A 'miracle' in the forest.

Byline: Scott Maben The Register-Guard

DORENA - When Janine Nilsen escorted Ray Jones into her favorite grove of ancient fir and cedar trees east of Cottage Grove, she was prepared to lay out all her reasons his logging company should forget about the spot.

But Roseburg Forest Products officials had already made up their minds. Jones told her the company would drop the 9-acre area from its logging plans.

Nilsen burst into tears.

"Emotion just washed over me," she said, recalling the scene from January. "I still get chills when I talk about it. I told him I thought it was a miracle, and I'd been praying for a miracle."

Nilsen and a group of Cottage Grove residents spent the past three years trying to block the Forest Service from allowing loggers to fell trees as old as 250 years in the Brice Creek watershed in the Umpqua National Forest.

They went as far as to erect a summer tree sit in the stand of old growth, taking a cue from environmental activists who scale trees in other national forest hot spots.

In the end, rancor gave way to civility. Both sides decided to talk and listen to each other, and they found something that's rare in the perennial debate over management of public forests: a compromise.

"It's just a real special place to them," Jones said earlier this week on a return visit to the cool, quiet stand of trees. "After we understood that, we had a choice to make: Do we move ahead with the sale as planned, or do we do something different?"

"Frankly, the thing that really impressed me was Janine's passion around this particular place," he said.

Nilsen added, "We thought it was about time for both sides to come together and have a discussion instead of yelling and screaming at each other."

Roseburg Forest Products earlier had agreed to several revisions to the mix of timber it planned to log in what the Forest Service named the Blodgett sale. The agency had offered the sale to the company in exchange for another sale that the Forest Service canceled eight years ago in the Coast Range to protect habitat for the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird.

But even with the changes, some folks were unhappy with the amount of older timber marked to be cut.

"No one was listening to us," said Nilsen, owner of the Avalon equestrian center outside Cottage Grove. "That's why we decided to have a tree sit. We had gone to the Forest Service, to politicians. This was a last-ditch effort to save this area."

Company agrees to a swap

She and several other Cottage Grove residents took their concerns directly to Roseburg Forest Products President Allyn Ford, who has been the target of spirited anti-logging protests in recent years.

Ford and Jones, the company's vice president of resources, talked it over and agreed to back off of the most contentious piece of the 1.75-million-board-foot sale. The company traded the nine-acre unit for a dense stand of younger trees in the Christy Basin of the Willamette National Forest.

The exchange represents about a fifth of the total volume in the Blodgett sale, Jones said, and gives the company smaller, less profitable logs.

"Although pulling this unit out of the sale had a financial impact to the company, we felt it was the right thing to do," he said. "Our company doesn't feel like we have to have all old growth trees to make this sale work for us."

About two-thirds of the total timber volume will be thinning of stands 40 to 120 years old, he said. The rest will be light to heavy harvests in stands older than that.

It's a solution that's reasonable, Jones said, and that grew out of working with local residents who aren't affiliated with any organization but who share a love for the remnants of old growth in the forest.

"We were trying to listen to the most vocal stakeholders - in this case, Janine and her group," he said. "But that won't make everyone happy. I don't think we can make everyone happy."

Anti-logging group backs deal

Some environmental interests still may object to the logging, scheduled to begin next summer, Jones said. But a Eugene-based group that opposes most old-growth logging in Northwest forests approves of the compromise.

"I think Blodgett is sort of a special case," said James Johnston, executive director of Cascadia Wildlands Project.

The 6-year-old organization is tracking 116 timber sales on 13 national forests in the region, Johnston said.

"What I've tried to do with this sale is be responsive to what the priority of the community is," he said.

"If this makes members of the Cottage Grove area happy, then our organization will be happy."

Johnston said he still fundamentally opposes logging of older forests, and Jones said he continues to believe that older forests outside of special reserves can benefit from selective harvests.

But the two have found common ground to walk in the area's national forests at a time when the animosity over public lands stewardship seems to be growing.

"I'm not uncomfortable with conflict. I think the clash of values in a democratic society is healthy," Johnston said.

"I do think the controversy that's marked management of federal forests in Oregon has become unhealthy and destructive."

Jones acknowledged that the older the tree, the more controversial a timber sale becomes. But he said his company is committed to working with environmentalists and local residents to find better solutions - even if that's not a popular approach among timber interests.

"We've taken some criticism from some industry peers for modifying this sale," Jones said. "But at the end of the day we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good with who we are. And I am and Allyn is."

Deal is no model, advocate says

Ross Mickey, Western Oregon manager for the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said the Blodgett compromise is a fine solution for Roseburg Forest Products to pursue. It's not, however, a model for resolving ongoing protests over timber sales, he said.

"Individual timber companies can use this if they want to," he said. "Timber purchasers are always willing to sit down and talk to reasonable people."

But anyone who tries to block legitimate logging contracts issued by the Forest Service should be stopped from illegal acts, he said.

Mickey also said it would be wrong to withdraw anymore forest lands from logging, arguing that the 10-year-old Northwest Forest Plan already severely restricts where logging is allowed. That includes the patch of old growth abandoned on the Blodgett sale, he said.

"Just because Roseburg is walking away from it, that does not mean the Forest Service can't put it in another sale," he said.

That's true, Cottage Grove District Ranger Deb Schmidt said, but "we have no plans to do that right now."

The district instead is focused on designing thinning operations that will make stands more resilient when forest fires burn through, Schmidt said.

Doug Heiken, Western Oregon field representative for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, an environmental group, said there's room for compromise over controversial timber sales.

"Cutting of any mature or old growth tree gives us heartburn," Heiken said.

"But in the trenches of this war, there are situations where you sometimes need to do a tactical retreat or accept that some older trees might be cut, but that you are saving many others."

CAPTION(S):

Janine Nilsen, who led the fight to save a 9-acre stand of old-growth trees, and Roseburg Forest Products Vice President Ray Jones stand in the tract of trees that the company agreed to exclude from a timber purchase.