The immense Douglas-firs on Grayback Mountain began falling in early September of 1995. All summer, forest activists from nearby southwestern Oregon communities had held prayer vigils on the mountain, hoping to win these forests a reprieve. On September 9, as loggers cut the first openings in the unbroken forest canopy, locked gates and armed guards kept protesters at a distance.
High in the Oregon Cascades, on a logging road overlooking a valley carved by clearcuts, a small band of forest defenders dug in on that same September week to block the logging of blackened timber in an old-growth forest torched four years earlier by arsonists.
In early October, 33-year-old Tim Ream began a 75-day fast outside the federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, to draw attention to a law passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton that required the logging of ancient forests regardless of the consequences for fish and wildlife, soils and streams.
Over the next nine months, across the Pacific Northwest, these forests continued to fall. But they did not fall unnoticed. Each forest doomed to destruction had a name, and each name became a kind of lament: Sugarloaf. Roman Dunn. Warner Creek. Rocky. Yellow Creek. Honey-tree. Hoxie Griffin. Caracao Cat. First. Last. Tobe West. Enola Hill.
On the other side of the Cascades, in the pine and mixed-conifer forests of eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, and western Montana, the Forest Service prepared to push roads into some of the last large unprotected wilderness areas in the Intermountain West under the guise of restoring the forests to health.
Environmentalists accustomed to working through the system and activists on the radical fringe of the forest preservation movement united to fight the leveling of these forests. They raffled, trespassed on logging roads, wrote letters to Congress and the White House, and sent their lawyers to argue fruitlessly in federal court that these trees, these mountainsides, these watersheds should not be logged.
In February of 1996, balmy temperatures melted the mountain snowpack in the Cascade Mountains and a storm front dropped curtains of rain on the Pacific Northwest, filling rivers and reservoirs to overflowing and unleashing the most devastating floods since 1964. Rain pummeled the clearcut mountainsides and saturated the logging roads of the high country, setting off landslides and sending torrents downstream to rip away bridges and houses and roads. Still the logging continued.
Tree Huggers
Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign
Author's Prologue
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This was not the way it was supposed to be.
For a quarter-century, a scattered tribe of forest defenders battled the timber industry and the political establishment to save remnants of the Pacific Northwest's virgin forests. They used law, science, and a growing public awareness of the ecological value of these forests to make the case for protection. In 1993, they won a fragile, incomplete victory. In 1995, Congress and the Clinton administration took that victory away.
The passionate protests that flared across the region in the fall, winter, and spring of 1995-96 marked a tragic setback, and a critical turning point, in the Northwest ancient forest campaign.
The forests at stake in this campaign hold within them the complex wisdom of many thousands of years of evolution. They are fragments of the great conifer forest that once cloaked the mountain ranges at the western edge of North America, from Southeast Alaska to Monterey Bay and inland to the Continental Divide.
The green cloak, now tattered nearly beyond repair after a century of forest liquidation, is a weave of many conifer species: Sitka spruce in the narrow band of coastal rainforest stretching north to Alaska; Douglas-fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock in the coastal mountains and on the western slopes of the Cascades; incense cedar, sugar pine, and rare Brewer's spruce in the Siskiyous; ponderosa pine and western larch in the open forests east of the Cascades. All grow larger in the Pacific Northwest than anywhere else on Earth; some grow only in this region of wet winters and dry summers. The conifer forest with its intricate web of plant and animal life evolved over millennia, shaped by climate and altitude, latitude and terrain, wind and fire—natural forces unique to a time and a place on this planet that we will not see again.
The moral argument for saving some of this natural legacy is powerful. But from the beginning, the odds against success were high. The great forests of the Pacific slope held untapped wealth for an expanding young nation. Accessible forests along the lower reaches of coastal rivers began falling in the mid-19th century. Over a century, logging progressed steadily into the foothills and climbed steep slopes into the headwaters where salmon spawned.
The American conservation movement, born in the waning years of the 19th century, heightened awareness of the vast western wilderness and won early protection for such treasures as Mount Rainier, an alpine paradise of glaciers and meadows in the Washington Cascades, and Oregon's Crater Lake, a blue jewel within the caldera of ancient Mount Mazama.
In 1892 John Muir, the Scottish-born patron saint of wilderness, co-founded the Sierra Club to create a broader constituency for preserving wild places. The Sierra Club drew affluent hikers and mountaineers who valued wilderness for its recreational and esthetic qualities. Over a century Congress conferred permanent protection on many scenic gems of the public domain by including them in the national park system.
In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt established the national forest system to protect some of this forested domain from the lumberman's ax. By then, loggers had leveled virgin forests on the Olympic Peninsula and on the islands of Puget Sound, along the Lower Columbia River, in the vast Douglas-fir trove of Oregon's Coos Bay watershed, and in the misty coastal redwood region along the northern California coast.
Through the efforts of visionary foresters Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall, in the 1930s the Forest Service designated some of its remote backcountry as primitive areas. But because these areas had no statutory protection, they were soon opened to logging, one pristine watershed after another. In 1935, Marshall and Leopold founded the Wilderness Society to work for wilderness preservation on federal lands. In 1938, over vehement opposition from timber companies, Congress carved Olympic National Park out of a shrinking national forest reserve. The park was the first in the Pacific Northwest to remove large swaths of commercial forests from timber production.
Howard Zahniser, a longtime conservationist and former employee of the federal government's National Biological Survey, became executive secretary of the Wilderness Society in 1945. He formed a powerful alliance with David Brower, the legendary executive director of the Sierra Club, to work for wilderness preservation and fight dams on western rivers.
In 1964, when Congress passed the Wilderness Act, it created a framework for conferring permanent protection on wild forests. Yet most of the 9.1 million acres that won instant protection under the act was calendar-art wilderness: snow-capped mountain peaks and alpine meadows, not land forested with commercially valuable timber. In the late 1960s, when the modern forest preservation campaign was born, the last wild forest strongholds were going fast.
The wilderness campaigns of the 1970s and early 1980s, led by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, introduced new people to these wild forests. But the 1984 bills left many millions of acres unprotected. After 1984, when the wilderness wars had played out, grassroots activists committed to saving unprotected wildlands were left to fight on alone during years of accelerated logging. By the late 1980s, a century after industrial logging commenced in the Northwest, no more than 15 percent of the original forest canopy remained; much of that survived as islands surrounded by logged-over land.
This book tells a story rooted in Oregon, where the stakes were high as the new era of forest activism dawned. Oregon was the nation's top timber-producing state. Virtually all of the state's public and private forest lands were scheduled to be logged. The political power of the timber industry went largely unchallenged. Though Oregon had a reputation as an environmentally progressive state, there was a strange disconnect between that image and the reality of its scarred mountainsides and ruined streams. The timber industry was to Oregon as coal was to West Virginia.
Thick-skinned and determined adversaries were required to challenge the state's political and economic establishment. Oregon's young forest activists were desperate and foolhardy enough to embrace the challenge. With forest and wildlife research centered at Oregon State University in Corvallis, and environmental activism concentrated 40 miles to the south on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, the Corvallis–Eugene axis became a conduit for a powerful information exchange between scientists and activists.
Environmentalists used the results of scientific research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s to argue in the courts, in Congress, and in the news media that the ancient forests must be saved for their wildlife and salmon, for the pure drinking water that flowed from their headwater streams, for their trees that anchored soil and streambanks, for their irreplaceable genetic legacy.
Over nearly two decades, activists in Oregon, Washington, and California worked separately on their separate campaigns. That changed in 1989. The northern spotted owl, which ranged across the forests of all three states, brought these natural allies together. The wild salmon of the Columbia River Basin knitted together the fate of forests east and west of the Cascades. The marbled murrelet, a diminutive seabird that nested in coastal old growth, linked the Northwest with British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. (These campaigns are touched upon only lightly here. Each deserves its own book.)
In the early 1990s, national conservation groups and foundations joined the grassroots forest protection campaign, contributing money and access. The success of the campaign was remarkable. Before long, a great many people far from the Pacific Northwest knew the story of the ancient forests.
As the destruction of tropical rainforests became a planetary issue, and as timber companies searched the globe for untapped forests, the campaign to protect native forests accelerated in the radiata pine forests of Chile and the hardwood forests of Malaysia and the boreal forests of the Russian Far East. The battle for the ancient forests of the Northwest helped to inspire and mobilize similar efforts around the globe. In 1993, when Bill Clinton became president, he promised to resolve the bitter impasse over forest management in a way that would follow where science led and comply with the nation's environmental laws. It seemed possible that the United States might become the only industrialized nation to preserve a significant remnant of its virgin forests for future generations.
What happened next—the betrayal of that promise, the fracturing of the forest preservation movement over tactics and philosophy, the environmental backlash unleashed by the Republican-led 104th Congress on behalf of its corporate constituents, the passage of a law that ordered logging to proceed in the most vital forest sanctuaries, the anguish and anger that drove forest activists back to protest and direct action in the woods—is a tale of tenuous victory and crushing defeat.
It is the saga of fiercely independent activists who suddenly found themselves playing in the big leagues, of the painful adjustments they had to endure and the hard political lessons they learned on the way to maturity.
And it is much more.
The ancient forest campaign demonstrates the transitory nature of political victory in a democratic system. It shows both the power and the limitations of science in resolving contentious issues of public policy. It proves how difficult it is to change the entrenched culture of a captive agency. It reveals, once again, the corrupting influence of political power.
With all of that, the ancient forest campaign remains an American success story. Its sustaining vision has ushered in a change in public consciousness about the value of forests. It has promoted a new ecological awareness. And it has slowed, if not entirely stopped, the destruction of an irreplaceable national legacy: forests older than the United States of America, older than the history of European settlement in the New World.
Preface and Acknowledgments
I grew up in the heart of timber country: Lane County, Oregon. My grandfather, George Monteith, logged the giants of Grays Harbor County, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. Trees formed the contours of my childhood. But I did not begin to learn the forest until I began to explore my world as a woman. And I did not begin to understand the politics of timber until I began to write about the conflict surrounding the fate of the Northwest's old-growth forests as a journalist, in 1989.
In his book The Klamath Knot, David Rains Wallace equates the experience of being in an evergreen forest with the long life stage known as maturity: "There are no horizons in the forest. Beginnings and endings seem far away among the trees, and one feels caught in the fabric of life." Ancient forests, and the story of the campaign to save them, have become woven into the fabric of my life these past seven years.
A word about the title of this book: "Tree huggers" is a term often hurled at forest activists as a dismissive epithet. However, the term has quite different connotations in other cultures. Indian environmental activist Sunderlal Bahaguna, a follower of Gandhi and a spiritual leader, spends his days trekking through the Himalayas, speaking with villagers and schoolchildren and stopping to hug scrawny oaks from which limbs have been lopped to provide scarce firewood. He is the driving force behind a grassroots movement called Chipko—Hindi for "to embrace, or hug"—that hopes to halt deforestation in the Himalayas. In the Pacific Northwest, grassroots activists have wrapped metaphorical arms around ancient forests—the arms of passion, of law, of political persuasion, and of a growing ecological awareness.
The job of covering the most significant environmental conflict of the late 20th century fortunately fell to a cadre of dedicated local, regional, and national journalists who knew they were recording conservation history in the making. I am indebted to my colleagues on the beat who contributed to the common pool of information.
I am grateful to scores of scientists, environmental activists, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management employees, and others who took time to show me the forest. I regret that I could not mention each one by name in this book and that so many stories of courage and dedication had to go untold.
Kathie Durbin June 1996
