Election dominated by big issues worries environmentalists, industry.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

Since Oregonians last voted for president, the state has endured the West's hardest fought Water Wars, one of the nation's worst salmon die-offs and the most ravaging wildfire in its recorded history.

And in the wake of the 2001-02 Klamath Basin water crisis and the Biscuit Fire of 2002, President Bush's water, salmon and forest policies have drawn praise from resource-using industries, and scorn from environmentalists and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

Although the Pacific Northwest's natural-resource policies are driven by the White House, Oregon voters find themselves judging Bush and Kerry largely by the same measurements used by the rest of the country: Iraq, terrorism and the economy.

"This is what you call a big-issues election," Portland-based Republican pollster Bob Moore said. "You're worried about staying alive and having enough to eat. Whether the salmon survive doesn't mean as much to you."

Even so, groups in conflict over how far the government should go in conserving natural resources have spent endless weeks and millions of dollars trying to inform voters how their presidential choice could affect the future of Oregon's forests, watersheds, salmon and jobs that rely on agriculture and timber production, recreation and commercial fishing.

But leaders from the timber and agribusiness industries and environmental groups agree that the issues dividing them aren't the biggest concerns for most Oregonians.

"Everyone's focus is on terror. It's front and center on our newscasts every single day, and it's important for us to have that be a large part of our focus," said Southern Oregon timber executive Steve Swanson, the chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 Oregon natural resources committee. "But it's nice to know the president and the administration have been able to continue to do the work that needs to be done, including working on the environment with the Healthy Forest Restoration Act."

Swanson is president of the Swanson Group, a forest-products company headquartered in Glendale. Swanson and his company have given more than $92,000 in campaign contributions to the GOP and President Bush, according to Common Cause. The national campaign-finance watchdog group issued a report this year detailing contributions of more than $670,000 from 14 Oregon timber companies to President Bush and the Republican Party since 2000.

Environmental groups have been just as caught up in the presidential election.

"He's the worst environmental president in the history of this nation, as far as I can tell," said Doug Heiken, the Western Oregon field representative for the Oregon Natural Resources Council. "He only wants to represent those interests that want to destroy nature."

Nationally, the League of Conservation Voters is spending $6 million on its "Focus on the Five" campaign to mobilize pro-Kerry voters in the battleground states of Oregon, New Mexico, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group, which has given Bush an "F" grade, has awarded a lifetime rating of 92 percent to Kerry for his Senate voting record on environmental issues.

With a goal of reaching 120,000 Oregon doors in the last two weeks of the election, the campaign is busing volunteers to Portland from San Francisco next weekend to canvass swing-voting Portland-area suburbs and Salem neighborhoods.

With the candidates' views on the top-tier issues such as Iraq and taxes already widely known, a fresh look at how Bush and Kerry approach environmental policy could help nudge uncommitted voters off the fence, said Matt Blevins, who until recently was the league's state campaign director.

"The environment is something independent voters by and large value and want an environmental champion on," Blevins said. "So it is an issue you can really move voters who are undecided."

Many of the issues cited by the league extend beyond Oregon: clean air and water, toxic waste cleanup, energy policy and climate change. But some of the campaign's most contentious natural-resource conflicts are rooted in Oregon.

The half-million-acre Biscuit Fire in Southwest Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest in 2002 provided the backdrop for Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative. It led to both executive-branch forest policies and passage by Congress of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which Bush championed and signed into law last year.

The act was meant to address years of fire suppression on public forests, which have allowed brush and thick stands of trees to grow in the forest understory - resulting in super-hot fires that overtake otherwise fire-resistant trees and communities that have expanded into forested areas.

Kerry and conservationists have criticized the act for limiting legal challenges against thinning projects, for underemphasizing fire prevention near communities and for allowing what they see as excessive cutting of healthy, large trees.

"It says they can take shortcuts when planning timber sales in certain areas," said Heiken, the Eugene environmentalist. "They really want to make it easier to get the big trees out of the woods and this makes it easier to do that."

Swanson, the Southern Oregon timber-company president, disagreed, saying environmentalists and Kerry can't be sincere about their support for fire-preventing forest thinning if they oppose the Healthy Forests legislation.

"It's hypocritical, the way they act," Swanson said. "They say they want to protect wildlife, air quality, water quality, but they want to throw roadblocks up in front of the way we want to achieve those same goals."

Swanson called the Healthy Forest Restoration Act a good first step in restoring balance to the management of the Northwest's public lands. He said that while forest thinning will allow the removal of millable timber as well as commercially worthless underbrush, the projects are a far cry from clear-cut logging and will leave plenty of trees standing.

Bush also has exercised his executive branch authority to change rules and policies through his "Healthy Forests" initiative to increase and speed up logging as part of an effort to prevent forest fires and disease. Among other things, it allows thinning and salvage logging to go ahead without being held up by what the president decried as "endless litigation." And it allows for increased timber removal through more generous exemptions to existing logging restrictions.

As a result, environmentalists say they've been denied the appeals process to put the brakes on what they see as the illegal logging of more than 300 million board feet from the Siskiyou National Forest. Citing the risk of forest fires, the administration says the logging is allowable under "forest health emergency" and "economic emergency" exemptions in otherwise protected roadless areas and old growth reserves.

The Bush administration's proposal to do away with a road-building ban on 58.5 million acres of federal forests is another point of contention. Kerry supports the protections imposed by President Clinton, saying the public supports the moratorium.

Bush proposed removing the protections in July, pending public hearings and the recommendations of governors to reinstate a road-building ban on some or all of the areas within their states.

Hal Falwasser, dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, said the Healthy Forest and Roadless Rule policy changes under Bush won't "change fundamental forest policies with regard to what federal forests are managed for."

Falwasser said the Healthy Forests legislation came out with specific language to protect the larger trees from cutting, while the Roadless Rule change "will not end up with any difference on the ground" because the moratorium applied to areas that had been previously left alone due to steep terrain that made such development difficult.

Falwasser said he thought the heat of the presidential campaign has unfortunately politicized the way Bush's forest policy would help combat the threat of fire on the West's overgrown forests.

Beyond forest policy, the two candidates are sharply divided on watersheds, dams and salmon protection.

Bush's salmon policy last week prompted 102 Democrats and Republicans in Congress to write the president in protest. The letter criticized his plan, which flatly stated that dams would not be considered for removal, but would be considered "part of the environmental baseline," and treated as permanent parts of the natural habitat.

The president also has proposed to count hatchery fish, along with wild salmon and steelhead, in determining whether species are imperiled - a move that could lead to the removal of several runs of salmon from the endangered species list.

Two years ago, the Klamath Basin was the site of one of the biggest flash-points in the Northwest's struggle over the future of its pre-eminent natural icons. Between 60,000 and 80,000 salmon were killed in the massive 2002 Klamath River die-off. California state biologists blamed the phenomenon on low in-stream water flows following the Bush administration's decision to divert water upriver in Oregon to irrigate farms.

Oregon agribusiness and pesticide lobbyist Paulette Pyle said Bush's aid to Klamath Basin farmers won't be forgotten among rural Oregonians, who see the president as a champion for their way of life.

"I know of no administration that would have gone to the ground and taken the time to meet with and understand the farmers in the Klamath Basin like the Bush administration did," said Pyle, statewide volunteer director for the Bush campaign.

But commercial fisheries advocate Glen Spain said recent water and salmon policies from the White House are costing jobs in the commercial, sport and tribal fishing industries.

The Klamath water diversion is likely to force the closure of West Coast fall chinook fisheries from the Columbia River down to San Francisco Bay next year, when the juvenile salmon killed in 2002 would have been harvestable adults, said Spain, the Northwest regional director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

With so much at stake for Oregon's natural resources in this year's presidential election, he said it was a shame voters weren't focusing on them as they choose between Kerry and Bush.

"It should be a bigger issue because in the long run these things mean a lot," he said. "If we destroy the natural resources that our industries depend on, then this region's economies will suffer for generations."