“The handling of adversaries is perhaps the most difficult of all political skills to learn and is a significant test of a movement's effectiveness.”
—MARK. DOWIE, Losing Ground, 1995
“There is no ecological need for immediate intervention on the post-fire landscape.”
—ROBERT L. BESCHTA et al., Wildfire and Salvage Logging, March 1995
“There is no such thing as biological waste in a forest.”
—CHRIS MASER, Salvage Logging: The Loss of Ecological Reason and Moral Restraint, 1996
The 1994 wilderness fires in Idaho and eastern Washington fueled calls by the timber industry and western lawmakers for a massive salvage logging project to recover scorched trees from the forest and reduce the risk of future fires. The Forest Service responded with a plan to speed salvage sales by shortening environmental reviews.
In November 1994, Republicans won control of Congress and launched an attack on the nation's environmental laws. Timber lobbyists and newly empowered Republican congressional leaders seized the opportunity the fires had provided to draft a bill that opened roadless areas and fragile forests across the nation to "salvage logging"
Tree Huggers
Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign
Part 6: Backlash 1994-95
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the guise of restoring "forest health"—and to exempt those sales from federal environmental laws.
One cleverly written section of the measure ordered the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to release all timber sales in Northwest forests that had been withdrawn or delayed because of the damage they would inflict on fish and wildlife. Disregarding pleas from environmentalists, President Clinton inexplicably signed this "logging without laws" measure, in the process selling out Option 9, his own Northwest Forest Plan, and unleashing a brutal assault on forests across the nation.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Dead and Dying
In late 1994, when Idaho forest activist Ron Mitchell saw the aftermath of the Foothills fire salvage sale along Little Rattlesnake Creek, he got mad. Then he got even.
Two years earlier, in the hot, dry August of 1992, a fierce wildfire ignited by lightning had scorched 257,600 acres of forest, brush, and rangeland east of Boise. In his zeal to recover marketable timber from the burn, Steve Mealey, then supervisor of the Boise National Forest, ordered the Foothills salvage sale and exempted it from citizen appeals.
As soon after logging as he could get access, Mitchell went in. He found hundreds of violations of the salvage plan. Logging had left slowto-heal scars across the landscape. Roads roughly dug into hillsides for fire suppression bled soil into Little Rattlesnake Creek in the heart of the burn. Fresh-cut stumps marked areas where loggers had cut too close to streambanks. In some areas where the Forest Service had promised to reforest and to obliterate roads and helicopter landing pads, the work had not been done.
Frank Carroll, spokesman for the Boise National Forest, brushed off Mitchell's concerns. Though Carroll conceded that mistakes had been made on the Foothills sale, he insisted that they were in the acceptable range.
But Mitchell argued that the forests of the Northern Rockies needed to burn and mend on their own timetable, not one set by the Forest Service. Fire had been excluded from these dry hills for too long, he said. "Fire improves nutrients in streams and rejuvenates the soil. It releases seeds that need fire to bloom. In the Northern Rockies, fire is as essential as water."
With a small grant from the renegade group Save America's Forests, Mitchell published a report on the Foothills salvage sale, complete with photographs, and distributed it to the news media and selected members of Congress. The Washington Post and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer came to take a look. As congressional debate over wholesale salvage logging heated up in the aftermath of the 1994 fires, the Foothills sale became part of the debate.
"A SLASH-AND-GRAB JOB"
By 1994, the push from the timber industry to accelerate salvage logging across the forests of the Intermountain West had been building for four years. It began with the Forest Service's declaration of a forest health emergency in the wake of the spruce budworm outbreak in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. It spread north and east to other dry forests between the Cascades and the Rockies where drought, insects, cattle grazing, fire suppression, and overcutting had taken their toll.
A series of federal studies implicated past management practices in the weakened conditions of these forests. Scientists called for a combination of thinning, prescribed burns, and mechanical removal of dead wood to reduce the fire hazard posed by dead trees. The timber industry, however, was interested mainly in getting access to trees charred by fire or weakened by insects before they lost their commercial value. The Forest Service, which had a strong bias toward management, shared the enthusiasm for logging these forests back to health.
While Democrats controlled Congress, the pressure to speed salvage logging fell short. In 1992, U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican, tried but failed to attach a measure to an appropriations bill directing the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to increase sales of insect-damaged timber even in areas inhabited by the spotted owl. Both of Oregon's U.S. senators, Republicans Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood, jumped on the salvage bandwagon, as did Democratic U.S. Representative Les AuCoin. But Senator Brock Adams, a Washington Democrat, called the amendment "a slash-andgrab job" motivated by greed. Adams argued that the Forest Service already was selling salvage timber and that forcing it to sell more would delay other restoration work. Gorton's amendment failed.
The pressure continued in 1993 and 1994 as federal timber sales west of the Cascades remained frozen by federal courts. Some Oregon companies began turning to the forests of central Idaho, where logging remained wide open. The Forest Service was pushing new roads into Idaho roadless areas, and the Boise National Forest under Supervisor Steve Mealey had plenty of salvage timber to sell.
THE MEALEY MANTRA
Returning forests of the Intermountain West to their "historic range of variability" was Steve Mealey's mantra. His thesis, discounted by many fire ecologists, was that these ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests should be managed to return them to conditions that existed in the mid- to late 18th century, when low-intensity fires, many set by aboriginal people, regularly cleared the underbrush and thinned less fire-resistant conifer species to encourage game. Mealey proposed to do this mainly through intensive thinning of dense stands across the landscape. On the Boise National Forest, he also advocated intensive salvage of fire-damaged stands in projects such as the Foothills sale. Mealey brought those biases with him when he was assigned in 1994
to direct preparation of an ecosystem plan for the federal lands in Idaho and western Montana. With wildfires still smoldering across the West, his message suddenly had broad appeal.
The voices of scientists who had studied cycles of insect infestations in the eastside forests, and who saw no true emergency, were largely ignored in the call for action. And the notion that even very hot, stand-replacing fires like those of 1994 might benefit forests by replenishing the soil and restoring a more natural mix of conifer species seemed almost unpatriotic. In the summer of 1994, fire was the enemy.
The forced evacuation of several eastern Washington and Idaho mountain communities in the path of the 1994 fires helped fan the fear of future wildfires. So did the deaths of 14 hotshot firefighters, who perished July 2 on a Colorado hillside as they fought to control a wind-whipped fire in dry pliion-juniper and Gambel oak. An investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration later concluded that the Forest Service and BLM had committed "willful" safety violations by failing to alert firefighters to extremely dangerous conditions. Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas took the deaths of the firefighters especially hard.
AN INTOLERABLE SITUATION
In late August of 1994, U.S. Senator Larry Craig, a conservative Idaho Republican and a good friend of the timber industry, presided over a Senate Agriculture subcommittee hearing in Boise to inquire about the Forest Service's plans for salvage logging in the aftermath of the fires. Chief Thomas testified at the Boise hearing that his agency "cannot, in my opinion, simply step back and wait for 'nature' to take its course."
"I do not believe that what has happened this fire season is acceptable as a solution to the problem," he said. "These fires at this scale and intensity are too hot, destructive, dangerous and too ecologically, economically, aesthetically, and socially damaging to be tolerable."
The only thing stopping the Forest Service from expediting salvage sales, Thomas said, was environmentalists' appeals and litigation. He knew some critics would question any approach that included cutting trees. But he vowed the Forest Service would not wait to begin restoring burned forests to some semblance of their historical condition through salvage logging, prescribed fire, and thinning of densely stocked stands Immediately afterward, the Forest Service began preparing its Western Forest Health Initiative, a plan to do exactly that.
The timber industry followed up with its own large conference on salvage logging and forest health in Spokane, Washington, in early September, sponsored primarily by Boise Cascade Corporation. Soon after, the Intermountain Forestry Association, Boise Cascade, and other companies stepped up pressure on the Forest Service to give them access to fire-blackened stands throughout the Interior Northwest. They also pushed the agency to open insect-infested forests to extensive thinning, in the interest of reducing future fire danger and restoring "forest health."
Thomas's support for intensive forest thinning was no surprise. In the 1980s, he had endorsed a massive thinning operation on the Starkey Experimental Forest in northeastern Oregon. The Starkey was the site of Thomas's own pet research project, a long-term study to measure how Rocky Mountain elk responded to roads, cattle, and changes in forest habitat within a 3,600-acre fenced enclosure.
The Starkey had been particularly hard-hit by spruce budworm and pine bark beetle infestations. In 1988, it became the site of a massive salvage project designed to test various strategies for restoring diseased forests throughout the Blue Mountains. Over two years, half of the forested land enclosed by the fence was thinned. The jury was still out on whether the new forest that would grow up in its place would be more resistant to insects.
REWARDING ARSON
In western Oregon, a salvage debate of another kind was smoldering. The Willamette National Forest's plan to salvage timber blackened in a 1991 arson fire was on hold. Environmentalists had held off logging of the Warner Creek burn with appeals and lawsuits. They argued that it was dangerous public policy to reward arson by allowing logging in a spotted owl reserve that would have been off-limits to logging had it not burned. The Forest Service's own resource specialists had recommended only very light logging in the burn area, in instances where it might improve future owl habitat.
But Darrel Kenops, supervisor of the Willamette National Forest, was determined to salvage a significant amount of timber from the 9,000- acre burn. In 1992, he overruled his resource specialists and chose a plan that would allow far more extensive logging. Three years after the fire, however, the burned timber remained locked up in a court challenge.
EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES
On October 31, 1994, the Forest Service unveiled its promised Western Forest Health Initiative, which laid out its plan to move salvage sales through the system quickly. "Innovative and extraordinary measures are needed to restore forest health in stressed forests," the report began. But its definition of "forest health" was so vague and jargon-filled as to be meaningless: "A condition where biotic and abiotic influences do not threaten resource management objectives now or in the future."
The agency identified 330 salvage projects on national forests across the nation and predicted that salvage logging could produce 4.5 billion board feet of timber over the next 24 months.
On the Boise National Forest, where two wildfires burned through 102,000 acres in 1994, Steve Mealey had already directed preparation of the mammoth Boise River Project, a plan for logging 81,000 acres of fire-killed timber, including stands within roadless areas.
The timber industry suddenly saw its chance to push for more timber while buffing its image as a concerned steward of the public lands.
In late summer, the industry placed a large ad in 12 daily newspapers and spots on more than 30 radio stations in Washington, Idaho, and Montana blaming conservationists in part for the summer's fires in eastern Washington and central Idaho.
"The irresponsible actions of a few radicals have blocked even the most modest efforts to return to safe and healthy condition through thinning and selective logging," the ad accused. "Sadly, this year's tragic losses may be but a preview unless public land managers are immediately allowed to harvest dead and dying timber on our national forests."
AN EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE
For eastside forest activists, the forest health issue posed a difficult public education challenge.
Environmentalists were placed on the defensive. They tried to counter the timber industry's ad campaign with logic. For instance, they pointed out that much of the 1994 Tyee Creek fire, which scorched 135,000 acres in the central Washington Cascades, burned in previously logged stands where eight years of drought had left insect-damaged trees vulnerable. They also accused the timber industry and its allies in Congress of deliberately preying on people's fear of devastating wildfires to stack the decks in favor of massive salvage logging.
"The timber industry is taking advantage of a void in public understanding," said Lisa Lombardi, a wildlife biologist and Moscow, Idaho, conservationist. "Fires are not like logging. Many species depend on snags and down logs. Those snags left on the land are the only remaining biomass" after fire sweeps through, she said.
In a January 1995 posting to Northern Rockies activists on the Econet Western Lands Gopher Service, Lombardi wrote: "This is a complex and contentious topic in our region, as you all know. Over the next few years, many things are going to be proposed under the guise of what is good for the health of our forests. One reason the issue is going to be difficult to deal with from a public education standpoint is that there truly are places where some intervention would be not only acceptable but also beneficial—in other words, there is no hard line, no yes/no; more like a 'yes, but . . . '"
Most foresters who argued that salvage logging was good for "forest health" were really talking about tree vigor, not the overall condition of the streams, soils, fish, wildlife, and vegetation that make up the forest ecosystem, Lombardi said.
Then she laid out the bottom line: "Are we in for some stand-replacing fires? Yes. Can some thinning be done in mismanaged stands? Yes, but it will have no effect on landscape-level fires. Should that be done over the landscape? No. Can we eliminate fire from these forests? No. . . . Unless we take every tree, trees will always burn."
But scientific arguments put forth in the debate over salvage logging seemed to carry little weight. Even Steve Mealey, a scientist by training, didn't let scientific accuracy get in the way of a good sound bite. After
fire burned through the South Fork of Sheep Creek on the Boise National Forest, Mealey told a reporter for the newspaper High Country News, "We lost a unique, distinct, genetic population of bull trout."
When Forest Service fisheries biologist Cindy Deacon-Williams confronted him, pointing out that bull trout had never lived in that stream, she said Mealey replied that fish had indeed been lost, and that calling them bull trout would give the issue the attention the situation deserved. Mealey also predicted that "it would take millennia" before fish returned to Sheep Creek. But in fact, Deacon-Williams said, "It only took a month."
THE RUSH TO SALVAGE
In late October of 1994, when Congress passed the appropriations bill funding the Forest Service and BLM, a conference committee directed the agencies to "move expeditiously to restore and rehabilitate burned-over areas, and reduce excessive fuel loads in areas highly susceptible to wildfire."
Already, some Forest Service officials were rushing to offer salvage sales. On the Colville National Forest, the agency admitted it had marked trees for cutting within the Copper Butte Roadless Area before the close of public comment and that it had drastically overstated the size of the burn.
Evan Frost, an Okanogan County environmentalist, had walked the burn. He was incensed by the difference between rhetoric and reality. "The fire on Copper Butte did little damage to the old-growth structure and habitat value of this area," he said. "The way these trees were marked makes no sense at all. It looks as though a drunken sailor with a paint can went roaming through the forest."
Sara Folger of the Spokane-based Inland Empire Public Lands Council saw an ominous portent in the Forest Service's rush to salvage: "Any hope the public might have had that the Forest Service was capable of protecting forest ecosystems is gone."
Chapter Twenty-nine
Contact on the Environment
On November 8, 1994, the world changed. Republicans took back the U.S. Senate and, for the first time since the Great Depression, gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Within days of the stunning upset, rumors of plans to roll back 20 years of federal environmental legislation were coming from all directions. Leadership of congressional committees overseeing the nation's air, water, and public lands had passed from sympathetic Democrats to hostile Republicans Friendly congressional staffers who had given environmental lobbyists access to the workings of House committees began getting layoff notices as House Speaker—designate Newt Gingrich announced deep cuts in congressional office budgets. Overnight, green Democrats like Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Representative George Miller of California were out of the loop.
Environmentalists' most rabid adversaries in Congress were about to grab the reins of key natural resource committees. Republican Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska would become chairman of the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho would chair Murkowski's forestry subcommittee. Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon would take the reins of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. And Republican Representative Don Young would take over as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. In case anyone doubted his intent, Young promptly deleted the word "Natural" from the committee's name
For national conservation groups, it was a nightmare from which there was no waking. By December, they were holding lengthy strategy sessions to figure out where they had gone wrong, what friends they had left, and how they could recast their message so that it connected with people's lives.
At the cramped offices of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, the threat on everyone's mind was a bill that would exempt salvage logging from environmental laws.
Forest activists had reason to worry. In December, Murkowski and Craig asked Mark Rey, the timber industry's top lobbyist in D.C., to come to work for them. With Rey's help, the leadership's forestry agenda came together in a two-week period between mid-December
and mid-January. At the top of the list was a bill to open the national forests to more logging.
A PREVIEW OF DISASTER
In late January of 1995, nearly 400 West Coast forest activists gathered in Ashland, Oregon, to get another sobering civics lesson from the D.C. lobbyists who were on the front lines in this fierce new battle. The message: Their foes in Congress and statehouses throughout the West had captured the populist high ground. Without serious political alliance building, environmental activists stood to lose everything they had fought for.
They were served up a preview of setbacks to come. Massive salvage logging throughout the West, possibly aided by an emergency congressional appropriation with language that would shield the sales from legal challenges. Proposals to turn over federal lands to the states. A moratorium on new endangered species listings. Raids on the Tongass National Forest and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Conservative Republicans sympathetic to the wise-use agenda had simply seized the initiative, said Roger Featherstone of the Endangered Species Coalition, a foundation-funded organization created to build national support for the Endangered Species Act. "The situation in Washington the past few years has built up a tremendous inertia," Featherstone said. "There's not been a lot of leadership from Congress, the administration, the agencies, or even the environmental groups themselves. We no longer have inertia. We have popped the ball out of the socket and it's rolling around."
If they hoped to have any credibility with the Republican majority, environmentalists would have to decide on a position and stick with it, Featherstone said. "To work with Republicans you have to have a measure of respect built up. You ask for what you want and you don't back off from that. We're backed into a corner and we have to fight our way out like a badger."
Steve Holmer of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign urged activists to be visible in Washington, D.C., and in the offices of their own congressional representatives, whether Democratic or Republican. "It's very important that we're bipartisan," he said. "We can't afford to write off one member. Make them realize there's a price to pay for a vote against the environment."
The conference's most discouraging words came from Tarso Ramos, a former labor organizer who headed the Wise Use Public Exposure Project in Portland. The wise-use movement's formidable power came in part from its populist call for political self-determination, especially in rural communities, Ramos said. Its support for private property rights had helped the movement expand into suburban areas as well.
The wise-use message fit the angst of the times, he said. People were fearful for their economic future and suspicious of government. "What's changed is that someone is going to organize these disaffected citizens,
and for the most part that is not progressives or environmentalists."
He urged environmentalists to become more sophisticated about economic issues and to come up with their own proposals to keep rural areas alive: "Recognize the difference between timber companies and the people who work for them." "For most workers there's no option other than a job today versus no job today. You must take on these economic issues head-on. It's the only way the environmental movement stands a chance of surviving as a powerful political force in this country. If it stays isolated, the movement threatens to become an agent in its own destruction."
Even Brock Evans, vice president of the National Audubon Society, admitted that national conservation groups were under siege and trying to regroup. The hostility was so thick, he said, that Representative Young had told the major national conservation groups they would not be invited to testify before his House Resources Committee. "The tidal wave in Congress is a totally different structure than I've seen in my lifetime," Evans said. "The historian in me is fascinated; the lobbyist in me is scared."
Forest activists didn't have to wait long to see one of these prophecies borne out. On February 10, 1995, Senator Craig introduced the Federal Lands Forest Health Protection and Restoration Act. Under Craig's bill, salvage logging would be exempt from appeals in forests in which half or more of the trees were "dead or dying." Legal challenges of these sales would be limited. Citizens could petition to have forest tracts declared "emergency" areas. Forest managers would then have to justify the decision not to log.
At a March 1 hearing before Craig's subcommittee, Assistant Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons expressed qualified support for the Craig bill, though he said the petition process was unnecessary.
At the same time, the House was busy designing a bill that would cut appropriations for programs already funded in the 1995 federal budget. It was Don Young who proposed dealing with the salvage issue by attaching it as a rider to the pending budget rescission bill. Soon after, the Craig bill was shelved. "We decided it didn't make sense to pursue it in both venues this year," Senate Energy Committee staffer Mark Rey said. Besides it was also far from clear that the Craig bill could win on the Senate floor.
DISREGARDING SCIENCE
At congressional hearings, scientists disputed whether a true forest health "crisis" even existed, let alone whether massive thinning and salvage logging were appropriate responses. But the message that fire and insect epidemics are nature's way of restoring balance to these stressed forests got lost in the din of timber industry rhetoric.
On February 10, 1995, the day the Craig bill was unveiled, Dr. Art Partridge of the University of Idaho recounted before a joint hearing of two House subcommittees his 30 years of research on forest diseases
and forest insects in the Interior Northwest. He and other pathologists had recently evaluated the condition of 130,000 trees in more than 60 areas of Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Their conclusion: There was no forest health crisis. Fewer than 2 trees out of 1,000 showed symptoms of a root disease that was a key indicator of serious forest health problems. In fact, the pathologists' tests revealed the lowest level of disease and insect activity in 28 years. Moreover, where past insect infestations had been severe, scientists had found high rates of recovery.
In March of 1995, a panel of eight prominent scientists issued a paper for the Pacific Rivers Council in which they argued that there was no ecological justification for salvage logging, that in fact burned-over forests must be treated with the greatest care to prevent mass erosion and damage to soils, streams, and fisheries. The only valid argument for post-fire salvage logging, the scientists said, was economic.
Yet, though environmentalists had mustered credible scientists for congressional hearings, they found themselves battling not only powerful members of Congress and a determined and cynical timber industry but a public largely ignorant of forest ecology.
In March 1995, Ron Mitchell of the Idaho Sporting Congress, who had documented salvage logging abuse on the Boise National Forest, went to Washington, D.C., to lobby against Craig's salvage bill. He made the rounds of 36 Senate offices, arguing that salvage logging was a budget buster and the forest health crisis a hoax. But he said Senate staffers were concerned that taking on the issue directly might cost western Democrats their seats. He said they told him, "The truth doesn't matter. Power does."
On March 30, 1995, Republican U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon took to the Senate floor and pushed every button in arguing for expedited salvage logging. "There are those whose agenda is to prevent people from managing our forests altogether," he said. "They would rather let our dead and dying forests burn by catastrophic fire, endangering human life and long-term forest health, than harvest them to promote stability in natural forest ecosystems and communities dependent on a supply of timber from federal lands."
The drumbeat of the timber industry's ad campaign reinforced Hatfield's message. "Wildfire destroyed four million acres of America's forests last summer and killed dozens of people," said a Northwest Forest Resource Council newspaper ad that ran in April. "This year could be worse. Congress has asked federal resource managers to make our forests safer and healthier for fish, wildlife and people. Rehabilitation plans include immediately planting new trees, restoring watersheds and leaving snags for birds and wildlife while allowing the careful and speedy salvage of dead and dying trees before they rot, lose their value and spark further forest fires." Who could be against a bill that would do all that?
THE UNHOLY TRINITY
The Contract for America, Newt Gingrich's manifesto for the Republican freshman class, hadn't mentioned the word "environment." What it had promised was regulatory reform. Three tenets of that manifesto, dubbed the "unholy trinity" by Beltway environmental lobbyists, were the early focus of the 104th Congress.
Unfunded mandates legislation prohibited the federal government from passing along the costs of new regulations to the states without full funding for compliance. It sailed through Congress and was signed by President Clinton.
"Takings" legislation required the federal government to pay private property owners when government rules decreased the value of their property. Takings became embroiled in bitter debate as its supporters told largely apocryphal tales of federal bureaucrats running roughshod over the rights of ordinary citizens and as environmentalists worked hard to debunk the anecdotes.
The third member of the trinity was a bill requiring impossibly complex risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses before new federal laws and rules could be enacted. Corporate lobbyists from virtually every polluting industry favored this bill, which like takings legislation would make it prohibitively expensive for federal agencies to enforce rules on the books. Both regulatory reform and takings eventually fell by the wayside in 1995.
But these were just the opening salvos. When Congress convened, Republican leaders quickly made it clear that they would use all the arrows in their legislative quiver to undo environmental safeguards: self-standing bills, rewrites of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, deep cuts in appropriations, and attachments to appropriations riders and omnibus spending bills. Conservation groups found themselves inundated.
ALASKA'S TURN
The three-member Republican Alaska delegation flexed its new muscle shamelessly. A team of federal and state biologists had recently warned that continued logging of the Tongass National Forest at current rates threatened the survival of nearly a dozen species. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska inserted language in an appropriations bill forbidding the Forest Service to take any action implementing the findings. Senator Murkowski floated a bill to turn over large sections of the Tongass National Forest to so-called "landless Natives" who had not qualified for timberland allotments under a 1971 law. He was forced to abandon the bill after it drew strong opposition from fishermen, Southeast Alaska communities, and a number of Alaska Natives, who had seen their hunting grounds and salmon streams ruined by logging.
Don Young, Alaska's only representative in the House, set up several task forces headed by his own hand-picked chairmen to bypass the existing subcommittee structure. He appointed Representative Richard
Pombo of California to chair a task force that would undertake a rewrite of the Endangered Species Act. Young wanted a bill that would put economic arguments against saving endangered species on an equal footing with ecological arguments in favor of saving them. Pombo, who represented a Central Valley district with numerous simmering endangered species conflicts, stacked his task force with western conservatives.
One of the worst fears of Northwest forest activists—that they might save the forests but lose the Endangered Species Act—seemed about to be realized.
STACKING THE DECK
In April 1995, Congress took its first shot at the ESA when it attached a rider to a Defense supplemental appropriations bill placing a temporary moratorium on new endangered species listings. That same month, Pombo's task force held field hearings in several states. The first three—in Louisiana, Texas, and North Carolina—featured speakers invited to air grievances against the act. In Louisiana, a shrimper complained about having to equip his boat with a turtle exclusion device to save endangered sea turtles. In Texas, a rancher protested the curtailment of pumping from the Edwards Aquifer to protect an endangered fish. In North Carolina, a landowner griped about the reintroduction of endangered red wolves. Task force members were wined and dined by the wealthy constituents they had invited to testify. Several disgusted Democrats on the panel boycotted the hearings.
On April 24, the task force held a hearing in Vancouver, Washington. The speakers' roster was stacked with critics of the act: a mill owner, a resident of a timber town, an aluminum worker, a rancher, a miner, and three irrigators. Representatives of fishing groups, who supported a strong Endangered Species Act, were added to the panel only after fishermen flooded Pombo's office with phone calls. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the two agencies charged with enforcing the act, were nowhere in sight.
But attempts to build a case for gutting the act backfired in the Northwest, where polls showed 60 percent of residents favored retaining the law. Environmentalists, tapping into a nationwide network, succeeded in exposing the hearing as a sham and turning some of the testimony to their advantage.
"Pushing species to the brink of extinction and beyond not only wastes future economic opportunities but helps destroy those industries we already have, such as the Pacific salmon industry," testified Glen Spain, regional director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "Without a strong Endangered Species Act, there will never be salmon recovery in the Northwest, and the approximately 85,000 jobs which the salmon resource could potentially generate in this region would be gone forever."
Stan Shaufler, a former sawmill owner, testified that he had come
to realize that the overcutting of old-growth forests had to stop. "The old-growth logs I milled represented centuries of growth," Shaufler said. "The logging of the national forests was a disgrace at the rates instituted and maintained by our expert forest managers."
Some environmentalists struck a conciliatory note, conceding that the act could do a better job of involving local people in developing conservation plans for threatened and endangered species.
Nevertheless, Pombo's committee went back to Washington and wrote a bill gutting the act. On the Senate side, Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican, unveiled a bill giving the secretary of interior unilateral authority to decide the fate of imperiled species. Gorton freely acknowledged that the bill was written by Washington, D.C., lawyers representing timber, mining, ranching, and utility interests.
RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE
Though Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had praised the Endangered Species Act as the nation's strongest and most important environmental law, his voice was largely absent from the debate for much of 1995. He tried to defuse opposition by publicizing the act's successes and by negotiating with private landowners to adopt voluntary habitat conservation plans.
By April, when President Clinton still had not dug in his heels against the Republican attack on the environment, national groups went public with their frustration, saying they now believed they could not count on the president to veto bills rolling back environmental protection. "I think the American people have to demonstrate this is their air, their water, their communities," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "And they have to demonstrate they are not going to let anybody—whether it is Bill Clinton, the U.S. House, or the U.S. Senate—mess with it." That same month, more than a dozen national groups launched a $2 million media campaign to alert voters to the GOP assault on the nation's environmental laws.
Chapter Thirty
Logging without Laws
As the 104th Congress and its "Contract with America" grabbed headlines in the spring of 1995, timber industry lobbyists huddled with congressional staffers on Capitol Hill to craft a bill that would open the national forests to virtually unrestricted logging for at least one more year. They decided to promote their bill as an effort to restore sick forests. With so much else going on, this "forest health" bill largely escaped scrutiny outside a small circle of lobbyists, western lawmakers, and committee staff members.
ANY TREE IN THE FOREST
The bill that finally emerged from a conference committee, attached to a massive budget-cutting measure, directed the agriculture secretary and the secretary of interior to immediately implement a two-year timber salvage program on national forests and BLM land. Its broad language, borrowed from the Forest Service's own regulations governing salvage logging, called for removing "disease- or insect-infested trees, dead, damaged, or down trees, or trees affected by fire or imminently susceptible to fire or insect attack," as well as "associated trees or trees lacking the characteristics of a healthy and viable ecosystem." The bottom line, as sponsors and industry lobbyists intended, was to give the agencies a blank check to cut any tree in the forest under the guise of "salvage."
The bill exempted all such sales from all administrative appeals and from the requirements of all applicable environmental laws. No legislated timber sale target was necessary; the Clinton administration, through its Western Forest Health Initiative, already had committed to selling 4.5 billion board feet of timber in salvage sales over the next two years.
This so-called "salvage rider" applied to all Forest Service and BLM lands in the nation, though it had particular relevance for ecologically stressed forests of the Intermountain West. However, it quickly became a Christmas tree for timber industry add-ons that had nothing to do with "forest health"—and that applied specifically to the spotted owl forests of western Oregon, western Washington, and northern California.
SNEAK ATTACK
House Republicans added a section that directed the Forest Service and BLM to promptly award all timber sales released by the 1989 Rider
from Hell, regardless of environmental consequences. A number of those sales had been put on hold or canceled because of their impact on owls, marbled murrelets, salmon, and other sensitive species. The new language required that these old sales be logged according to their original specifications and at the original price.
On the Senate side, Washington Republican Slade Gorton added language insulating all new sales offered under President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan from legal challenges. That language was never debated on the floor of either the House or the Senate.
Gorton described the provisions affecting westside forests differently to different audiences. In a speech on the Senate floor, he told colleagues its purpose was to release timber sales held up by "gridlock over the marbled murrelet"—roughly 300 million board feet of timber in all. A number of senators voted for it with that understanding.
But a careful reading revealed that the provision in fact said something quite different. It said the agencies must release all unawarded timber sales on federal lands subject to the 1989 rider—in other words, all unawarded timber sales in Oregon and Washington. The clever wording was worth millions of dollars to federal timber purchasers in the two states who had never given up on logging these sales from the bad old days.
Federal timber sale managers in the Northwest understood immediately that the rider threatened the integrity of the Northwest Forest Plan. On March 11, 1995, the head of the BLM timber sale program for western Oregon wrote a memo to BLM State Director Elaine Zielinski stating his dismay over the rider's implications.
"BLM would suffer a severe setback in the implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan," Lyndon Werner wrote. "We support the need to improve forest health and expedite the salvage of diseased, infested, or dead/dying timber; however, we are opposed to this amendment. . . . We believe (the sales) should occur in compliance with existing laws and land management plans. We plan to only put sales in appropriate locations, and analyze and mitigate the impacts. We are not going to sacrifice quality on the ground to meet sale targets. That would be irresponsible land stewardship."
The Forest Service's regional timber sale office in Portland quickly grasped the impacts as well. Timber sale planners sent off to Washington, D.C., a long list of environmentally damaging timber sales that would have to go forward if the language became law.
But if the agencies got it, Clinton's advisors apparently did not. Whether they failed to read the language carefully or chose to misinterpret it, they would soon regret the oversight.
Ironically, the timber industry was not clamoring for salvage timber. In May, the Boise National Forest auctioned the first Boise River salvage sales. To the agency's chagrin, some of the sales drew no bids in a market already glutted with salvage timber. Forest officials were forced to redesign the sales, lower the minimum bid, and reduce their
estimate of how much money the sales would produce for the federal treasury. The pattern soon would be repeated in other forests.
CLINTON'S FIRST VETO
The Budget Rescission Act of 1995 passed the House and Senate with the salvage rider intact and was sent to President Clinton's desk in early June. Among other add-ons, it contained money for California flood relief and aid to victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.
In a blitz organized by the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, environmentalists across the nation swamped the White House with more than 30,000 calls, faxes, and letters urging Clinton to veto the rider. More than 600 pieces of wood carrying the message "Veto Salvage Logging—Salvage Your Presidency" arrived at the White House. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today editorialized against the measure. Even groups not usually involved with forest issues, including the Native American Rights Fund and Physicians for Social Responsibility, weighed in against suspending the nation's environmental laws.
It worked. On June 7 Clinton, exercising his veto power for the first time in his presidency, vetoed the Rescissions Bill. In his veto statement, he specifically objected to "the very bad environmental provision .. . which says that no environmental laws will apply for the next three years to any cutting of so-called salvage timber in our forests, and we'll just have the taxpayers pay for whatever damage occurs to the environment."
Environmentalists lavished praise on the president for his decision. "President Clinton seems to have discovered a renewed affinity for environmental protection," the Headwaters Journal exulted in its summer 1995 issue. "If we want the President to follow through with more action, we need to let him know that we like what we hear and see."
ROUND TWO
But to the rider's supporters, Clinton's veto was merely round one. Even as environmentalists rejoiced, back-room negotiations between Congress and the administration over the salvage rider were underway. Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, who chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, engaged in political hardball, reportedly threatening to attach the rider to every appropriations bill—a move that would force Clinton to veto each bill or let the government shut down. At the same time, Hatfield promised the president that under the rider, his agencies still would have the latitude to follow environmental laws and regulations except for those suspending appeals and legal challenges.
On June 13, speaking to an audience of pro-timber activists, Hatfield predicted that the rider would become law. A day earlier, Representative Charles Taylor of North Carolina, sponsor of the House version, had promised them that "the timber salvage bill will be intact in the new rescission bill."
On June 28, as rumors of a deal in the making swirled on Capitol Hill, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont circulated a Dear Colleague letter asking pointedly why the proposed salvage rider was needed now "The reality is that the Forest Service cannot get bids on all the sales it has offered," Leahy wrote. He cited economic reports revealing that Oregon and Washington had in fact gained 4,000 forest products jobs in the previous two years, and new evidence that public forests in the West were healthier than private timberlands. "Now, when the data shows that the industry is doing well, the public forests are relatively healthy, timber supply appears sufficient, and jobs are on the rise, why should Congress suspend environmental laws?" he asked.
There was no answer. Instead, the next day the White House released a statement saying President Clinton had reached agreement with Congress on the budget-cutting bill. Clinton said he still did not support the salvage rider, but that the conference committee had agreed to language that preserved the Forest Service's ability to comply with its forest plans. "Furthermore," he said, "Chairman Hatfield insists that the timber salvage provisions provide complete discretion for the administration to implement these provisions according to our best judgment. I take Senator Hatfield at his word."
It was to prove a hollow promise.
On July 6, the day after the House voted on the budget bill, Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, got his first look at the rider. He denounced it in a scorching press release. "The salvage rider would allow logging along wild and scenic rivers and in sensitive riparian and roadless areas, with no restrictions based on slope or soil conditions," he warned. "Its definition of salvage is so broad that it opens the door to wholesale logging in the region's remaining old-growth forests and roadless areas."
DeFazio said he wasn't impressed by the administration's promise that federal agencies would follow the law. "The Clinton administration says `Trust us.' But I don't trust any federal agency with the kind of unlimited power granted by this salvage amendment."
Clinton's top environmental advisors, including Vice President Al Gore, Assistant Interior Secretary George Frampton, Assistant Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons, and Katie McGinty, now director of the Council on Environmental Quality, argued vehemently against the rider. They warned Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff, that it could sink his Northwest Forest Plan, on which the president had staked his environmental record.
McGinty, Frampton, and Lyons refused to divulge the precise content of their conversations with the president. But McGinty did say, "Congress had a gun to his head on that bill. When you're talking about Oklahoma City and the terrible tragedies in California and the emergency money that needed to get there, that's no way to have to put a choice to the president that either you attend to the emergencies or you sell out the fundamental environmental protection."
On July 27, Clinton signed the Budget Rescission Act into law—timber salvage rider and all. The final version of the rider was essentially unchanged from the version he had vetoed in June.
On July 28, leaders of the nation's major environmental groups gathered outside the White House for a "21-chainsaw salute" to draw attention to Clinton's retreat. "Actions speak louder than words," said an angry Kevin Kirchner of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. "And your action in signing the 'logging without laws' legislation yesterday speaks volumes to the American people about your lack of commitment to the environment and environmental protection in this country." Kirchner called on Clinton to issue an executive order instructing the Forest Service and other agencies to obey the nation's environmental laws despite the rider.
In one swift stroke, the rider took away every tool environmentalists had to stop environmentally destructive logging. It prohibited appeals of all salvage sales everywhere in the national forest system and all sales of healthy trees offered under the Northwest Forest Plan. It declared that all such sales would be "deemed to satisfy the requirements" of every federal environmental law and treaty. It overrode all existing federal court orders. And there was more to come.
SENATORIAL SCIENCE
The day Clinton signed the bill, before the ink was dry, its Republican sponsors—Senators Slade Gorton, Frank Murkowski, and Larry Craig and Representatives Charles Taylor, Pat Roberts, and Don Young—sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. The letter punctured any illusion that the administration might be able to have it both ways in Northwest forests.
The sponsors stressed that the rider was intended to apply to all unawarded timber sales in western Oregon and western Washington, not just sales delayed to protect the marbled murrelet. The only sales exempt, they said, would be those in which murrelets were "known to be nesting" when logging was scheduled. Even then, eggshells or other physical evidence of nesting would have to be produced. This requirement flew in the face of a protocol developed by biologists who had studied the murrelet's nesting behavior. Because murrelets don't actually build nests, but lay their eggs in mossy depressions of tree limbs that are difficult to locate, biologists developed a set of standards that used sightings of the birds in or near old-growth stands to determine whether they were likely nesting nearby.
That Republican lawmakers would substitute their judgment for that of the experts wasn't as bizarre as it appeared. The unawarded murrelet sales in the coastal forests of the Siskiyou, Siuslaw, Olympic, and Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forests contained some of the most valuable mature and old-growth timber west of the Cascades. From the timber industry's viewpoint, logging the murrelet sales was akin to taking part in the last buffalo hunt.
From a biologist's perspective, the 4,600 acres of coastal old growth at stake represented a critical chunk of all murrelet habitat remaining in Oregon, Washington, and California. Two-thirds of the acreage at risk was on Oregon's Siuslaw National Forest. Logging those 3,000 acres would destroy nearly a quarter of all murrelet habitat remaining on the forest, as Supervisor Jim Furnish warned in a letter to his bosses three days before Clinton signed the rider into law.
The rider's sponsors didn't limit their attention to birds. In the summer of 1995, the National Marine Fisheries Service was considering a petition to protect several sharply declining runs of coastal coho salmon under the Endangered Species Act. In their letter to Babbitt and Glickman, the sponsors asserted that timber sales in areas critical to coho salmon would fall under the rider's provisions. They warned that "the agencies may not in any way delay the award, release, or completion" of timber sales even if coho were listed, and even if NMFS concluded that sales posed a high risk to the fish.
The timber industry immediately went to court to enforce this broad interpretation of the rider. It filed its lawsuit in the federal district court for western Oregon, in Eugene, where U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan presided. It was a shrewd move. Hogan soon made it clear that he agreed with the industry's interpretation in virtually every respect.
STREET GANG ASSAULT
On August 1, 1995, President Clinton directed his department heads to begin implementing the timber rider "in an environmentally sound manner." On August 9, the administration released a detailed memorandum to field managers, explaining how they could do that within existing laws.
The next day, at a Senate subcommittee hearing, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho went on the attack. He charged that the memo completely undermined Congress' intent, which was to give federal agencies unfettered discretion to sell salvage timber sales without the impediments of environmental laws. "It's a formula for gridlock," Craig told 'Assistant Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons. "I suggest you toss it in the wastebasket."
"If we have to cut off your funds, we'll cut off your funds," Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska chimed in. "Gentlemen, we're going to get your attention."
Lyons, caught squarely between his principles and administration politics, defended the memo. But he added that he remained committed to producing 4.5 billion board feet of salvage timber from national forests during the life of the rider.
It wasn't enough to placate the timber industry. On September 14, industry lawyers asked Hogan to hold Lyons and Tom Tuchmann, the administration's forest plan pointman, in contempt of court for failing to release timber in forests used by the marbled murrelet. Hogan denied the motion.
On September 19, the full Senate, led by Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, turned up the heat when it adopted an amendment to an appropriations bill removing the Forest Service from Lyons's jurisdiction. "I consider it to be just a modest shot across the bow," Stevens said. "We want the laws that Congress passes to be observed."
The amendment was later withdrawn. But Kevin Kirchner of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, a Capitol Hill veteran, called what happened to Lyons on the Senate floor "the most vicious thing I've ever seen in 14 years. The Senate is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world, but this looked like a street gang assault."
A COOPERATIVE JUDGE
On September 7, 1995, Judge Hogan issued the first in a series of rulings siding with the timber industry when he dismissed challenges to the Warner Creek salvage sale in an area burned by arsonists four years earlier. Hogan said the sale clearly fell under the provisions of the Rescission Act and must go forward. The next day, a blockade went up on the logging road above Oakridge, Oregon. A group of Earth First! activists vowed to stay as long as necessary. It was the opening volley in what would become an impassioned return to direct action in the woods.
Hogan followed up with a September 13 ruling that the rider did indeed apply to all unawarded timber sales in Oregon and Washington. He ordered the government to release an additional 250 million board of feet of timber. That day Mick Garvin, a 37-year-old contract forest worker, locked himself to a metal fire door buried in the logging road that led to the Warner Creek sale.
Hogan's decision jolted forest activists out of their numbed state. They faced the prospect of losing everything they had fought for. But they had few weapons to fight the logging. These odious sales resurrected from the past could not be challenged in court under the usual environmental laws. Nevertheless, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund took up the challenge and filed a blizzard of lawsuits challenging the timber industry's interpretation.
On October 2, Tim Ream and Shannon Wilson set up tents on the steps of the federal courthouse in Eugene and began a liquids-only fast to protest the measure Northwest environmentalists were now calling "logging without laws."
"Our remaining forests are threatened by a back-room congressional trick to sell precious public assets at fire sale prices," Ream, a 33-yearold former Environmental Protection Agency employee, told the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper eight days into the fast. He called for public hearings on logging of old-growth forests and a separate vote on the measure in Congress so the issue could be debated in the open, for all to see.
Sleeping in tents, and braving rain, cold, catcalls, and traffic noise, Ream and Wilson spent their days explaining to anyone who asked the
purpose of their fast. Wilson dropped out after losing 20 pounds in 18 days. Ream remained. His quiet presence tugged at the conscience of the community, and forced other environmentalists to contemplate what they were willing to do to right this wrong.
REPACKAGING THE FOREST
Beyond the owl region, in forests east of the Cascades and across the nation, the Forest Service wasted no time ratcheting up timber sales under the rider's broad definition of "salvage." In northeastern Washington, the Okanogan National Forest offered two large salvage sales that required entering Washington's largest unprotected roadless area, a region providing critical habitat for an imperiled population of rare forest-dwelling lynx. In eastern Oregon, the heavily logged and roaded Malheur National Forest offered a series of sales in roadless areas that provided spawning habitat for wild salmon and steelhead and essential cover for Rocky Mountain elk.
In the Northern Rockies, forest managers saw the opportunity to enter large roadless areas that had been closed to logging because of appeals, lawsuits, and restrictions in forest plans. In Idaho, old sales were revived in areas where logging threatened to wipe out salmon runs and increase flooding. In New Mexico, the Gila National Forest offered a fire salvage sale in a roadless forest occupied by the threatened Mexican spotted owl—a forest that ignited the same day the salvage logging rider was signed into law. Arson was suspected.
In the Great Lakes region and in forests of the Southeastern Coastal Plan, the Forest Service offered salvage sales of healthy trees in rare forest ecosystems touched only lightly by windstorms. One huge sale on the Conecuh National Forest, successfully challenged by Alabama environmentalists, proposed to log healthy stands of rare longleaf pine. Another sale, in the Chippewa National Forest of Minnesota, cut remnant white pine, a species nearly eliminated from the Great Lakes by timber barons in the 19th century.
In central Idaho, the Boise and Payette National Forests auctioned the Thunderbolt sale, one of the most controversial sales in the history of the Forest Service. Thunderbolt, which was in the works before the salvage rider took effect, called for logging in the watershed of the South Fork of the Salmon River, the most productive salmon spawning habitat in Idaho. After reviewing the plan, the National Marine Fisheries Service sent up a red flag, warning that Thunderbolt could jeopardize endangered Snake River chinook salmon.
But throughout most of 1995, Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas put heavy pressure on the fisheries service not to issue a formal jeopardy opinion on Thunderbolt. NMFS Director Rollie Schmitten finally backed off, and the sale was auctioned to Boise Cascade.
Nothing slowed the rush to salvage. Late fall rainstorms in central Idaho triggered massive landslides on unstable mountainsides even as new roads and timber sales were being laid out under the salvage rider.
On the Clearwater National Forest, 28 roads were closed after heavy rains triggered more than 200 slides. On the Boise National Forest, a massive landslide downstream from an area where salvage logging was underway blew out a logging road and triggered a huge mudslide that sent roiling brown water into downtown Boise 55 miles away.
Jennifer Ferenstein of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies in Missoula, Montana, saw a disturbing new attitude among Forest Service officials as they realized that under the rider they were under no obligation to follow environmental laws. "On some forests, they're saying, 'We're going to do what we want.' They're realizing there's not much we can do anyway, that the pubic process has no power. The people who want to sell timber can ride roughshod over everyone else."
"In the debate over 'forest health,' biological truth has been overwhelmed by political manipulation," wrote Sara Folger of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. "The greatest timber propaganda blitz ever perpetrated on the American public is now underway."
OPTION 9 REVISITED
As the furor over the rider accelerated, the Forest Service and BLM auctioned the first big old-growth sales under Option 9. The administration was eager to move these sales to market so it could blunt accusations from impatient congressional critics.
But when Jeff Dose, a fisheries biologist on the Umpqua National Forest, reviewed five sales his own forest was preparing to auction, he tried to put on the brakes. The sales, in the Oregon Cascades, had been prepared without involvement by fish biologists. Taken together, they called for removing 630 acres of old-growth forest surrounding the headwaters of the North Fork of the Umpqua River, a premier fly-fishing river known throughout the West for its sea-run cutthroat trout. Cutthroat trout numbers had dwindled from tens of thousands in the 1950s to less than 100 in the 1990s. The National Marine Fisheries Service was considering a petition to protect the trout under the Endangered Species Act.
Dose warned in writing that the cumulative impact of the five sales would be devastating and might violate the aquatic conservation strategy in Option 9. The upper reaches of the North Umpqua had been logged so heavily that further logging and road-building on the scale the agency was proposing could deal the trout a lethal blow, Dose said. His advice was ignored; the sales were auctioned.
On September 1, 1995, the Oregon Natural Resources Council and Umpqua Watersheds, a Roseburg group, sued to stop the North Umpqua sales. They argued that the Forest Service had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by offering the sales against the advice of its own biologist. The lawsuit was a deliberate test of the salvage rider. Lawyers wanted to find out whether sales offered under Option 9 would be held to any standard at all. If not, said Patti Goldman of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, "then there are no
environmental standards for any logging in the forests of the Pacific Northwest."
Judge Hogan wasn't long in delivering an opinion: On December 5 he ruled, in effect, that any sale the federal agencies called an Option 9 sale was covered by the rider and was exempt from legal challenge. President Clinton's forest plan was beginning to unravel in full public view.
On October 25 a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Hogan's ruling requiring the release of all unawarded sales in Oregon and Washington. The administration had run out of legal remedies. "We fought this to the bitter end and this is the bitter end," said Peter Coppelman of the U.S. Department of Justice. "The damage will be done."
By November, the Clinton Justice Department had taken control of the westside timber sale process. In weekly conference calls to Portland from Washington, D.C., Justice Department attorneys directed the Forest Service and BLM to search their pantries for every sale that might fall under the rider under the court's broad interpretation.
WAR FROM PEACE
As late as October 1995, Katie McGinty, Clinton's lead advisor on environmental issues, still maintained that the administration could comply with the rider without compromising the environment. But McGinty admitted, "It's very difficult. Congress's objective is simply to cut timber, to cut it as quickly as possible and as much as possible. It's very hard for us to maintain our commitment to cutting timber, for example, but not, for example, killing fish."
Tom Tuchmann, the man in charge of implementing the Northwest Forest Plan from Portland, insisted the rider would have minimal impact. "What we're talking about is 600 million board feet of the last of the old sales," he said. "It's less than 1 percent of all late-successional and old-growth habitat. I don't think this legislation has to tear the heart and soul out of the forest plan."
"I won't argue the ecological point, but politically he's got his head stuck in the sand," said Adam Berger of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. "These sales have a long history. Environmentalists have worked for years to stop them. The administration has miscalculated their political significance."
The irony, Berger said, was that the rider might undo the president's hard-won forest plan. "We had a resolution to the timber debate in the Northwest," he said. "It didn't mean everyone was happy and it didn't mean there weren't still issues, but it did signal an end to the great debate. Now this rider has reopened the whole conflict. Congress has snatched civil war from the jaws of peace."
