstripped their ability to control them.

DAMAGE CONTROL
In the wake of the owl plan's unveiling, timber lobbyists didn't confine their efforts to organizing rallies and didn't even bother to talk to the chief of the Forest Service. They went straight to John Sununu, President Bush's chief of staff.

Within weeks, Jack Ward Thomas and his team were summoned to Washington, D.C. Thomas could feel the hostility in the room as he appeared before an inquisitory panel of Bush administration henchmen to defend his team's work. His interrogators included John Shrote and Don Knowles, political appointees in the Interior Department; Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter and his deputy, John Moseley; U.S. Representative Edward Madigan, the ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, who would succeed Yeutter as agriculture secretary later that year; and a number of government economists and policy analysts, but no biologists.

They were looking for a way to undermine the plan. The grilling went

TRUTH-TELLING
On April 5, 1990, the day after the ISC owl plan was unveiled in Washington, D.C., Oregon Secretary of State Barbara Roberts delivered a speech to the Northwest Forestry Association. Roberts had just launched a campaign for governor, following the surprise announcement by Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt that he would not seek reelection. In her speech, she attacked the export of raw logs from Northwest lands, expressed her desire for a responsible, balanced solution to the forest impasse, and committed herself to working with the industry to build a second-growth, secondary-wood products economy.

But she also attacked the politics of denial. "I am not here to sell you a bill of goods," she said. "The public need and the public pressure on the timber resource base in Oregon is not about to disappear. It long ago passed the point where it was simply a tug-of-war between the environmentalists and the timber industry. We cannot turn back the clock. You cannot change the landscape by name-calling or demonstrations or bumper strips about fried owls."

She concluded, "Now is the time for playing the cards we've been dealt." And that was the line that made the headlines in the next day's papers. Roberts' willingness to tell her fellow Oregon citizens what she thought they needed to hear won her no friends in Oregon's most powerful industry after she became Oregon's first woman governor in January 1991. She was still living down her "play the cards that we've been dealt" speech.

"The truth is, it was a fine speech," she said later. "I attempted to lay out the history of the timber industry in Oregon. In 1936, the year I was born, there was a report warning that the rate of logging in Oregon was not sustainable. But the Legislature failed to act on it, and so did the industry. If the Legislature and timber industry had not been in deep denial, we wouldn't have come to the point we had reached. The hand we'd been dealt was, we had a harvest deficit, an owl listed under the Endangered Species Act, an industry in major transition. My message was, 'If we don't deal with this, we will end up in court for the next four years or more.'"

Roberts grew up in the farming and timber town of Sheridan, Oregon, where her father owned a machine shop that repaired machinery for local sawmills. She knew the wave of mill closures Oregon was experiencing was not about spotted owls. "We had been closing mills for 10 years because of mechanization, log exports? and overharvesting," she said. "The owl was used by the timber industry to refocus workers away from those issues. It was a brilliant strategy."

As a blue-collar Democrat, she had political roots with organized labor and working people. But as governor, she soon found her efforts to communicate with workers blocked by harsh wise-use rhetoric. She refused to apologize for being an environmentalist. "My commitment was to abide by the law, to find a sound solution for the forests, both

some companies and workers but pointed out that the timber industry had more than two years' volume of federal timber under contract and was continuing to export its own logs to Japan.

"To bypass the environmental laws, either briefly or permanently, would not fend off the changes transforming the timber industry," he wrote. "The argument that the mightiest economy on Earth cannot afford to preserve old-growth forests for a short time, while it reaches an overdue decision on how to manage them, is not convincing today. It would be even less so a year or a century from now."

Dwyer saved his harshest words for politicians who had consistently refused to heed warnings from government scientists. "Had the Forest Service done what Congress directed it to do—adopt a lawful plan by last fall—this case would have ended some time ago," Dwyer scolded. "More is involved here than a simple failure by an agency to comply with its governing statute. The most recent violation of [the National Forest Management Act] exemplifies a deliberate and systematic refusal by the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to comply with the laws protecting wildlife. This is not the doing of the scientists, foresters, rangers, and others at the working levels of these agencies. It reflects decisions made by higher authorities in the executive branch of government."

FEELING PAIN
As the political wheels spun in Washington, a tableau of pain, anger, and incomprehension played out in owl hearings across the Northwest. Timber families, recruited by the Oregon Lands Coalition and other pro-logging groups, traveled hundreds of miles to vent their fear at public hearings held by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The service was required to gather public comment on its proposals to list the owl as a threatened species and, later, to designate critical owl habitat. Doing its job—enforcing the Endangered Species Act—had cast the agency as the ultimate out-of-control federal bureaucracy in the minds of many rural Northwest residents. Fish and Wildlife Service employees had been left to defend themselves with little or no help from the Bush administration. They gritted their teeth and took it.

The emotional testimony often ran late into the night, as workers berated the government and demanded answers to angry questions. To them, arguments about habitat fragmentation and population thresholds seemed abstract and unreal compared with the reality of mill closures, worker layoffs, and forests arbitrarily declared off-limits to logging.

At a Medford, Oregon, hearing in September 1991, one logger spoke with tears streaming down his cheeks, and a logger's wife described in shattering detail how her family had been disrupted by her husband's ever-more-desperate search for work.

Jerry Counsil, a logging contractor from Winston, Oregon, in the heart of timber country, bit off his words in barely controlled rage. Two years ago, he said, his company had employed 61 timber fallers. Now

 

Chapter Fifteen

Shasta Costa

In 1989, as District Ranger Kathy Johnson began planning timber sales for the next decade on the Siskiyou National Forest's Gold Beach District, she turned to the forest for guidance.

Wildfire had swept through the parched Siskiyous in the summer of 1987, leaving a vivid signature: a mosaic of bare, burned-over ridges; stringers of surviving green trees running downslope; and patches of charred tree, both alive and dead. Johnson thought the fire's pattern might offer a model for a gentler kind of forestry. She asked her staff to study the pattern of burns left by the Silver Fire and look for ways to make logging emulate nature.

THE ROADLESS AREA DILEMMA
The Shasta Costa watershed on the Gold Beach District was the perfect embodiment of the dilemma facing the Forest Service as it prepared to implement new forest plans for the 1990s.

Shasta Costa Creek flows west out of the Siskiyous, through a forested valley spread between steep ridges, toward its confluence with the Rogue River. Though the creek's headwaters had been heavily logged decades earlier, and roads had been built atop its ridgelines, the core of the 23,000-acre valley remained roadless in 1990, and the watershed provided a crucial link for wildlife moving between the Wild Rogue Wilderness and the North Kalmiopsis Roadless Area. Ecologically too, the Shasta Costa was pivotal; it formed a bridge, east to west, between the Klamath Mountains and the southern end of the Oregon Coast Range. The creek harbored salmon, and the forests were home to at least two nesting pairs of spotted owls.

The new Siskiyou National Forest plan called for building roads into Shasta Costa and selling timber there. Environmentalists in the Siskiyous had drawn the line against logging in roadless areas. Johnson knew any decision to enter Shasta Costa would be controversial. She decided Shasta Costa was the perfect laboratory for the "new forestry" that forest ecologist Jerry Franklin had lately been preaching. This kinder and gentler forestry called for logging more lightly on the land, creating smaller openings in the forest canopy, and leaving

DeBonis came to work in the Blue River District in 1989, he warned that some of these new forestry sales threatened to increase soil erosion and watershed impacts. But he said Eubanks disregarded his analyses, and he finally concluded that his boss "was using new forestry as a hook to get the cut out."

The ferment bubbling under the forest canopy in the Blue River District didn't get much attention outside the small team of scientists and forest managers who were making it happen.

In fact, in the late 1980s, when Eubank transferred to a desk job in Washington, D.C., no one from the chiefs office bothered to walk down the hall to his office for a briefing. In the mid-1980s, the Forest Service had no incentive to change its forest management paradigm in the Pacific Northwest.

That changed as the agency careened toward gridlock in 1989.

FORESTRY DUELS
By late 1989, Jerry Franklin's theories were gaining wide circulation. In November of 1989, he wrote in American Forests: "Forestry needs to expand its focus beyond wood production to the perpetuation of diverse forest ecosystems. . . . Forestry professionals need to acknowledge that what is good for wood-fiber production is not necessarily best for other forest values."

Franklin's piece also carried a subtle warning for forest preservationists that a paradigm shift away from wilderness preservation was underway. He argued that there simply wasn't enough wilderness to provide all the biological diversity the world needed.

"Environmentalists must stop relying on setting aside preserved lands as the only approach to the protection of ecological values," he wrote. "Clearly, the reserving of lands is critical to the protection of many values—such as, for example, aquatic habitats and unstable soils. But many of the reserves need to be a part of the commodity landscape, rather than existing apart from it."

By the summer of 1990, spirited debate over the wisdom of clearcutting raged within the forestry profession. The debate was particularly intense at Oregon State University's College of Forestry, where the superiority of clearcutting as a system for converting decadent Douglas-fir forests to young plantations had been treated as received wisdom for nearly a half-century.

During a July 12, 1990, tour of the Andrews Experimental Forest, as Franldin showed off some of the new logging techniques to foresters and the news media, the professional divide over new forestry flared into the public eye. Bill Atkinson, a member of the OSU forestry old guard who headed the college's forest engineering department, challenged him openly. "New forestry is being sold to the American people like a bar of soap," he stormed. "People are using new forestry to get at clearcutting. We're getting new forestry by decree, by dogma. We don't have Chairman Mao; we've got Jerry."

caused by past logging and road-building would be repaired. And the unroaded core of the watershed would remain untouched, at least for three more years.

Britell praised the plan as a way for the Forest Service to produce timber volume without roads or clearcuts. Not all environmentalists were as sanguine. The Oregon Natural Resources Council, smelling an alarming precedent, announced that it would appeal the Shasta Costa plan. "Roadless areas are the anchors of biological diversity, the intact ecosystems that still exist," said conservation director Andy Kerr. "New Forestry is simply a less violent way to rape them."

THE UNRAVELING
Timber industry groups initially gave guarded approval to the plan. But when they studied it further, they discovered that it would it reduce the timber yield from the Shasta Costa watershed by one-third over the next three years. How, they wanted to know, would the Forest Service make up the difference? And what were the implications if this "New Perspectives" paradigm became the modus operandi on watersheds across the Northwest? In that case, some mill-owners suggested, the agency should consider opening up scenic buffers, river corridors, and other reserves to logging.

The Forest Service should have been prepared to answer these questions, but wasn't.

Soon after, the Shasta Costa experiment began to unravel. Forest Supervisor Ron McCormick retired, and Kathy Johnson, a rising star in the Forest Service, was promoted to a job in the agency's Washington, D.C., office. She died later of brain cancer. In late 1990, Mike Lunn replaced McCormick on the Siskiyou, which was rapidly becoming a crucible for conflict.

In January of 1991, Lunn announced that in response to concerns from the timber industry, changes had been made in the preferred Shasta Costa alternative. There would be more roads, more clear-cuts. At a follow-up meeting, fisheries biologists who had helped craft the plan pounced on him for this retreat from watershed protection. By the time Judge Dwyer's injunction came down in May of 1991, blocking all logging of owl habitat, Shasta Costa was a fading memory.

That didn't mean New Perspectives was dead. Far from it. In an interview in November of 1991, Franklin said the past 12 months had seen an explosion in new forestry. "It's very hard to find a national forest timber sale anymore that doesn't have some elements of structural retention," he said. Even private companies like Washington's Plum Creek Timber were getting into the act.

For Franklin, the agency's belated decision to embrace his work was a huge career boost. Offers came in from all over the world. Franklin became the guru of new forestry. But Kerr and a few other activists saw an important point obscured

 

Chapter Sixteen

Train Wreck

When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the northern spotted owl a threatened species in June 1990, it set in motion a bewildering series of complex, conflicting, and overlapping processes. The agency concluded that the owl was in trouble because of destruction of its habitat by logging. But because the owl's range was so vast—spanning three states and encompassing 24 million acres of federal land alone—the challenge of deciding how to protect the bird under the Endangered Species Act was unprecedented. The act itself provided no clear path through the maze, and the Bush administration was content to stand by and watch the agency flounder.

The 1973 law required the FWS to write a recovery plan—a blueprint for restoring the owl's population to sustainable levels. It required the FWS to designate critical habitat—areas suitable for owls which would receive protection whether owls actually inhabited them or not. It required the FWS to formally review federal projects that might jeopardize the owl's survival—Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management timber sales, primarily. And it required the FWS to protect owls on private as well as public land, forcing the agency to step into the treacherous minefield of private property rights. At the request of several timber companies, the FWS established voluntary guidelines private timberland owners could follow to avoid civil and even criminal penalties for illegally "taking" owls by destroying their habitat. These guidelines, which called for leaving large circular forested buffers around owl nesting sites, drew powerful new adversaries into the fray.

Marvin Plenert, an honest, plainspoken career FWS employee, inherited this mess when he took over as regional director of the service in 1989. Fortunately, Plenert had a sense of humor. He needed it as the owl saga ground on for the next four years, fueled by court briefs, bureaucratic missteps, and administrative delay tactics.

UNDERCUTTING THE ESA
By 1991, the northern spotted owl was well on its way to becoming the most studied bird in the history of avian biology. The federal government was spending $10 million a year to research its birth and survival rates, dietary preferences, and habitat requirements. A small cottage

   
 
Surprisingly, the team began to click. Representatives from the governors' offices provided useful information about owl habitat on state and private land. Economists gathered employment data. Biologists were left to work out the details of the recovery plan with little inter ference. As team leader, Knowles was in a sensitive situation: He had his marching orders from Lujan, but as the months went by he built up a level of trust with the scientists that he was loath to betray.

At Knowles' direction, the recovery team, like the ISC before it, stuck to the owl. A subcommittee gathered detailed information on 364 other species, both plants and animals, that shared old forests with the owl, including 30 species already listed as threatened or endangered. But the administration passed on the opportunity to address the status of these species in its plan. The information was relegated to an appendix.

Knowles held monthly congressional briefings in Washington, D.C., to update the administration on the team's progress. "Everyone wanted the same thing," he said, "a scientifically credible plan with no impacts."

CRITICAL HABITAT
Because the FWS did not immediately designate critical habitat for the owl at the time of its listing, environmentalists sued to require that the agency finish the job as the law required. In February of 1991, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly ordered the FWS to publish a critical habitat rule by the end of April. The overwhelmed agency had to scramble to meet the deadline, and it showed. Its draft rule called for designating a whopping 11.6 million acres, including 3 million acres of private land, as habitat for the owl.

FWS officials tried to explain that the proposed rule didn't mean these areas would be closed to logging, only that logging within them would be subject to agency review. Nevertheless, timber towns erupted once again, and their anger turned to ridicule when a close examination of the maps accompanying the rule revealed that some of this "critical habitat" had no trees. "It is time for President Bush to intervene and 'reel in' the Fish and Wildlife Service," declared Mike Draper, executive secretary of the Western Council of Industrial Workers. At a raucous hearing on the critical habitat rule in the small Oregon town of Creswell, loggers shouted down environmentalists and blasted air horns to support pro-timber testimony.

Timber company executives who found the owl now had designs on their own land took a more direct approach. In July 1991, George Weyerhaeuser, chairman and chief executive officer of Weyerhaeuser Company, met with Bush administration officials to discuss how the owl's listing would affect private lands. In August, the FWS announced that it was dropping 3 million acres of private land from its critical habitat rule. By the time the agency adopted its final rule, it had whittled critical habitat to 6 million acres, but it was still living down this public relations disaster.

release of the ISC owl plan. But in 1990, Packwood's idea went nowhere.

In 1991, after the Fish and Wildlife Service found that 44 sales on BLM land posed risks to the owl, the BLM cut short negotiations with the service over changing the sales to make them less harmful. That laid the groundwork for Interior Secretary Lujan to invoke the God Squad.

In order to grant an exemption, the God Squad had to find, among other things, that the project was of regional or national significance. In the case of the 44 BLM sales, that was a hard case to make. The timber involved amounted to less than 1 percent of the nation's annual timber supply.

In that context, the tedious evidentiary hearing that unfolded in Portland in January of 1992 was at once less and more than it seemed.

Invoking the God Squad cast two Interior Department agencies, the FWS and the BLM, as adversaries. There was no question which side the Bush administration was on. Lujan put his top lawyer, Interior Solicitor Tom Sansonetti, on the case. The Fish and Wildlife Service, forced to turn to outside counsel, hired Patrick Parenteau, a politically savvy attorney in private practice who had helped argue the case against the Tellico Dam exemption. A retired administrative law judge from Salt Lake City, Harold Sweitzer, presided.

The cast of characters also included the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which argued against the exemption, and three pro-timber groups—the Oregon Lands Coalition, the Northwest Forest Resources Council, and the Association of 0 & C Counties—which argued in its favor.

On January 8, 1992, this passel of lawyers met in a Portland federal office building to present evidence and call witnesses. Because the administration had heard that emotions were running high, security was elaborate. But it soon became apparent that the biggest danger was boredom. Ahead were three weeks of arcane testimony and convoluted legal arguments. Even the rallies held concurrently were listless affairs.

Sansonetti, the Interior Department's top lawyer, was the impresario charged with orchestrating this circus. He had received his orders straight from the Bush White House: Find out whether the escape hatch in the ESA created a big enough loophole to drive several hundred log trucks through. "I really don't care who wins," he insisted to the press. "I just want to make sure the process goes right."

To Jamison and Lujan, the owl case seemed the perfect test of whether the act was flexible enough to consider what they called "the human dimension." Either way, they couldn't lose. If it worked, they could take credit for helping out struggling rural communities. If it failed, they could attack the act as a job-stealer when it came up for reauthorization in Congress.

But Sansonetti also had to worry about the BLM's legal exposure in a separate case underway across the river at the federal courthouse.

There, U.S. District Judge Helen Frye was hearing a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund against the BLM's so-called

 

among biologists on the team, who had vowed to walk and blow the whistle if their science fell victim to election-year politicking.
Lujan himself was growing impatient with all the simultaneous processes his agencies had set in motion. Knowles recalls that Lujan exclaimed to him one day, "Look, I'm the Secretary of Interior. Why can't I just say the owl isn't endangered and take it off the list?" Tom Sansonetti, his solicitor, explained to Lujan that he could indeed do that—if he wanted to find himself embroiled in yet another owl lawsuit.

Lujan asked Knowles to head the development of his new owl plan. This time Knowles knew better than to ask owl biologists to help him. Though he had no scientific background, he handled the job himself, with the help of other Interior policy works.

The plan they came up with proposed eliminating protection for owls in huge sections of Washington, Oregon, and northern California, effectively isolating the birds in pockets of the Oregon and Washington Cascades. Biologists who reviewed it said bluntly that while some owls might still remain in the forests after 100 years under such a strategy, it would create conditions that would almost certainly spell doom for the species over time. They called it "a recipe for extinction." Environmentalists immediately labeled it Lujan's "owl extinction plan."

Lujan agreed that his new plan did not comply with the Endangered Species Act, but he said it could be implemented through a special act of Congress. Senator Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican, later introduced the "owl extinction plan" in the Senate, where it died an unheralded death.

LUJAN'S CIRCUS
As inept as Lujan appeared, he did have a plan. The day of denouement was set for May 14, 1992. On that day the seven Cabinet-level members would meet to vote on the God Squad exemption. Lujan needed five of those votes to win his exemption.

Lujan could count on his own vote and those of Agriculture Secretary Edward Madigan, Secretary of the Army Michael Stone, and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Michael Boskin. But Tom Walsh, Oregon's representative, was a sure no vote. As the day approached, the Bush White House engaged in personal arm-twisting with the other two God Squad members, Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K. Reilly and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director John Knauss.

The atmosphere in the wood-paneled Interior Department ceremonial conference room was frantic on the morning of May 14. Interior functionaries stood at their posts and press aides darted in and out with quick glances at their watches. Seating in the small chamber was limited. Ten reporters and 10 invited timber industry constituents were allowed inside. No environmentalists were in attendance. Lujan, the chairman of the God Squad, was the last to arrive.