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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 2: Converging Paths, 1968-87
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“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil:”
—ALDO LEOPOLD, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

“With present knowledge, it is not possible to create old-growth stands or markedly hasten the process by which nature creates them.”
—SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS, Scheduling the Harvest of Old Growth, 1984


“The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled images of things recently seen.”

—EDWARD O. WILSON, The Diversity of Life, 1992


“Clear-cutting the watershed which is the vital artery that supports the environment in which one lives stirs the emotions and the intellect together in a powerful expression. To be an environmentalist takes on a deep, personal meaning.”
—JUDITH PLANT, Revaluing Home:Feminism and Bioregionalism, 1986

 
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Until the 1970s, the Forest Service didn't bother to study how the native forests of the Pacific Northwest functioned. Why study forests that would be gone in another half-century? When a few scientists did begin conducting research in old-growth forests, they discovered a remarkably stable ecosystem, teeming with seen and unseen creatures, among them the little-known northern spotted owl. They concluded that clearcut logging was robbing the soil of nutrients, replacing diverse forests with biologically sterile plantations, and fragmenting the forest canopy into isolated islands.

Even as scientists began to report their findings, the old-growth remnants were becoming smaller, the clearcuts larger, the roads carving the landscape more ubiquitous. The end of the old growth was in view at the same time people were beginning to understand for the first time the true value of the region's squandered forest resource.

Grassroots forest activists began using the new forest research to press for protection of old-growth forests as wilderness areas. In 1984, Congress passed wilderness bills that conferred protection on some old growth in Oregon, Washington, and California. Meanwhile, an emerging bioregional movement was building support for forest protection in rural enclaves across the Northwest.

The wilderness campaigns and the new bioregional movement did not succeed in slowing the rate of logging, however. Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980 ushered in 12 years of conservative control of natural resource agencies. Throughout the 1980s Congress set unsustainable timber sale levels, which the Reagan administration endeavored to meet. By mid-decade, even voices from within the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management were warning that the forests were being cut too fast.

 
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Chapter Four

A Rather Uncommon Bird


By now, Eric Forsman's first encounter with a spotted owl has become a Northwest legend. In 1968, while working as a summer fire lookout on the Willamette National Forest, he heard an odd barking from deep in the forest. He imitated the call. Two owls flew down from the forest canopy and looked him over with their large, round, black eyes.

Forsman, an undergraduate student in wildlife biology at Oregon State University, was driven by simple scientific curiosity to learn more about this brown-and-white—mottled bird. He was intrigued by the owl's unwariness, its willingness to fly in close when lured with prey. He began calling for owls in other forests. He was fascinated to learn that the owl seemed to live only in the deep shade of old forests. At the time, virtually nothing was known about the ecology of these forests or the wildlife species associated with them.

On a spring day in 1969, while Forsman was looking for owls in the woods near Corvallis, he met Richard Reynolds, a graduate student in biology. Reynolds was searching for hawks. They exchanged information. The next spring they teamed up to track their respective raptors: goshawks, Cooper's hawks, and sharp-shinned hawks by day, owls by night.

Because logging in the Oregon Coast Range was accelerating in the late 1960s, often, when Forsman returned to a site where he had located owls, the stand it had lived in was gone.

INTIMATIONS OF THE COMING CONFLICT
Forsman was drafted into the Army in 1970. In his absence, Reynolds carried on with both surveys. He drew maps of areas occupied by owls and goshawks that were scheduled for logging and prepared to distribute them to politicians and environmentalists. But his advisor, Howard Wight, knew the information Forsman and Reynolds had gathered was politically volatile. He advised Reynolds to prepare state and federal forest managers for the fallout by holding a seminar to present them with the information. Reynolds did so, in the spring of 1971. For the first time, forest managers became aware that the old-growth forests they were managing for timber production had value to species other than Homo sapiens.

In 1972, after Forsman's Army discharge, he returned to Oregon

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State University and began work on his master's thesis on the owl. He worked closely with Wight, who was convinced by now that there had to be wildlife species closely associated with the unique environment of old forests.

One day soon after his return from military service, Forsman discovered three nesting owl pairs in an old-growth forest within the Corvallis city watershed, on land owned partly by the city. One of the nests, containing a baby owl, was close to a tract the city planned to sell to produce revenue for municipal coffers. Forsman suspected that the owl pair used the drainage around the nest for breeding, roosting and preying on flying squirrels. He explained that and more to Floyd Collins, the city's water and waste plant supervisor, in a series of letters in 1972 and 1973 that presaged the titanic forest management battle to come.

"The Spotted Owl is a rather uncommon species which is found only in large stands of old-growth timber. . . . Very little is known about the ecology of this owl, and sightings are infrequent," he wrote in September 1972. "Prior to my study, there was only one nesting record for the state, and that was in 1926."

Clearcutting or thinning of the stand would destroy the owl's nest tree and surrounding habitat, Forsman warned. "At the present time, the Rock Creek watershed is one of the few remaining areas around Corvallis which still has enough old-growth left to support Spotted Owls. Because of this, I feel that every effort should be made to preserve the habitats of the remaining nesting pairs. If this is not done, the Spotted Owl will soon be gone from Rock Creek, just as it is gone from the cutover lands that surround the watershed."

Collins wrote back offering perfunctory appreciation for Forsman's concerns. The following April a study committee recommended stepping up timber harvests on the watershed to remove old trees that had decayed due to "disuse."

By now, Forsman had a basic grasp of old-growth ecology. He wrote back, retorting, 'Disuse' by whom, certainly not spotted owls? I recognize that most old-growth stands contain a high incidence of decayed and often diseased trees, but this is exactly the factor which attracts the spotted owl. . . . Old-growth trees provide an abundance of nest cavities for owls, squirrels, bats, woodpeckers, tree mice, wood rats and vaux's swifts. Old, decaying deadfalls which litter the forest floor in old-growth stands provide habitat for innumerable rodents, insects and reptiles."

Collins brushed aside Forsman's objections and went ahead with the sale, which cut a large area on the slope facing the nest grove. The owl pair disappeared.

SEEKING SUPPORT
In the early 1970s, when Forsman began his research, the northern sub species of the spotted owl was virtually unknown in the scientific literature. Forsman was the first biologist to conclude that the owl's survival

 
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hinged on the continued existence of large tracts of old forest.

He immediately understood the political implications of his research. Forsman had grown up in Eugene, in the heart of timber country. His father was a carpenter, and all five of his brothers ended up making their living from the timber industry, one way or another. Because he chose to study the owl rather than the bald eagle or the California condor, neither professional recognition nor funding came easily in the early years. He scraped to make ends meet, doing tree-trimming, carpentry, and other odd jobs in the winter and depending on his wife's schoolteacher salary to support their family, which eventually grew to include three kids.

An early challenge was finding financial sponsorship for Forsman's owl research. The Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis had no interest in supporting studies on an obscure raptor. Charles Meslow, who became Forsman's advisor after the death of Howard Wight, turned to Jack Ward Thomas, a colleague at the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station in La Grande, Oregon, for help. Thomas, an elk biologist, never had seen a northern spotted owl. Nevertheless, he agreed to subsidize Forsman's owl studies from his own research budget. Thus, the groundwork was laid for Thomas's future involvement in deciding the fate of the spotted owl.

James Monteith, soon to become the executive director of the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, was a fellow graduate student in wildlife biology at Oregon State University during Forsman's early battles on the owl's behalf. He recalls being impressed by his classmate's outspoken criticism of the federal agency that was funding his research. "He was writing letters to the Forest Service saying, 'Stop liquidating old growth before there's nothing left.'"

Early in his forest wanderings, Forsman found an injured young spotted owl in a nest. He took her home to live in a cage and eventually named her "Fat Broad" because of her propensity to overeat. She survived for more than 25 years in captivity, amid a menagerie of other captive owls that came and went at the Forsman house. Over that time she served as an emissary for her species, making appearances with Forsman before schoolchildren, environmentalists, biologists, and timber industry groups. Eventually, Fat Broad even graced the centerfold of Life magazine, where she perched on the shoulder of logger Wilbur Heath.

A CANDIDATE SPECIES
In 1973, soon after Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Service prepared a list of animal and plant species that might be candidates for listing as threatened or endangered under the new law. Biologists who were aware of Forsman's research included the northern spotted owl on the list.

That same year, the state of Oregon appointed a task force to recommend a plan for protecting the owl and other species under the
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state's own Endangered Species Act. It was the first of many owl committees that Forsman would serve on or advise. Its modest proposal: State and federal agencies should set aside 300 acres of old-growth habitat around each of the 100 known spotted owl sites in Oregon.

It took four years—until 1977—for state and federal forest managers to agree to even these minimal buffers. By that time Forsman had far more data. Two years of radio tracking had revealed that individual owls ranged over at least 1,000 acres and in some cases as much as 3,200 acres. It was the beginning of a pattern that would prevail throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, as protection for the owl on federal lands lagged at least four years behind the growing body of owl research.

As he searched for owls in forests of all types and age classes, Forsman found the blue spray paint that marked trees for cutting everywhere he went. Nevertheless, he managed to locate and track enough birds to complete a master's thesis on the number, distribution, diet, and habitat needs of the owl. He concluded that the owl's favorite prey were probably most abundant in old stands.

So much about the owl remained unknown that Forsman went on to doctoral research. He began documenting the owls' range on the west side of the Oregon Cascades through radio telemetry. Living in an old trailer on the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene, he spent 12 months tracking eight adult owls fitted with tiny radio transmitters. Tuned in to a receiver that picked up their eight distinct frequencies, he followed them virtually around the clock. He discovered that his owls flew long distances for prey but avoided large clearcuts. "When they were foraging, they worked around a clearcut, but when they captured prey they would fly straight across clearcuts to get back to the nest," he said. In a burned-over area near Eugene, where all the trees had been salvaged, he observed that owls went to the edge of the burn and then turned back.

It appeared that spotted owls were becoming prisoners within islands of old growth surrounded by logged lands. For Forsman, the implication was obvious: The patchwork quilt of 40-acre clearcuts on national forest land, and the much larger clearcuts on private land, were fragmenting the owl's habitat throughout its range. If the trend continued, he concluded; prospects for the owl's long-term survival looked bleak.

Forsman completed his doctoral dissertation in 1980. His eight years of graduate study had cost $35,000. And the Forest Service had footed the bill.
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Chapter Five

Biological Deserts


As late as 1970, neither the Forest Service nor university-based schools of forestry showed much interest in studying the virgin forests that were rapidly disappearing from the mountains and foothills of the Pacific Northwest. It took the international scientific community to focus attention and research dollars on this vanishing ecosystem.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon authorized U.S. participation in a United Nations project intended to increase understanding of Earth's major ecosystems. Oregon State University received a grant from the National Science Foundation to take part in the worldwide study. Jerry Forest Franklin, then a young forestry professor at OSU, was tapped to head a study of old-growth Douglas-fir forests. He assembled a team of scientists and selected the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, part of the Willamette National Forest east of Eugene, as his laboratory.

Suddenly there was money for old-growth research on bats and raptors, small mammals and insects, birds and reptiles. There was money to study the structure and function of the forest itself: how old-growth trees received, stored, and used water and nutrients; how the dead snags and the fallen logs that covered the forest floor contributed to the life of the forest; and what role the soil played in sustaining the living ecosystem. Jim Trappe, a Forest Service mycologist on Franklin's team, began studying the fungi beneath the forest floor.

The early results of the new forest research and Eric Forsman's owl studies filtered into the environmental community. In 1978, at a conference at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Glenn Juday, an OSU graduate student in forestry, read a paper extolling the ecological characteristics of old forests and criticizing the prevailing system of clearcut logging. Juday, a classmate of Forsman's, had done his doctoral research on spotted owls in the old-growth forests of the Oregon Coast Range. He was continuing his research with Franklin's team on the Andrews Experimental Forest.

A Reed College student named Cameron La Follette wrote a paper for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group, a Ralph Nader—inspired statewide organization, describing the Franklin team's work. Activists circulated her report. The pieces of a scientifically based old-growth forest campaign began to fall into place.
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AN ECOLOGICAL SYMPHONY
Chris Maser's no-nonsense supervisors in the Bureau of Land Management in the late 1970s couldn't understand the biologist's obsession with the insects and fungi that live in rotting logs. For Maser, a man of withering intensity, the internal workings of the old-growth forest ecosystem held an almost mystical fascination.

As Franklin's old-growth team pursued its research, Maser was engaged in a separate three-year ecological survey of the Oregon Coast. Maser had concluded that many of the creatures he was studying survived by eating the fungi beneath the forest floor. He induced Jim Trappe to join him in a study of small-mammal food habits. In this work, Maser began to glimpse an unseen and intricately balanced world.

On tours of an old-growth forest near Mary's Peak, where he conducted most of his research, Maser would point out the secret lairs of ambrosia beetles, carpenter ants, and clouded salamanders within the logs strewn in moss-covered humps over steep hillsides. He would show off the burrow of a red-backed vole, admire the tiny star-shaped hemlocks sprung from a decomposing log, and point out how fallen logs anchored the soil on an uphill slope.

Maser and Trappe discovered that northern flying squirrels, fungi, live coniferous trees, and northern spotted owls, together with many other species, lived in a carefully balanced symbiotic relationship. Small mammals ate the fruiting bodies of the fungi and spread their spores through defecation. Flying squirrels and other small mammals were eaten in turn by northern spotted owls nesting high in the broken tops of the old trees. They first described this symbiosis in 1978, in an article in the journal Ecology.

They concluded that when the natural cycle was interrupted by logging, tractor-piling, and slash-burning, what grew in place of the original forest was not really a forest at all. Removal of woody debris from logging sites robbed the soil of nutrients and speeded soil erosion. Removal of live trees from streambanks destabilized the banks and deprived fish of shade. Removal of fallen logs from streams destroyed pools where migrating fish rested on their journey.

In a report on their research studies completed in 1981, entitled "The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree," they documented the importance of decaying trees and asked difficult questions that challenged prevailing assumptions about forest management practices of the times. Maser and Trappe boldly urged their agencies to begin looking at forests as ecosystems, not as commodities.

"What will happen to the Douglas-fir ecosystem when fallen trees are no longer added, as will be the case under intensive forest management with increased utilization of wood fiber?" they asked. "And what will happen under short rotation management, when large trees are no longer produced?. . . . We must not sacrifice the options of future generations on the altar of cost-effectiveness through decisions based on insufficient data."
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The implications were stark: Clearcut logging as practiced in the Northwest was biologically unsound and indefensible. It left no organic legacy for the next generation of trees: no snags for woodpeckers; no big logs to decay slowly on the forest floor, providing hiding places for voles; no woody debris to fall into streams and create riffles and resting pools for salmon.

Their report caused consternation among industrial foresters and federal agency heads. In western Oregon, in the early 1980s, the BLM was a timber-cutting agency. How, Maser's bosses wondered, could they deal with these new concerns and still meet timber sale mandates?

A fierce three-year struggle over publication of the Maser-Trappe study ensued within the BLM, reaching the agency's highest levels.   

AN ECOLOGICAL DEFINITION
In 1981, after many delays, the Forest Service published a landmark report by Jerry Franklin, Chris Maser, Glenn Juday, and five others entitled "Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests." The report described for the first time the ecological features and functions of the Northwest's original conifer forests. Old-growth forests could be identified by four key features, the scientists said: large live trees, ranging in age from 200 to 1,000 years; large dead snags; large fallen logs; and large logs in streams. Each played an important role in the life of the ecosystem.

But the scientists did more than define and describe the old-growth forest. They also sounded a warning. "At current harvest rates, old-growth stands will not be completely cut over for at least four decades," they wrote. They acknowledged that some of the primeval old-growth forest enjoyed permanent protection. "Nevertheless," they said, "these reserves occupy less than 5 percent of the original landscape, and the end of the unreserved old-growth forests is in sight. The public, scientists, and land managers are increasingly concerned about whether species, communities, and functions are in danger of being eliminated."

In 1982, the Forest Service and BLM at last initiated their own old-growth wildlife research and development program and began to fund studies on spotted owls and other denizens of the ecosystem their agency was fast liquidating. That same year, Maser, wildlife biologist Larry Harris, and ecologist Arthur McKee published a research paper describing the implications of old-growth logging in the Cascades for native wildlife and laid out the concepts around which a system of old-growth reserves might be designed. Though it was not a spotted owl strategy, the report foreshadowed the owl plan that would rock the Northwest eight years later.

"How much old growth should be perpetuated is only part of the question," they wrote. "Size and spacing are of equal importance." Reserves must be large enough to include core areas free of outside influences such as wind and temperature extremes. Reserves of 300 to 500 acres might be needed to provide for natural populations of small
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rodents, and reserves of 1,000 acres might be necessary to sustain a pair of predatory birds.

SAVING SOME
The forestry profession began paying attention. In 1984 the Society of American Foresters, the nation's largest professional foresters' association, published a slim report entitled "Scheduling the Harvest of Old Growth." Though it was little noticed outside the profession, its significance was profound. The foresters called for federal forest management agencies to develop an updated inventory of the extent of old growth so they could make informed decisions about the future of this rapidly shrinking ecosystem.

"Old-growth forests are valuable for biological, scientific, and aesthetic reasons in addition to their value for timber production," the foresters wrote. "Some should be maintained in their natural state to realize all of these benefits."

In words unusually vivid for a scientific manifesto, they stressed that the old-growth forests were irreplaceable. "With present knowledge, it is not possible to create old-growth stands or markedly hasten the process by which nature creates them. Certain attributes, such as species composition and structural elements, could perhaps be developed or enhanced through silviculture, but we are not aware of any successful attempts. Old growth is a complex ecosystem, and lack of information makes the risk of failure high. In view of the time required, errors could be very costly. At least until substantial research can be completed, the best way to manage for old growth is to conserve an adequate supply of present stands and leave them alone."

As important for the future of forest management as the message were the messengers. They included Franklin; John Gordon, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale; and wildlife biologist Jack Ward Thomas, Eric Forsman's benefactor, who was at the time researching the habitat requirements of Rocky Mountain elk. The report was written by Jim Lyons, a young Yale forestry graduate and the society's director of resource policy. This would not be the last time the four came together to discuss the future of old-growth forests.


OWLS 101
In the early 1980s, other wildlife biologists began visiting Eric Forsman to learn his spotted owl survey techniques and to share information. Harriet Allen, a Forest Service biologist in Olympia, Washington, and others began tracking owls on the Olympic Peninsula and discovered that they ranged over much larger areas there than in western Oregon. Rocky Gutierrez, a professor of wildlife biology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and Alan Franklin, one of his graduate students, began a detailed long-term study of spotted owl habitat associations in California coastal forests. They concluded that in every
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area where they tracked owls, the birds showed a clear preference for older forests.

In April of 1984, the Wildlife Society, a professional association, published Forsman's wildlife monograph on the owl. The following year, after many delays, Forsman and Meslow at last got permission from federal officials to publish an article on the owl's plight in the Audubon Wildlife Report. Meslow said even his own supervisors in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opposed its publication. "We were pretty darned honest," he said. "We criticized management as practiced by the Forest Service and BLM, and that's a no-no. You don't criticize a sister agency."

By that time, scores of biologists from Olympia to Fresno were studying the northern spotted owl and the California spotted owl, a close relative. Owl research proposals proliferated. Federal research money followed. Strix occidentalis caurina was well on its way to becoming the most studied bird in the history of federal land management.

Meanwhile, researchers produced studies on scores of other denizens of the old-growth forest. Their research revealed that not only the spotted owl but also the fisher and pine marten, the marbled murrelet and pileated woodpecker, the tailed frog and clouded salamander lived in old-growth forests and depended on them to a greater or lesser extent for survival.

In 1985, the magazine American Forests, published by the American Forestry Association, printed a piece saying it might be prudent to delay a decision to log the remaining old growth while scientists studied the implications—and to begin helping timber communities adjust to the end of boom years in the Northwest timber industry.

It was clear by now that the science of forestry and the politics of wilderness preservation were traveling convergent paths.
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Chapter Six

Going for the Maximum


In the late 1970s, members of Congress from the Pacific Northwest signaled their intent to win passage of statewide bills that would resolve the fractious wilderness preservation issue once and for all. Wilderness advocates knew this might be their last best chance to save roadless areas. Grassroots forest activists hoped to bring the new scientific awareness of old-growth forest ecology to the political debate.

Within the environmental community, however, a difference of opinion was developing over the purpose of wilderness. The debate focused on whether intact forested watersheds warranted wilderness designation even if they offered no grand scenic vistas or outstanding recreational opportunities. The Sierra Club was not persuaded that its members would want to hike in these gloomy forests, or that they were important enough to risk alienating the powerful Northwest congressional delegation in order to win their protection.

The increasingly influential Oregon Wilderness Coalition, and grassroots forest activists across the Northwest, dissented. They saw how quickly the old growth was going. They determined to engage the political power structure directly, to make the ecological arguments, and to claim as much of this commercially valuable forest as possible for posterity.

EARLY VICTORIES
Oregon's first big wilderness victory came in 1978, with passage of the Endangered American Wilderness Act. In this first major national wilderness campaign, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society worked closely with grassroots groups, mounting a lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., while local activists promoted protection on the home front.

The act created 17 new wilderness areas scattered across the West. One-third of the acreage protected was in Oregon. The act established the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness, encompassing two remote canyons east of the Cascades that provided critical habitat for elk herds of the Blue Mountains. It established the Wild Rogue Wilderness in the Siskiyous, protecting a popular whitewater rafting river and its premier runs of chinook salmon, steelhead, and rainbow trout. And it added the entire French Pete watershed to the Three Sisters Wilderness.
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The French Pete victory proved for the first time that environmentalists could mobilize broad support for wilderness preservation, even over the opposition of influential Northwest congressmen. Though Oregon's junior senator, Republican Bob Packwood, supported protection for French Pete, Republican Mark Hatfield, the state's senior senator, was opposed.

The Many Rivers Group of the Sierra Club and the Save French Pete Committee had taken the lead on French Pete, however, they shared credit with the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, which had thought up the successful strategy of fighting to extend protection to 55,000 acres of intact forest, more than triple the original 16,000 acres proposed. The strategy worked. The victors toasted their victory with French champagne.

By bringing unprecedented publicity to a beautiful old-growth forest, the French Pete victory helped to redefine wilderness. The valley had no alpine meadows, no glaciers, no craggy peaks. What it had were huge old conifers that hugged the riverbanks, fallen logs that created pools and riffles for fish, delicate wildflowers in spring, fiery vine maples in autumn. French Pete was the quintessential low-elevation old-growth forest.

Timber industry leaders, sensing a shift in the political winds, hunkered down to plot strategy. Until then, the wilderness movement had made no serious incursion into the national forest lands the industry regarded as part of its commercial timber base. These were the lands that were supposed to carry wood products companies through the gap between the last of their old growth and the maturing of their second-growth plantations. Now, suddenly, environmentalists were after the same thing the industry coveted: big trees.

In 1979, as the Oregon Wilderness Coalition continued to build its case for saving old forests, scattered grassroots activists in Washington formed the Washington Wilderness Coalition to coordinate their own separate wilderness campaign. The main event in the wilderness wars—the big wilderness bills of 1984—lay ahead.


A NATURAL LABORATORY
In the spring of 1980 Mount St. Helens, dormant for 123 years, rumbled to life. A 300-foot bulge formed on the mountain's north side. On May 18 an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale triggered a massive eruption. The mountain's swollen north flank slid into the green basin of Spirit Lake and raced down the North Fork Toutle River, forming the largest landslide in recorded history. A lateral blast produced a 650 degree Fahrenheit current of ash and hot gas that traveled at speeds up to 330 miles an hour. The ash cloud, driven east by prevailing winds, circled the Earth in two weeks.

The blast leveled 150 square miles of forest, including national forest land to the north and a large swath of the Weyerhaeuser Company's 473,000-acre Longview Tree Farm, which extended around the

 
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mountain's western flank. Sixty percent of the timber destroyed was privately owned.

A great debate ensued about how to manage the public lands leveled by the blast. Overnight, these lands had become not only a world-class tourist destination but also a priceless laboratory for studying how life reestablishes itself after a natural cataclysmic event. The Mount St. Helens Protective Association, an environmental group based in Longview, Washington, wanted Congress to designate a 216,000-acre national monument, where recovery could proceed at nature's pace.

But in 1981, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest proposed to establish only a 71,000-acre interpretive area around the immediate blast zone and to manage the forests that eventually grew back for timber production and recreation. The Reagan administration opposed legislation to protect the area, maintaining that the Forest Service was quite capable of managing Mount St. Helens on its own. The Washington congressional delegation was split on management.

On a wintry November day in 1982, Susan Saul, the association's president, organized a bus tour of the blast zone for the news media, activists, and members of Congress. Democratic U.S. Representative Don Bonker, whose district included the west slopes of the mountain, asked the Gifford Pinchot National Forest supervisor to send a representative on the tour. But when the bus pulled up at headquarters, no Forest Service representative was there. Bonker was incensed at the snub and decided the Forest Service could not be trusted to manage Mount St. Helens responsibly.

"That was the turning point in the campaign," Saul recalls. "Bonker went back to D.C. and asked his staff to develop the Mount St. Helens Preservation Bill." At hearings, scientists emphasized the mountain's matchless opportunities for long-term research. In 1982, after a number of land trades with private timberland owners, including Weyerhaeuser and Burlington-Northern Railroad, which owned the now-vanished summit, Congress passed a bill setting aside 110,000 acres for public enjoyment and scientific research. It was a stunning victory. Even a portion of the lush Green River valley north of the mountain, untouched by the blast, was included in the monument's boundaries.

One of the first scientists to undertake research in the new monument was forest ecologist Jerry Franklin. He was stunned to discover how quickly life returned to the devastation zone in areas where a biological legacy—seeds, insects, burrowing gophers—survived beneath the ash. It was on the gray slopes of Mount St. Helens that Franklin refined his thoughts about the value of leaving a biological legacy on forest land after logging.

RARE A SECOND TIME
As the wilderness campaign moved into high gear, the Forest Service  embarked on a second roadless area inventory. RARE II was intended
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to settle the issue of wilderness preservation on the national forests and provide certainty to timber companies about future federal timber supplies.

Rupert Cutler, assistant agriculture secretary, in the Carter administration, and a former vice president of the Wilderness Society, directed the Forest Service to do a better job with its second inventory and to make specific recommendations this time about which areas should be set aside permanently as wilderness and which should be released for logging and other nonwilderness uses. He told Congress in early 1978 that he believed the job could be done in less than a year.

True to his word, in January 1979, Cutler announced the Forest Service's recommendation: 15 million acres of wilderness nationwide, of which 5 million acres would be in Southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest. In Oregon and Washington, the Forest Service proposed protecting a total of 637,000 acres, out of nearly 5.5 million acres eligible. In California, it proposed protecting 983,900 acres, out of 6.5 million acres eligible. Most of the rest would be released from consideration as wilderness for at least 10 years.

The Forest Service remained openly hostile to all wilderness proposals except its own. Shortly before his retirement in 1981, Northwest Regional Forester Dick Worthington revealed his bias and his failure to grasp the ecological argument for wilderness preservation when he lashed out at the tactics of wilderness "cultists." "Many wilderness demands are entirely unethical," he said. "They conflict with any sound, esthetic, or biological value; yet they are trumpeted as being in the public interest. In reality classification of lands as wilderness means locking up large acreages for the use of very few people."

The agency began a crash program to build new roads into the roadless areas it had eliminated from consideration. But continuing to destroy the old-growth inventory before the issue of permanent protection was resolved by Congress was a practice of questionable legality. Soon after RARE II was released, Huey Johnson, director of the California Resources Agency, sued and won an injunction blocking development of 47 roadless areas on California national forests until the agency prepared an environmental impact statement for each one.

James Monteith and Andy Kerr were itching to stop development of roadless areas in Oregon. But they had no money to file a lawsuit. In Oregon, the Sierra Club was the only group that did.

By then, a schism had opened in the movement. In 1982, the Oregon Wilderness Coalition became the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) to reflect the board's expanding interest in issues besides wilderness preservation. ONRC believed the Sierra Club was too quick to compromise, too recreation-minded, too slow to understand the scientific significance of old growth. The Sierra Club, which dominated wilderness politics in California and Washington, was uncomfortable with what it regarded as the Oregon group's increasingly confrontational tactics.
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As mainstream groups debated, a band of radical environmentalists from another dimension moved in.

NO COMPROMISE
The Siskiyou Mountains rise at the intersection of the Oregon Coast, Oregon Cascade, and Klamath Ranges. They hold the largest block of wild forest remaining in Oregon and the most botanically diverse conifer forest ecosystem in North America. In 1936, wilderness advocate Bob Marshall recommended establishment of a million-acre wilderness park in the Siskiyous. But in 1964, Congress protected just 77,000 acres at the heart of the range, and in 1978 Senator Mark Hatfield blocked attempts by Representative Jim Weaver, a maverick Oregon Democrat, to expand the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. Most of the roadless Siskiyou forest remained open to logging.

In 1983, the Siskiyou National Forest began laying out a high logging road that would snake along the ridgeline forming the northern boundary of the Kalrniopsis Wilderness, effectively severing it from the roadless area to the north and cutting this last big chunk of wild Oregon in two. Bald Mountain Road was one of Hatfield's pet projects; he had included an appropriation in the Forest Service budget specifically to build it. Once it was completed, any proposal to annex the North Kalmiopsis to the existing wilderness would become moot.

As the bulldozers moved in, Mike Amaranthus, a young soil scientist working on the forest, contacted some local environmentalists. One of the most beautiful old-growth forests in the world was about to be destroyed, he said. Wasn't there something they could do?

On April 27, 1983, Earth First! made its Northwest debut on Bald Mountain Road. Four men, Mike Roselle and Kevin Everhart of Wyoming and local activists Steve Marsden and Pedro Tama, walked out of the woods and blocked the bulldozer as it punched a road into the mountainside. Before they were arrested, they hung an Earth First! banner on the dozer's side.

Dave Foreman, former chief lobbyist for the Wilderness Society, and four friends—Roselle, Ron Kezar, Bart Koehler, and Howie Wolkehad conjured Earth First! in 1980, during a legendary week-long hike in the Arizona desert. Foreman had quit his job out of frustration with the ineffectiveness of the national conservation groups and out of disgust with the Forest Service over its RARE II recommendations. All of the others except Roselle, a veteran of the radical left, also had worked for mainstream conservation groups. From their desert experience came the decision to start a movement that would counter the destruction of nature directly.

The Earth First! mantra, No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth, struck a chord with many grassroots activists in the Northwest. They saw the results of accelerated logging firsthand, and they perceived that nothing the national conservation groups were doing seemed to be stopping the destruction.

 
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The arrival of Earth First! ushered in an era of direct action and civil disobedience in the Pacific Northwest. Earth First! engaged the political and industrial juggernaut that was leveling forests directly—disabling equipment, blocking logging roads, sitting in trees as chainsaws whined below. Earth First! tactics drew national attention to the wars being waged on frontiers of wilderness across the West and brought drama and increased tension to the forest protection movement.

The action on Bald Mountain continued sporadically for months, drawing national news coverage. Money poured in to save the North Kalmiopsis and halt Bald Mountain Road. Monteith and Kerr at last had the resources they needed to hire a lawyer and raise the stakes.   

DRAWING A LINE
On December 13, 1983, Monteith called a press conference in Portland to announce that the Oregon Natural Resources Council had filed suit against the Forest Service to halt all logging in roadless areas. Monteith was visibly nervous. His voice shook, and he perspired heavily under the television lights, but his message was firm: Today we have filed suit in federal district court to stop illegal development of de facto national forest wilderness lands. Conservationists have asked the court to halt road-building and timber sales on slightly less than 3 million acres of roadless areas until an adequate wilderness review is completed, or preferably until Congress passes legislation to resolve this issue.

Between 1979 and 1983, about 90,000 acres of roadless national forest land had been sold and logged in the Northwest.

Over the next two years, the Forest Service planned to open up nearly 200,000 acres more. With the filing of the Bald Mountain Road lawsuit, environmentalists drew a line in the forest. The ONRC/Earth First! suit was the first citizen-initiated, statewide lawsuit in the nation over the future of these roadless areas. U.S. District Judge James Redden, new to the federal bench after a career in state politics, granted an injunction halting Bald Mountain Road—and logging in all Oregon roadless areas—until the wilderness issue was settled.

Suddenly, the timber industry was pushing harder than anyone for a wilderness bill that would resolve the issue and let business as usual resume in the national forests.

WILDERNESS POLITICS
The Oregon, Washington, and California wilderness bills passed by Congress in 1984 were overtly political documents, and the political dynamic was different in each state.

Oregon
Senator Mark Hatfield personally brokered the Oregon Wilderness Bill. Oregon's senior senator was a master at the art of the deal. Because
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Hatfield wielded his power on the Senate Appropriations Committee to keep Oregon's timber industry well supplied with federal timber, Kerr and Monteith referred to him privately as "the Godfather." They had few illusions about where his heart lay, but they knew the fate of the forests rested in his hands. Hatfield's natural resources aide, Tom Imeson, personally visited nearly every roadless area in Oregon that was under consideration for wilderness protection.

Representative Jim Weaver had clout too, as chairman of the House Agriculture Forestry Subcommittee. Weaver had been among the first Oregon politicians to attack the timber industry for sending its own unprocessed logs, and lumber mill jobs, overseas. In 1977, when loggers in his timber-dependent congressional district complained that his support for adding French Pete to the Three Sisters Wilderness would cost their jobs, Weaver retorted that log exports to Japan could produce as many jobs as "860 French Petes every year."

The shaping of the Oregon wilderness bill became a contest between Hatfield, the titan of the Senate, and Weaver, the maverick of the House.

By now, Oregon grassroots forest activists knew the wilderness real estate intimately. They fought to get the maximum amount of roadless forest included in Hatfield's bill. The fiercest battles were fought over proposals to protect large blocks of commercially valuable old-growth timber: the Middle Santiarn in the central Oregon Cascades; Drift Creek in the Coast Range; the North Fork John Day in northeastern Oregon; and Grassy Knob, on the South Coast.

The Sierra Club's Seattle office, which was directing the Northwest wilderness campaign, was particularly opposed to including Drift Creek, the largest remaining intact watershed in the Oregon Coast Range. Drift Creek, on the Siuslaw National Forest, lay entirely within Representative Les AuCoin's district. AuCoin, a liberal Democrat, represented Oregon timber interests on the House Appropriations Committee. He vehemently opposed withdrawing Drift Creek from logging, though even local Forest Service officials favored its protection. Hatfield ultimately added a 5,800-acre Drift Creek Wilderness to his bill after noticing that AuCoin was enthusiastically supporting a bill that included no wilderness at all in his district.

The organizing the Oregon Wilderness Coalition had done in the 1970s now paid dividends. Virtually every area under consideration had its local advocates. Some local activists resorted to desperate tactics to keep roads out of unprotected areas. Twice in the early 1980s, road survey stakes were removed from the Grassy Knob Roadless Area, a rare old-growth Port Orford cedar forest just seven miles from the Oregon Coast. The delay helped keep the 17,200-acre unprotected wilderness intact until Congress stepped in.

Because local support for these areas was so passionate, Kerr and Monteith had a hard time dealing away any of the 4 million acres eligible for protection during last-minute negotiations over the final shape
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of the bill. Hatfield, however, insisted that his bill had to come in at under 1 million acres. In the end, the Oregon bill created 23 new wilderness areas totaling 853,000 acres. When Grassy Knob was added at the last minute, the Forest Service was ordered to stop work on the road it had finally begun pushing into the lush coastal forest. The forest is now gradually reclaiming this monument to the agency's defiant stance against wilderness preservation.   

Washington
The Washington delegation was more systematic in its approach to crafting a wilderness bill. Each member developed recommendations for his district. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat and a powerful figure in Washington politics, assumed responsibility for shepherding the bill through. When Jackson died suddenly in 1983, Dan Evans, a progressive Republican, was appointed to fill out his term.

"The switch when Jackson died and Evans succeeded him made a huge difference," said Charlie Raines, a longtime Sierra Club activist in Seattle. "Evans was a hiker. He knew the land on the ground, knew the value of wilderness."

The Gifford Pinchot Alliance, a successor to the Mount St. Helens Protective Association, pressed for protection of three large roadless areas in the heavily roaded forest Indian Heaven, Trapper Creek, and Dark Divide. But Republican Senator Slade Gorton, looking after the interests of Washington's timber industry, balked at setting aside that much valuable timber.

Representative Mike Lowry, a liberal Democrat who represented a pro-wilderness Seattle constituency, introduced a wilderness bill designed to protect intact watersheds. Environmentalists credit Lowry with making the case that resulted in designation of the 6,000-acre Trapper Creek Wilderness, which contained rare low-elevation old growth. But the much larger Dark Divide Roadless Area, which encompassed 57,000 acres of the Cispus and Lewis River Valleys, and which was renowned among hikers in southwest Washington for its old-growth valleys, craggy rock formations, and incomparable views of four Cascade mountain peaks, was left out of the bill.

Representative Tom Foley, a Democrat who represented the Spokane area of eastern Washington, fought designating any wilderness in the Kettle Range, which lay within his district. This was a great disappointment to wilderness advocates. "Kettle Range was the model for grassroots activism in the state," recalled Tim McNulty, a forest activist on the Olympic Peninsula. "They had the support of county administrators, they had local businesses, they did everything right."

Representative Sid Morrison, a moderate Republican, supported several high-elevation wilderness areas in his district on the eastern slope of the Cascades.

On the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the fantastic Olympic rainforest grew, the Forest Service had moved quickly in the
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1970s to preempt wilderness designation. Unit plans prepared by the Soleduck and Quinault Ranger Districts called for opening virtually all roadless areas to logging. Environmentalists proposed wilderness designation for large roadless watersheds adjacent to Olympic National Park in both districts, but to no avail.

The outlook was more hopeful on the peninsula's east side, across Puget Sound from the state's heavily populated Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area. McNulty credits botanist Ed Tisch for persuading the Forest Service that the upper watersheds of the Quilcene and Dungeness watersheds should be protected because they harbored rare endemic plants.

Grassroots activists like McNulty and Tom Jay of the group Wild Olympic Salmon worked closely with an established group, Olympic Park Associates, which had built a national constituency for forest protection on the peninsula. The park, McNulty said, was an important selling point for wilderness. "We could talk about the ecological value of Forest Service lands surrounding the park and their importance to wintering elk and salmon."

When the first round of hearings on a Washington wilderness bill was scheduled, McNulty wanted to testify in Washington, D.C., but he had a major tree-planting contract to fulfill His crew encouraged him to go and kept him on the payroll during his absence.

One of McNulty's top priorities was saving the watershed of the Gray Wolf River, on the north side of the park. In January of 1984, in deep snow, he drove Joe Mentor, a member of Senator Dan Evans' staff; to see the area in his beat-up Volvo. "Somehow we made it and had a magnificent view," he said. "Joe went back and briefed Evans, and the Gray Wolf, virtually the whole valley, ended up in the Washington wilderness bill."

On March 9, 1984, the entire Washington delegation met in Tom Foley's office to hammer out the final bill. Even staff members were excluded from the meeting. "At 9:00 P.M., after five intense hours, the delegation emerged from Foley's office, arm-in-arm and smiling," Karen Fant of the Washington Wilderness Coalition wrote in the coalition's newsletter. "The deals had been cut and, for better or worse, the major decisions on the Washington Wilderness Act of 1984 had been made." Environmentalists had proposed protection for 2 million acres. The final Washington bill established 19 new wilderness areas and expanded four others, protecting 1.03 million acres in all.

Forest activists declared victory. To celebrate, Tim McNulty married his sweetheart, Mary Morgan, on the Gray Wolf River that fall.

Northern California
The California Wilderness Act was even more generous. The Forest Service's RARE II inventory had identified 6 5 million acres of roadless national forest in the state. The final bill, spearheaded by Democratic
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U.S. Senator Phil Burton, designated 1.8 million acres as wilderness and set aside an additional 1.7 million acres for further study.

Though most of the newly designated California wilderness was high-elevation rocks and ice, the Northcoast Environmental Center in Arcata managed to win protection for some ecologically significant old growth in the state's northwest corner. A significant victory, said Tim McKay, the center's director, was the designation of the 153,000-acre Siskiyou Wilderness, on the Siskiyou, Klamath, and Six Rivers National Forests, which conferred permanent protection on 10,000 acres of rare low-elevation old growth. The act also added land to the Marble Mountain Wilderness in the rugged Klamath Mountains and gave permanent protection to 500,000 acres of the spectacular Trinity Alps Primitive Area.

NOT ANOTHER ACRE
A key issue for wilderness advocates after 1984 was the fate of the millions of acres left out of the wilderness bills. Senator Hatfield vowed that not another acre of national forest land in Oregon would become wilderness as long as he served in the Senate. His position, and the timber industry's, was that roadless areas left out of the bill should be released forever from consideration as wilderness and opened to logging. Environmentalists opposed this blanket giveaway to the timber industry, known as "hard release" language. The Forest Service also opposed hard release, for a different reason: It took away the agency's discretion to manage the land.

Congress ultimately decided that the roadless areas would be returned to multiple-use management—but not necessarily to timber production. The door to protection of these areas remained open, if only a crack. Dispirited, Andy Kerr and James Monteith plotted their next move.

At 5 o'clock one bleary morning in late 1985, Kerr approached Hatfield at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where they were both between planes. The home-building industry was in its worst slump since the Great Depression, and Hatfield had introduced a bill to aid the industry by allowing federal timber purchasers to get out of their high-priced contracts. If it passed, it meant less timber would be logged over the next several years. Kerr told Hatfield he was headed for D.C. to support the bill because it would slow the development of roadless areas.

As Kerr recalled the early morning exchange, Hatfield said, "There are no more roadless areas. We released them." "And I said, 'Oh, well, Senator, but you know, they are still out there in fact, and they still don't have any roads.' "He said, 'There are no more roadless areas.'"

For Kerr, the conversation was a turning point. The Godfather was unmovable. Environmentalists had won all the wilderness they were going to get.
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U.S. Senator Phil Burton, designated 1.8 million acres as wilderness and set aside an additional 1.7 million acres for further study.

Though most of the newly designated California wilderness was high-elevation rocks and ice, the Northcoast Environmental Center in Arcata managed to win protection for some ecologically significant old growth in the state's northwest corner. A significant victory, said Tim McKay, the center's director, was the designation of the 153,000-acre Siskiyou Wilderness, on the Siskiyou, Klamath, and Six Rivers National Forests, which conferred permanent protection on 10,000 acres of rare low-elevation old growth. The act also added land to the Marble Mountain Wilderness in the rugged Klamath Mountains and gave permanent protection to 500,000 acres of the spectacular Trinity Alps Primitive Area.

A key issue for wilderness advocates after 1984 was the fate of the millions of acres left out of the wilderness bills. Senator Hatfield vowed that not another acre of national forest land in Oregon would become wilderness as long as he served in the Senate. His position, and the timber industry's, was that roadless areas left out of the bill should be released forever from consideration as wilderness and opened to logging. Environmentalists opposed this blanket giveaway to the timber industry, known as "hard release" language. The Forest Service also opposed hard release, for a different reason: It took away the agency's discretion to manage the land.

Congress ultimately decided that the roadless areas would be returned to multiple-use management—but not necessarily to timber production. The door to protection of these areas remained open, if only a crack. Dispirited, Andy Kerr and James Monteith plotted their next move.

At 5 o'clock one bleary morning in late 1985, Kerr approached Hatfield at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where they were both between planes. The home-building industry was in its worst slump since the Great Depression, and Hatfield had introduced a bill to aid the industry by allowing federal timber purchasers to get out of their high-priced contracts. If it passed, it meant less timber would be logged over the next several years. Kerr told Hatfield he was headed for D.C. to support the bill because it would slow the development of roadless areas.

As Kerr recalled the early morning exchange, Hatfield said, "There are no more roadless areas. We released them."
"And I said, 'Oh, well, Senator, but you know, they are still out there in fact, and they still don't have any roads.'
"He said, 'There are no more roadless areas."

For Kerr, the conversation was a turning point. The Godfather was unmovable. Environmentalists had won all the wilderness they were going to get.
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Chapter Seven

Loving a Place


While lobbyists and politicians were cutting final deals on the 1984 wilderness bills, a quieter and more profound movement was taking shape in rural enclaves across the Northwest. By 1983, it had a name: bioregionalism.

Rooted in environmental and utopian ideals, and nurtured by the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, bioregionalism was a politics of place. It flourished in remote, sparsely populated areas. Among other things, it was a reaction to nightmare visions of a technological society like the one portrayed in George Orwell's 1984, where Big Brother and the Thought Police quashed autonomy and independent thought.

One of the places where bioregionalism flowered early was in the Siskiyou-Klamath country of southwestern Oregon and northwestern California.

SISKIYOU COUNTRY
In late 1983, a few people living in Oregon's Illinois Valley, in the heart of the Siskiyous, began publishing a bioregional magazine about their corner of the world, Siskiyou Country. Many of those involved had taken part in the 1983 Bald Mountain Road blockade and had stayed on to put down roots and build an alternative community.

In an early issue, Siskiyou Country published an essay by Mark Roseland, a writer and teacher living in the small community of Applegate, describing how bioregionalism could defeat Orwell's vision. Roseland wrote:

The way to decrease the threat of centralized power is by expanding the realm of decentralized power—that is, by making decisions at the level of maximum participation, where those who are most affected by a decision have the most say about it; and by concentrating on relations that stem from reciprocity and voluntarism rather than on law or judicial obligation. The goal is not to capture power but to break it down to a point where it is human-scale, a level at which people can have a say or a vote about how to manage the energy, food, products and resources of the area where they live.
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Siskiyou Country became a communications medium for people who shared this vision of society.

In the Pacific Northwest, living bioregionally meant getting to know the flora and fauna of your particular forest ecosystem, the geology of your watershed, and the policies and practices of your local Forest Service or BLM district. It wasn't a new concept, but it was an important one in the context of the times. Knowledge was power in the campaign to protect the public lands.

Bioregionalism also meant learning the history and culture of your corner of the planet, including the history of its indigenous people. It meant going deeper than wilderness politics, deeper than science, in an effort to understand the spiritual essence and natural wisdom of a place.

In the same 1984 issue of Siskiyou Country, Felice Pace, an environmental activist living in Scott Valley, California, in the heart of the Klamath Mountains, contributed an eyewitness report describing a rare performance of the Brush Dance by the Karuk Indians of the Klamaths. "Mainstream ignorance of the lives and traditions of our bioregion's native tribes is deep," he wrote. Most whites, he said, "are either unaware of these events or would never dream of attending them."

Pace went on to found the Klamath Forest Alliance, a bioregional group that worked for responsible forestry and preservation of roadless areas on the Klamath National Forest.   

SAGE OF THE SISKIYOUS
Lou Gold, a former political science professor at Oberlin College and the University of Illinois, was one of many newcomers drawn to the Siskiyous by the 1983 Bald Mountain actions. Gold left that life behind in 1983 to devote himself to saving the Siskiyous.

After the blockade, Gold held a solitary 56-day vigil on Bald Mountain, camping just inside the boundary of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, where he watched as workers bulldozed the road into the heart of the wild country. In July, he learned that a federal judge had halted road construction in response to the Earth First!/Oregon Natural Resources Council lawsuit.

Gold returned to Bald Mountain each summer for a dozen years. His camp became a destination for forest activists and hikers. He developed his own rituals for honoring the sanctity of wilderness, and shared them with visitors. In 1987, wildfire swept across Bald Mountain, burning through old-growth stands both within and outside the protected wilderness, and Gold fled for his life. Later he kept watch as loggers salvaged burned trees from the North Kalmiopsis Roadless Area.

With his long beard and gray ponytail, Gold became the gentle sage of the Siskiyous. When he was not on Bald Mountain, he lived with friends in the Oregon counterculture community of Takelma, near the California border. He spent much of each winter traveling around the country with a compelling slide show and lecture that described the beauty of the Siskiyous and the Forest Service's plan to destroy it.

 
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Single-handedly, Lou Gold built a national constituency for protection of the wild Siskiyous. By 1990, he had made more than 500 presentations across the nation. Siskiyou National Forest managers could track his travels by the letters they received from people in distant states, commenting on their draft forest plan.

Lou Gold never enjoyed the political combat involved in saving wilderness. His connection to the Siskiyous was deeply personal. In a 1990 interview on Bald Mountain, he confided that he was weary of "the politicking, the horse-trading, the chess-playing, the back-room deals." His message, he said, was more basic.

"What I really want to say is, I love a place. It's important to love a place. We have to be part of a total community, human and nonhuman. It's about having a relationship with the Earth that we live and die on."

COMMITTING TO THE CAUSE
Julie Norman acquired her passion for wild places as a Girl Scout. She was a computer specialist for IBM in Houston when she first went rafting on the Colorado River. With scarcely a backward glance, she traded her business cards thr a raft and paddle and moved to the West Coast to become a wilderness river guide. Fate brought her to the Rogue River, renowned by whitewater rafters. As she learned this rugged country, she fell in love with the dazzling Siskiyou forests of tanoak and madrone, rare Brewer's spruce and sugar pine.

In the victorious aftermath of the Bald Mountain action, Earth First! held its first Round River Rendezvous at Galice on the Rogue. Norman was living in the river outpost of Galice that summer. She had never heard of Earth First!. Out of curiosity, she attended the rendezvous. There she met Steve Marsden, Chant Thomas, Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, and Robert Brothers. Brothers, who had adopted the name Bobcat, was crippled by polio. He had collected several Ph.D.s before dropping out of academia to fight for wilderness in the Siskiyou backwoods.

Norman and Bobcat moved to the hippie community of Williams and became part of the Earth First! culture. Norman also joined a new group called the Siskiyou Citizens' Task Force and began to study computer models of timber sales on the Siskiyou National Forest. Another group in Williams, Headwaters, was monitoring logging on the Medford BLM district, which until 1979 had sold timber without any management plan at all.

In 1985 Norman joined the Headwaters board of directors. She remained active in Siskiyou Earth First! as well, until 1987. But in the aftermath of the 1987 Silver Fire, when the future of the North Kalmiopsis became a high-stakes political issue, she decided that wearing both hats was no longer politically tenable.

Together, Norman and Bobcat put their computer skills to work analyzing 30 years' worth of timber sales in the Siskiyous. In the trunk of her 1966 Dodge Coronet, Norman carried color-coded maps and computer printouts containing the details of those sales. They revealed
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a history of inappropriate forest management: logged areas at high elevations where the soil and climate were so harsh that trees could not regenerate, and clearcuts in unique transition zones where flora and fauna of the Coast, Cascade, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges converged. She became a mainstream activist, lobbying Congress, appealing timber sales, and cajoling foundations to give Headwaters money.

Siskiyou Country eventually folded, but out of it grew the Siskiyou Regional Education Project. Based in Takelma, the project drew a number of Siskiyou Earth First! activists and others from the Bald Mountain Road protests, including Steve Marsden and Lou Gold. The Siskiyou Project also gradually became more mainstream, applying for grants to conduct ecological mapping and challenging destructive hard-rock mining projects.   

KNOWING YOUR WATERSHED
Out of the bioregional movement came the concept of local organizing along watershed boundaries. The formation of local watershed councils held the possibility of bringing together people with conflicting values around a mutual commitment to protecting or restoring the watersheds they shared.

In the Mattole Valley, along a remote stretch of northern California's Humboldt County coast, loggers, ranchers, and back-to-the-land refugees from the San Francisco Bay area set aside their differences and came together in the late 1980s to restore salmon runs in the damaged Mattole River watershed. The onetime adversaries celebrated the success of their project in a ribald touring musical comedy called Queen Salmon.

Bonnie Phillips moved to Washington state from Wisconsin after college to climb mountains. In the mid-1980s she developed a progressive form of rheumatism that ended her days as a mountain-climber. In 1987, looking for a new way to use her energy, she joined the Pilchuck Audubon chapter in Everett, Washington, and threw herself into a series of environmental campaigns focused on Puget Sound and the sprawling Mount Baker—Snoqualmie National Forest to the east.

Phillips educated herself about the old-growth issue and about how logging practices on the Darrington Ranger District in the mountains east of Everett affected the Stillaguamish watershed she called home. With her fierce commitment and her impressive organizational skills, Phillips would become a force in the regional and national ancient forest campaigns of the 1990s. "A lot of my effectiveness is because I remained here," she said. "You gain credibility with the Forest Service first, if you file lawsuits, and second, if you stay around a long time. Then you have standing."

BREITENBUSH
In the central Oregon Cascades, a group of counterculture entrepreneurs came together in 1981 to form the Breitenbush Community, a cooperative centered on a dilapidated hot springs resort in a beautiful

 
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setting near the Breitenbush River. Members of the co-op didn't plan to become forest activists; their activism was thrust on them as logging roads and clearcuts in the Detroit Ranger District of the Willamette National Forest rapidly encroached on their new age sanctuary.

"We were a bunch of idealistic young hippies who were trying to hide out from the world," said Michael Donnelly, one of the original members of the Breitenbush Community, who went on to found Friends of the Breitenbush Cascades. "The movement came to us, in the form of chainsaws at dawn and scars climbing up the hillsides."

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Breitenbush became a base of operations for forest activists who blocked logging roads and sat in trees to slow the rate of logging in the North Santiam Canyon, a timber stronghold long accustomed to getting its way with the Forest Service.

HOSTILE TERRITORY
Living bioregionally didn't come as easily east of the Cascades, where the culture was hostile to environmentalists. Some bioregional experiments failed to flourish as communities dependent on natural resources shattered along predictable fault lines.

Geraldine Payton, New England–born, moved from Berkeley to a remote corner of northeastern Washington's Okanogan County in the mid-1970s to become part of an organic wheat farming cooperative. In 1983 she moved to the tiny hamlet of Chesaw, reached by a twisting 20-mile mountain road that connects it with Oroville, the closest town of any size. On a clear day, from Buckhorn Mountain near her home, the view to the north takes in a forested wilderness across the British Columbia border.

Payton and her partner Rick Gillespie got involved in a local anti-herbicide campaign, drawing the ire of the county's apple orchardists. They monitored forest practices on the Okanogan National Forest. In 1987, they began producing a bioregional journal, Columbiana, which carried stories about the ecology and culture of the Interior Columbia Plateau—the vast area drained by the Columbia River east of the Cascades, which encompasses parts of seven states and British Columbia. Columbiana published essays about natural history, agriculture, appropriate technology, indigenous people, and early pioneers in the region, as well as environmental issues. But to many of their rural neighbors, their political views made Payton and Gillespie outsiders who would never fit in.

THINKING BIG
The new discipline of conservation biology, just emerging in the 1980s, supplied a scientific context for bioregional consciousness. Conservation biologists stressed the need to manage large landscapes for the preservation of biological diversity. Where large chunks of wild land remained—the Siskiyou-Klamath province, the North Cascades, and the
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Northern Rockies—environmental activists adapted the concepts of conservation biology to argue for saving these last, best wild places.

In 1989, a former Earth First! activist named Mitch Friedman founded the Greater Ecosystem Alliance, based in Bellingham, Washington, to bring together U.S. and Canadian environmentalists in a campaign to protect wildlands on both sides of the international boundary. This knot of mountainous wilderness, centered on the North Cascades, is one of the last places in North America large enough and wild enough to harbor gray wolves and grizzlies.

The high-profile ancient forest protection campaign to come was built on the work of these and other environmental activists who chose to live bioregionally, think globally, and act locally.

 
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Chapter Eight

Early Warnings


On May 19, 1983, nine national forest supervisors who held the fate of the Northwest's big-timber forests in their hands gathered at Portland's elegant Benson Hotel. They were by definition "timber beasts"—politically astute managers committed to their agency's mission of getting out the cut. Yet they had asked their boss, Forest Service Chief Max Peterson, to fly out and meet with them face-to-face so they could warn him that the forests were being cut too fast.

After years of politically inspired delay, the supervisors were writing new 10-year forest plans to comply with the 1976 National Forest Management Act. These plans were supposed to balance timber production with recreation use, scenery, and protection of streams, soil, fish, and wildlife. The field reports were in, and the news was not good: all of those nontimber amenities were at risk unless the pace of logging slowed immediately. If it continued, a crash in Northwest timber supplies was inevitable when the new forest plans were completed. And if that happened, there would be hell to pay in the hardball world of Northwest timber politics.

No one said anything about preserving a vanishing ecosystem. The concern was more pragmatic. "The message was that there had to be a day of reckoning," said Dick Pfilf, at the time supervisor of Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest. "We said we ought to prepare the political climate so it wouldn't be a big surprise when the plans came out."

Peterson listened, but he was a political realist. It was he who had to face the powerful Northwest congressional delegation at budget time. Then he doled out a dose of political reality. The timber industry wouldn't stand for a premature reduction in timber sale levels, and neither would the delegation.

The overcutting was to continue for six more years, until a federal judge ordered the Forest Service to put on the brakes.

THE REAGAN FACTOR
In the political climate of the early 1980s, any attempt to reduce log ging on the national forests was met with great resistance in Washington, D.C. The Reagan administration had turned over the nation's natural resources to a band of conservative westerners, led by Interior
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Secretary James Watt, who were bent on exploiting them for quick profit. Max Peterson's boss was Assistant Agriculture Secretary John B. Crowell, a former Louisiana Pacific Corporation timber executive. Crowell was dissatisfied with the way the new national forest plans were shaping up.

To his mind, forest managers out in the Northwest weren't building a convincing case for increasing protection of wildlife and scenery at the expense of timber production.

Crowell had set off a firestorm within the Forest Service when he announced that the national forests of the Northwest ought to be able to double timber production to 10 billion board feet annually by the 1990s without harmful environmental consequences.
Three months before Max Peterson's meeting with forest supervisors in Portland, Crowell had warned in an internal memo that "appropriate changes" would be made in Forest Service personnel unless the plans began to "improve significantly soon." In response, Northwest Regional Forester Jeff Sirmon had ordered a "pause" in preparation of management plans for the 19 national forests in Oregon and Washington so supervisors could figure out how to implement Crowell's directive.   

A WARNING UNHEEDED
Sirmon was a voice for restraint. He had reviewed early projections of timber yields in the forest plans, and he could foresee the political donnybrook to come. "I decided that I needed to begin taking slings and arrows for the region as a whole," he said.

In 1984, he went public with warnings that the cut would be coming down. He met with the timber industry-dominated Oregon Board of Forestry and with the governors of both Oregon and Washington. He explained why the Forest Service soon would be selling less timber in the Northwest. "My message to them was, 'There's going to be a falldown in timber output. We need your cooperation.' But everyone was in denial; no one wanted to grapple with the issue."

Sirmon met with environmental groups, too, and asked for their help in discussing and debating the planning process, but with Crowell pushing for a doubling of timber sale levels, they were distrustful. "Environmentalists said, 'Don't expect any help from us as long as your generals are rattling their sabers,'" Sirmon recalled.

He went to all the major timber associations with his warning, but they weren't ready to concede that the cut would be coming down. They were too heavily invested in trying to influence the timber yield estimates in the new forest plans. "They had their own economists and forest planners," Sirmon said. "Their computers were as good as ours."

HARDBALL
In 1986, three years after the meeting at the Benson Hotel, Forest Service Chief Max Peterson appeared before the House Interior
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Appropriations Subcommittee, the panel that decided how much timber his agency would sell each year. He was grilled by Democratic Representative Les AuCoin of Oregon, who touted his conservation credentials while taking money from the timber industry to do its bidding. At AuCoin's insistence, the 1986 timber target for the Pacific Northwest had been hiked by 700 million board feet beyond the amount the Forest Service had requested. In April, halfway through the fiscal year, national forests in Oregon and Washington were having a hard time finding timber to sell. AuCoin had been hearing from his timber industry constituents. Why, he asked Peterson, was the Pacific Northwest dragging its feet in meeting its 1986 timber targets?

In 1985, during a depression in the home-building industry, Congress had passed special legislation allowing federal timber purchasers to get out of contracts for timber they couldn't afford to log. Now with the market still in a slump, the industry was pushing for the Forest Service to rush large volumes of timber back to market at bargain-basement prices for harvest later, when the price of lumber had rebounded. Peterson was trying to cut his budget to comply with a new congressional deficit reduction law. And he had not forgotten the warnings delivered at that long-ago meeting in Portland.

AuCoin was not sympathetic. He warned Peterson that if timber sale levels in the Northwest didn't start climbing soon, the chief might not remain chief for long. His grilling paid off—in the short run. The Forest Service scrambled to meet its quota. The following February, Peterson left the Forest Service for a job in the nonprofit sector.

The confrontation was unusual only because it occurred in the open. The pressure from the Northwest delegation to get out the cut in those years was unrelenting. The regional forester and forest supervisors in the Northwest routinely received orders from members of the delegation to expedite timber sales on behalf of timber industry constituents.

"Probably a half dozen times during my tenure someone put out the word that it was time for me to leave," Peterson said years later. "I don't think there's any question that some in the Pacific Northwest were glad to see me go."


NOW OR NEVER
Meanwhile, a few employees in the federal Bureau of Land Management were sounding their own warning about the pace of cutting on the 2.5 million acres the agency managed in western Oregon, where BLM land was interspersed with logged-over private land in a giant checkerboard of mile-square blocks. They tried to take steps to avert a showdown by proposing a system of forest reserves to protect the tattered old-growth forests under their jurisdiction before it was too late.

In 1937, when Congress gave these former Oregon & California Railroad lands to the BLM to manage, it also gave the agency a simple mandate: Sell timber, and pump half of all receipts into the 18 counties where the former railroad lands were located. This revenue-sharing
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arrangement created a strong political constituency for the BLM among the counties that depended on timber revenue as their lifeblood.

By the mid-1980s the BLM had been liquidating the mature and old-growth timber on the 0 & C lands for nearly a half-century. As the agency prepared required timber management plans for the 1990s, some officials saw a day of reckoning on the horizon. "It became clear that the end of the old growth was now predictable with relative certainty, and that it was basically now or never if a representative sampling of functioning old-growth ecosystems was to be preserved," wrote Ronald Sadler, chief of forest planning in the BLM's Oregon office from 1973 to 1984, after his retirement in 1991.

In the late 1970s the BLM set aside 90 small owl reserves under a voluntary agreement with the state of Oregon. But it did not reduce logging to reflect the land withdrawn. To meet its timber goals it was forced to log more heavily on land outside the owl reserves. The stepped-up logging dumped more sediment into streams, eliminated more wildlife habitat, and created more ugly clearcuts.   

QUASHING REFORM
The 1983 plan, drawn up by employees of the BLM's Coos Bay District, proposed setting aside a number oflarge old-growth forest blocks where logging would be prohibited and connecting them with smaller blocks that would be logged no more frequently than every 350 years. The proposal contrasted sharply with the agency's existing plan to log most of its western Oregon lands every 60 years. Sixty years is far too little time for young forests to acquire the ecological characteristics of old growth that make them ideal habitat for spotted owls.

Sadler took the plan to Washington, D.C., for review by Interior Department officials. Because of its impact on timber production, it received in-depth scrutiny from BLM Director Robert Burford and Assistant Interior Secretary Garrey Carrothers, both of whom worked for Interior Secretary James Watt. They gave it tentative approval, but a week later that approval was rescinded. Burford later issued a directive boosting the annual timber sale level on the BLM's Coos Bay District and told the state BLM office not to reduce timber production to benefit any wildlife species unless it was already federally listed as threatened or endangered.

In 1986, a BLM wildlife biologist named Mike Wisdom made another attempt to head off disaster when he developed a system for ranking the shrinking old-growth stands in the Coos Bay District based on their size, distance from each other, and suitability as spotted owl habitat. Sadler and most of the agency's field managers endorsed the system as a way to protect some old growth. This time, it was state BLM officials who vetoed the plan.

In the meantime, logging on BLM and private lands continued to carve the Coast Range with roads and clearcuts. In 1990, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as a threatened species, federal

 
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biologists singled out the severely fragmented BLM lands of the Oregon Coast Range as an area of critical concern

STANDING UP TO CENSORSHIP
In the mid-1980s, BLM biologist Chris Maser continued to wage an uphill struggle to get his research on old-growth forest ecology published. At last, in 1988, the BLM and Forest Service jointly published "From the Forest to the Sea: A Story of Fallen Trees." The report, coauthored by Robert Tarrant, Jim Trappe, and Jerry Franklin, warned that current logging practices would profoundly affect forest, stream, and ocean ecology.

By then, Maser had resigned from his job. The BLM's forestry and science staff in Washington, D.C., had tried for three years to squash the old-growth report. Maser had been directed to place himself under censorship for what he said and wrote, but he had refused to fudge data or to lie to the public. By 1987, when he quit, federal agencies no longer could keep a lid on the proliferating old-growth research studies.

In 1988, Maser published The Redesigned Forest, a small, profound book in which he wove together his own evolving philosophy with descriptions of forest ecology and raised fundamental questions about the wholesale conversion of complex forest ecosystems to simplified monocultures. He punctuated the text with pithy contrasts between the natural forest and the fully regulated forest that was rapidly replacing it:"Nature designed Pacific Northwest forests to live 500-1200 years. We are designing a forest that may seldom live 100 years."
 
"Nature designed Pacific Northwest forests to be unique in the world-25 species of conifers, 7 major ones, the longest lived and largest of their genera. We are designing a forest based largely on a single-species' short rotation."

Maser began to write and speak in whatever forums he could find. To many forest activists, he was a hero, a scientist who had spoken truth to power and who was unafraid to express his contrition. "We have the right to redesign the world," he said in a 1989 speech to a Corvallis, Oregon, standing-room crowd. "What we don't have is the intellect, the knowledge."

In his speeches, Maser expressed empathy for timber workers who had lost their livelihood. "The small loggers, the independent loggers, are part of our heritage," he said. "They're part of what makes us us. They're fighting for their dignity. I know what it's like when the paychecks stop. You can't take something away from people and not replace it with something else."
However, he did not attempt to disguise his frustration with his former employer. "The BLM was lying behind closed doors to retain its homeostasis," he said in a 1989 interview. "One BLM district manager told me
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that as far as he was concerned, he was going to run an industrial forest and what happened afterward was not his concern."

A FINITE FOREST
By the mid-1980s, forest supervisors were hearing reports from their field employees about slopes too prone to stream-burying landslides to risk logging them and about hikers who objected to clearcuts along their favorite trails. An environmentally awakened public was putting new pressures on national forests to provide wilderness and back-country recreation, trails and campgrounds, and scenery and wildlife viewing opportunities.

Forest managers faced hard professional choices. Meeting timber targets, especially on the big-timber forests, was a sure route to career advancement. But the toll exacted by excessive logging was now impossible to ignore. Some watersheds had been logged so heavily that the Forest Service had no choice but to put them to bed for decades.

As vast and productive as the old-growth forests of the Northwest had once seemed, they were not infinite. The end game for these forests was now in sight. 

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