The veiled threats and hyperbole are mere warm-up exercises for this Friday’s “forest summit.” Called by President Clinton, it will let timber-industry officials and environmentalists square off in the infamous “jobs vs. owls” debate. With Vice President Al Gore and three cabinet secretaries also on hand, the summit is intended to inspire a compromise that would save jobs and birds, as well as cool tempers by giving each side Clinton’s ear for a few hours. And cool is sorely needed. For three years the spotted owl has been a cat’s-paw in the battle over national forests, which lumber companies are allowed to log. Some of that public land is what’s known as oldgrowth forest. Owls need these ancient forests to survive, so under the Endangered Species Act, the government must protect the birds’ habitat. Since 1991, the courts have banned logging on millions of acres in 17 national forests and five Bureau of Land Management parcels in northern California, Oregon and Washington (map). Faster than you could say “whoo,” SAVE A LOGGER, SHOOT AN OWL bumper stickers became as common as flannel shirts in the timber towns. And a few diehard, out-of-work loggers would just as soon replace “owl” with environmentalist.
But beneath the din of the professional railing, quieter voices, those of the battered timber workers, are changing the terms of the debate and shaking up old allegiances. Many rank-and-file forest and mill workers still fume at “extreme” environmentalists and harbor a lingering hatred of greens who drove spikes into trees to prevent cutting. But they’ve come to believe they were victims of the industry as much as the were of the spotted owl. Environmentalists would not have gotten such a foothold, says Bill Rodgers, a former millworker who is now a peer counselor for a retraining program, “if the industry had started policing itself in 1970 instead of clear-cutting every hillside.” Workers complain bitterly that they’ve been betrayed by an industry that uses loss of jobs as an argument against closing national forests to logging, but then turns around and exports raw logs to Japan, which eliminates U.S. mill jobs.
The timber industry blames environmentalists for the loss of at least 30,000 jobs since 1990 and for the dive in timber sales from federal lands to roughly 10 percent of their 1991 levels. The Sierra Club countered last week with a report reiterating that “timber exports and robotization of the timber industry, not environmental regulations, are the principal causes for a poor Northwest economy.” But many workers have moved beyond finger-pointing and fry-the-owl rhetoric. Whether they become unemployed because forests are placed off-limits to logging, or because trees are fewer and mills are automating, a lost job is a lost job. Men who started logging at the age of 7, carrying tools for their fathers in the cathedral-like forests, know that a way of life is vanishing, and nothing will bring it back. “Three years ago people were in denial,” says Dave Schmidt, commissioner of Linn County, Ore. “Now we know we are just not going to have what we had before.”
So while the politicians keep propping up the owls vs. jobs straw man, many locals have begun to lay the foundation for an economy based on tourism, recreation and high technology. Forest and millworkers are retraining to be nurses, flight technicians, fitness instructors. At Lane County Community College in Eugene, the 200 graduates (1,400 more are still enrolled) earn an average $9 an hour, respectable though lower than some timber jobs pay. Danny Craft, 39, a laid-off millworker, is training to become a nurse as well as starting a river-guide business. Oakridge, Ore., which lost 1,000 timber-related jobs, has given itself a paint job, installed flower boxes and attracted a Best Western and an espresso-and-latte cafe to lure tourists and businesses. A machine company and a wood-products firm have already moved in.
No matter how the forest summit cleans up what Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt calls the trees vs. owls “train wreck,” an even bigger disaster is coming down the track. The Northwest salmon industry is near collapse. Hatchery-produced fry are more likely to carry disease than wild stocks; dams reduce the number of fry that make it back to the open ocean, and logging sends torrents of sediment into streams, impeding spawning. As a result, says the American Fisheries Society, 101 of the 214 native salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest are at high risk of extinction. In 1988, sport and commercial fishing generated 62,000 jobs and pumped $1.25 billion into the local economy (compared with $15 billion from timber). By last year that had plunged to less than $200 million. Despite the high stakes (or, to the conspiracy-minded, because of them), salmon issues rank low on the summit agenda. Fishermen are not taking the snub lightly. They may petition Interior to declare all remaining stocks of coho salmon threatened; if that happens, Interior would have to craft a conservation plan, and that would lock up even more federal timber. “The timber industry is scared to death of us because the salmon are the next spotted owl, and they darn well know it,” says Glen Spain, of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.
But salmon are just the environmentalists’ ace in the hole. Even without that argument, the greens hold most of the cards going into the summit. Just two weeks ago the Forest Service submitted a report to the federal district court concluding that there will have to be more logging restrictions to save various fish and fowl. About the only thing the timber interests might salvage from the summit is a few years of logging on the eastern slope of the Cascades (NEWSWEEK, March 29). There, dead and diseased trees could benefit from selective cutting, which might not damage salmon streams. Perhaps because there’s so little wiggle room, Clinton sounded less than optimistic about the forest summit last week, when he told his press conference that “the position [I take on logging and owls] will probably make everybody mad.” But then, why should his attempt at a solution be different from anything else in this long and hate-filled controversy?
