Forest wars, Part 2.

Byline: Scott Maben The Register-Guard

GARY BROWNSON steadied himself in the soft soil and stared downhill as his faller's saw screamed through a Douglas fir older than the nation itself.

In mere minutes the tree swayed, tipped and came crashing to earth in a splash of shattered limbs and dust.

"It's a tree. It will grow back," the Myrtle Creek logging contractor said.

The big fir and scores like it were pulled down the hillside, loaded - some trucks held just three mammoth logs - and hauled to the D.R. Johnson Lumber Co. sawmill in Riddle, south of Roseburg.

It's rare anymore to see mills offered such large trees on public lands, said Brownson, who started his logging outfit with his father and brother in 1975. "But wherever there's old growth, they take it," he said.

And wherever there's old growth, there's controversy.

Just up the ridge, Erin Mannix, a 20-year-old environmental activist, clung to a wooden platform suspended halfway up another tree marked to be cut in the Berry Patch timber sale in the Willamette National Forest east of Lowell.

"It's a really valuable experience to see all this life being decimated," said Mannix, an upbeat student who chose the name "Basil" for her 2 1/2 -week summer protest. "There are a lot of people who see money as more important than life."

Big trees are still coming down across the Northwest. Activists are still going up into the treetops. Lawsuits are still flying left and right. New reports of tree-spiking aimed at stopping the chain saws recall a more combative time in the woods, but by all accounts the forest wars are far from over.

Old growth still an issue

Nearly a decade after the Clinton administration tried to reconcile timber industry and conservation group desires with a plan to protect the old-growth habitat of the northern spotted owl, the legal brawls and demonstrations haven't vanished. Indeed, a fresh round of sparring has begun.

President Bush's proposed forest management reforms, applauded by the timber industry and rural community leaders, have stirred environmentalists to redouble their efforts to protect mature and old-growth trees and halt logging they believe harms the environment.

"I think there's broad recognition, more so now than any other time in the debate, that old-growth forests are a resource that's too precious to be squandered," said James Johnston, executive director of the Cascadia Wildlands Project, a Eugene-based group that champions protection of native Northwest forests.

The organization, which monitors timber sales on the Eugene-based Willamette forest, has teamed up with a dozen other conservation groups in a new campaign calling for an end to logging old forests on public lands.

This past summer's Berry Patch sale, planned and sold in the mid-1990s, was a virtual clear-cut of trees ranging up to 500 years old. Although old growth is prized for its clear, straight grain and the sheer quantity of wood it provides, many of the trees had begun to decay, lowering their commercial value.

Forest officials said the sale was a holdover from the past and not representative of the kind of projects they emphasize now.

"Because we have been unable to accomplish certain types of projects on the ground, we did make a deliberate shift about a year and a half ago," said Rob Iwamoto, deputy supervisor for the Willamette. "Our focus has been more in terms of commercial thinning, in trying to work with managed stands. We're focusing on less-controversial timber sales."

The Willamette also has much less land open to logging as a result of the Northwest Forest Plan. Once among the top timber producers in the region, the forest saw half the land available for commercial harvests withdrawn under the plan.

In 1990, 46 percent of the 1.7-million-acre forest was open to logging; today, 23 percent is open. The rest is set aside for owl and old-growth reserves, streamside protection, roadless areas and wilderness.

Still, forest activists believe logging operations such as Berry Patch are not unique. By their estimates, it was one of more than 150 planned timber sales that collectively target nearly 50,000 acres of mature and old-growth forests in Western Oregon and Western Washington.

"We don't need to log old-growth forests to meet society's need for wood products," Johnston said. "They're a scarce resource. That's the bottom line. Only 10 percent of the Pacific Northwest's big, old-growth Douglas fir-Western hemlock forests are left."

Bush, meanwhile, is pushing new forest policies that emphasize thinning to reduce large-scale wildfires such as occurred this year, and to increase the flow of logs to mills. The administration also wants to streamline environmental reviews and limit administrative appeals that have delayed timber sales.

Bush forest plan debated

Industry leaders hail the effort to use thinning and forest restoration projects to rebuild the federal timber supply, which has dwindled to far less than what mills expected when Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan took effect in 1994.

"Our forests are unhealthy, and this work needs to be done now rather than later," said Ross Mickey, Eugene-based Western Oregon manager for the American Forest Resource Council, an industry trade group. "It shouldn't be stopped by this endless process of appeals and litigation."

The president's Healthy Forests Initiative, which he announced in August during a campaign swing through Oregon, promises some long-sought relief for mills but also would improve the condition of tens of millions of acres of overgrown forests that are susceptible to disease, insect outbreaks and catastrophic wildfires, Mickey said.

Allyn Ford, president and CEO of Roseburg Forest Products, said the Northwest Forest Plan failed in its promise to help mills make the transition from older forests to younger, previously logged stands, known as second-growth timber.

"The plan was not implemented," Ford said. "This put a lot of communities and operations in some pretty hard situations. People have been able to survive, but in doing so, transitioning from one product to another, one technology to another, it's been pretty difficult."

Yet Bush's pledge to deliver on the harvest levels set under the 8-year-old forest plan alarms environmentalists, who see the administration's proposed reforms as a ploy to exploit natural resources and thwart public scrutiny of forest management.

"Obviously, it's largely designed in response to this season's wildfires," Johnston said. "It's not meant to address forest health or the need for fuel reduction. It's designed to undermine environmental laws and get the cut out."

Many environmentalists and timber industry representatives recognize a need to compromise to protect old growth better and free up younger timber for harvest, Johnston said. "But the administration seems bent on further polarizing the issue by staking out an extremist stance on things like fire protection and old-growth protection," he said.

Such a posture will only infuriate the public and keep the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies in gridlock rather than focused on forest restoration work, he said.

Oregon 4th District Rep. Peter DeFazio, who has helped write a bipartisan bill on forest thinning, said a successful forest management policy must strike a balance between greater protection for old growth and assurance of a predictable supply of timber for mills.

It also needs substantial financial investment in forest health work, said DeFazio, a Democrat and member of the House Resources Committee.

"For years we have treated the forests in the West like a cash cow, and you can't do that and maintain healthy forests over time," he said. "The Bush administration, the Clinton administration and the Congress have all been reluctant to invest in forest health, invest in things that would reduce fuel loads and the catastrophic effect of fires, because it costs money."

Managing old growth

The drive to thin fire-prone forests and the campaign to spare remnants of old growth and untouched native forests tend to overlap. Trees several centuries old are still being cut on public lands, sometimes in the name of forest health.

Timber sales are now designed both to improve forest conditions and provide wood products, Iwamoto said.

But some environmentalists also lobby to save stands as young as 80 years old - a definition of old growth that timber executives dismiss as laughable.

"People have this conception that we need to totally preserve anything that's a certain age," Ford said. "Preservation of old growth is not, in our way of thinking, a management concept.

"A forest is a living dynamic. If you want to preserve old-growth characteristics, you have to go manage for it. You can't just walk away from the forest."

The Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management both allow the harvest of trees well over a century old as part of projects for which the primary goal is to reduce forest density.

To achieve the desired spacing and a diverse range of tree ages, foresters may mark some of the larger trees to be cut in a given stand. It also helps the two agencies draw more bidders to timber auctions and fetch higher prices.

Proceeds from the sales help the agencies cope with funding shortfalls and pay for other important work, Iwamoto said.

"People think of timber sales as being just negative," he said. "We also generate funds through timber sales to do recreation work and for fish and wildlife."

"Bad all the way through"

Sawmills that survived the drop in timber sales caused by the Northwest Forest Plan compensated by scaling back operations, retrofitting to handle smaller logs and stepping up logging on private land.

Some companies now haul logs hundreds of miles, and all compete fiercely for federal timber sales that may be held up for years by administrative appeals, lawsuits and protests, then possibly canceled.

The timber industry has lost faith in federal land managers to guarantee a predictable supply of logs, said Tom Varley, timber manager for D.R. Johnson Lumber.

"It's becoming more and more important for the federal bureaucracies to get some timber available for the mills," Varley said. "There is a pretty good supply right now of private stuff, but that's not going to last very long."

The company, one of a few Oregon mills still equipped to cut old-growth logs, lost a bid in late July for a timber sale on the Mount Hood National Forest. Environmental groups protested at the auction and labeled the sale a clear-cut of mature and old-growth forests.

But Varley said he considered the Solo timber sale "a perfect prescription to reduce these hot fires" by removing small wood and selectively harvesting some larger trees to spread out the stand. "This whole mentality of these environmentalists is to have just no tree-cutting period, no matter what," he said.

That's why the government needs to change the laws that permit groups to hold up timber sales and threaten the jobs of thousands of Oregonians, Varley said.

"It's a bad deal. It's bad for our forests, it's bad for the American consumer, it's bad for the sawmill people, it's bad for the people who work here," he said. "It's just bad all the way through."

Meanwhile, environmentalists are braced to defend the appeals process they've counted on for years. They say too many harmful and shortsighted projects continue to be pitched in the Forest Service and BLM districts they monitor, with the prospect of still more if Bush gets his way.

Johnston of the Cascadia Wildlands Project said he's convinced the Bush administration is moving to reduce environmental protections under the Northwest Forest Plan to make it easier to log old growth.

"They use words like 'streamline' and say they want to make the process more efficient, but they also speak pretty bluntly about wanting to increase the cut levels," he said.

1994 plan had an impact

The Northwest Forest Plan was crafted in hopes of ending the logging war sparked by the federal government's decision in June 1990 to list the spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The plan set aside owl reserves in Western Oregon, Western Washington and Northern California and directed the agencies to manage the lands in ways that preserve and enhance old-growth qualities.

As a result, loggers were shut out of millions of acres and harvest levels dropped precipitously. The Willamette forest's annual timber sales program has plummeted to about 2 percent of what it was at the height of logging in the late 1980s.

"If you look at our (timber sale) accomplishments over the last several years, it's been pretty dismal," Iwamoto said. "We're not meeting our objectives."

The main reason, he said, is the months and years it takes to complete required surveys of fungi, plants and animals, such as the red tree vole, the mouse-like tree dweller that's a primary source of food for the spotted owl.

Wildlife management agencies use the surveys to decide whether to allow forest projects to move ahead - a process Bush administration officials have dubbed "analysis paralysis."

Appeals and lawsuits challenging the surveys and planned timber sales also reduce forest officials' ability to meet harvest goals, Iwamoto said. "It takes time to get these things resolved," he said. "It has been extremely frustrating for all of us."

But the Native Forest Council, a Eugene-based group dedicated to public land preservation, says the Clinton plan left more than a million acres of old growth still open to logging.

"We're liquidating priceless, irreplaceable life-support systems," said Tim Hermach, the group's president.

Hermach called the Bush Healthy Forests Initiative "a Trojan Horse, as is everything the timber industry argues for. They always will have the same solution: more logging."

"Some people say we've reduced logging," Hermach said. "I say no, we've run out."

TIMBER SALES DECLINE

Logging levels in the Willamette National Forest have tumbled under President Clinton's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan.

Peak harvest years: 943 million board feet in 1965, 945 million board feet in 1973, 881 million board feet in 1988.

1990: The Willamette's forest plan set its annual "allowable sale quantity" at 491 million board feet.

1994: The Northwest Forest Plan set the Willamette's "probable sale quantity" at 136 million board feet.

Today: The "probable sale quantity" officially is 111 million board feet. Unofficial targets are much less.

Actual harvests: In fiscal 2001, the Willamette cut 17.9 million board feet of timber.

- Willamette National Forest

CAPTION(S):

T.D. Woodruff (left) and Dan Price, both of Myrtle Creek, fall an old-growth Douglas fir tree on the Willamette National Forest east of Lowell. Erin Mannix sits in an old-growth Douglas fir tree on Willamette National Forest land to protest logging. STORIES BY SCOTT MABEN PHOTOS BY THOMAS BOYD The Register-Guard It's much less common today to see old-growth trees such as these being logged on public lands. Old growth is still prized for its clear, straight grain. A log truck loaded with old-growth logs leaves a Willamette National Forest timber sale. The logs are so large that only three can fit on the trailer. Gary Brownson, owner of Brownson Logging of Myrtle Creek, believes logging is essential to maintaining a healthy forest. TIMBER SALES DECLINE Logging levels in the Willamette National Forest have tumbled under President Clinton's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Peak harvest years: 943 million board feet in 1965, 945 million board feet in 1973, 881 million board feet in 1988. 1990: The Willamette's forest plan set its annual "allowable sale quantity" at 491 million board feet. 1994: The Northwest Forest Plan set the Willamette's "probable sale quantity" at 136 million board feet. Today: The "probable sale quantity" officially is 111 million board feet. Unofficial targets are much less. Actual harvests: In fiscal 2001, the Willamette cut 17.9 million board feet of timber. - Willamette National Forest