December 19, 2011
Twenty years ago...1992. It was a different world. The Internet was in its earliest infancy, nobody had a cell phone or knew what email was, and Kurt Cobain was still writing grunge rock classics. And it was still very much an open question whether or not old-growth forests in our National Forests would be completely liquidated outside of the minimal reserves found in designated wilderness areas.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the Forest Service mowed down ancient forests like there was no tomorrow, and by the early nineties, the inevitable results of overcutting were coming home to roost. Entire watersheds were unraveling from the combination of widespread road construction and clearcutting, the Spotted Owl and Marbled Murrelet were hurtling towards extinction due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat, and public sentiment was rapidly souring on the idea that National Forests should be managed primarily for the benefit of the timber industry.
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As the economies of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California diversified, more and more people were beginning to see National Forests as something other than just fiber farms. The values of recreation, clean water, and biodiversity were emerging as tangible benefits that only intact public lands could provide.
Enter the Northwest Forest Plan
The past and future visions of public lands management were on full display during the 1992 presidential election. Incumbent President George H.W. Bush told Northern California mill workers that the environmental laws constraining the old-growth timber sale program should be gutted and that the election of his opponent would result in America "being out of jobs and up to our necks in spotted owls." In contrast, candidate Bill Clinton sought to assure voters that he could "break the logjam" inhibiting the Forest Service timber program while abiding by environmental laws.
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The Northwest Forest Plan was designed to lift the court injunctions protecting spotted owl habitat and resume logging on public lands by establishing a system of "reserves" and of "matrix" areas. Forests located in the reserves would be managed primarily for aquatic and late-successional values while the matrix stands would be subject to intensive logging. 20 years later, these land allocations of the Northwest Forest Plan remain in place for over 24 million acres throughout the range of the spotted owl.
This "split the baby" solution was designed to provide the minimum habitat necessary to meet the agency's legal obligations while opening the maximum acres of federal forests to logging. Hence many of the oldest, most-beloved ancient forests were consigned to the "matrix" land allocation while a great deal of previously logged second-growth fiber plantations were protected as streamside "riparian" and old-growth "late-successional" reserves.
Neither conservationists nor the timber industry were thrilled with the Forest Plan and both immediately sued to prevent its implementation. Environmentalists hated that it called for logging some of the oldest and most biologically rich ancient forests, and the timber industry objected to the significant reduction in timber volume that the Plan would produce compared to the historic highs of the 1970s and 1980s. In upholding the Forest Plan to these legal challenges, Federal District Judge William Dwyer noted that he believed the Forest Plan provided the "bare minimum" protections for old-growth species required by the National Forest Management Act. Through the Northwest Forest Plan the floor for oldgrowth protection had been identified and the bare minimum legal protections for some of these ancient forests had been achieved.
Logging Without Laws
Implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan got off to an extremely rocky start. Immediately upon the Plan's adoption, Senator Hatfield--then chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee--attached a rider to a "must-pass" Interior Appropriations Bill that deemed all federal timber sales in the range of the spotted owl to be legal and directing the Forest Service to log a number of old-growth sales that had already been found to violate the Endangered Species Act by Federal Courts.
The result of Hatfield's Rider was a deluge of old-growth timber sales throughout the range of the spotted owl. With the courthouse doors closed to legal challenges, and the Forest Service and BLM cranking out as many old-growth sales as possible, the mid-nineties saw a tremendous surge in radical forest defense activism.
Inspired by the tree-sits and civil disobedience of Redwood Summer of 1990, which brought national attention to the liquidation of ancient redwoods on private lands, the initial wave of old-growth timber sales released under the Northwest Forest Plan were fought tooth and nail by both activists in the woods and by conservation organizations in cities and towns across the Northwest.
Salvage Logging
Emblematic of the resistance to the resurgence of old-growth logging in the mid-nineties was the occupation of a logging road leading to the Warner Creek timber sale in the Willamette National Forest. The old-growth forests located at Warner Creek were supposedly protected as one of the Forest Plan's "Late-Successional Reserves" in which ecological and habitat values would be emphasized in contrast to the "matrix" logging emphasis zones. But the Forest Plan was ambiguous as to what would happen to reserves that experienced a wildfire, and the ancient forests of Warner Creek had been set ablaze by an arsonist.
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That was far from the end of the story however. Forest defense activists dug in to live on the road accessing the timber sale while others toured the West Coast raising the profile of both salvage logging and old-growth logging. The Hatfield Rider preventing legal challenge to timber sales proved to be a very effective organizing tool for forest activists and protests of "salvage rider" sales sprang up throughout the Northwest.
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Following the Biscuit Fire, the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest proposed a number of post-fire timber sales within Late-Successional Reserves. Again, the old-growth timber sales were fought vigorously in court and in the woods, but this time the Forest Service was largely successful in its efforts to convert the post-fire old-growth reserves into fiber plantations. This logging provided researchers with an opportunity to contrast those forests that had been subject to salvage logging with those that had been left to recover naturally. Oregon State University graduate student Daniel Donato published a seminal paper indicating that salvage logging the reserves both increased future fire hazard and inhibited forest recovery. These findings helped change the terms of the debate regarding post-fire salvage logging.
Looking Forward: the Next 20 Years
Following the protracted fights over old-growth logging and salvage logging that dogged the Northwest Forest Plan over the first two decades of its existence, the issues regarding public land management have taken a dramatic turn. Many Forest Service timber planners have largely embraced the social consensus that the remaining old-growth forests on public lands should be retained. While old-growth timber sales are still occasionally prepared and opposed, they have become exceedingly rare and the debate over federal forest management in the range
of the spotted owl has largely shifted to new topics.
The emerging debates surrounding public lands management include the following: What is the role of forest-lands in sequestering carbon and providing habitat to mitigate the effects of climate change? How should the Forest Service restore lands that have been subjected to prior logging? What have the effects of decades of fire suppression been on fire-dependent forest ecosystems, and should anything be done to ameliorate those effects? Given the declining Forest Service budget, how should the agency manage the vast network of logging roads that it can no longer afford to maintain? With the meteoric rise in the price of gold, how will terrestrial and aquatic forest resources be protected from increased mining activity on public lands? Given those questions, the next 20 years of forest defense should be just as interesting as the last 20.
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TOC for Forest & River News, Winter 2011