In the fall of 1996, when The Mountaineers Books published Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign, the outcome of the campaign was very much in doubt.
President Bill Clinton had brokered a deal that satisfied neither the timber industry nor forest activists. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan represented a landmark shift in federal forest management. It called for a sharp reduction in logging across national forests and other federal lands within the range of the northern spotted owl.
But the strategy did not give environmentalists what they had sought for decades: inviolate preserves to shield the last unprotected roadless forests from logging. And although it set a soft timber production target for these “owl forests”—1.1 billion board feet of timber annually, about 25 percent of historic high levels—the Clinton plan made no promise that the target would be met.
In January 2001, in one of his last official acts, President Clinton signed an executive order protecting 58 million roadless acres of national forest from road-building and logging. But soon after President George W. Bush took office, the Roadless Area Rule was consigned to legal limbo.
The timber industry immediately challenged the rule in court. The Bush administration refused to defend it, leaving attorneys for environmental groups to face off against timber industry lawyers in federal court. A series of conflicting federal district court rulings ensued.
In December 2001, key Bush administration environmental officials flew to Oregon and met with timber industry lawyers, who demanded that the administration take immediate action to meet the 1.1 billion board feet timber target in the Northwest Forest Plan.
Soon after, the industry filed a “friendly” lawsuit, in which it called for the weakening or elimination of five key elements of the Northwest Forest Plan: an aquatic conservation strategy designed to protect stream habitat for threatened salmon; a “survey and manage” protocol that required land managers to survey timber sale sites for rare species before logging; status reviews for the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet, designed to weaken protections for both threatened species; and an amendment to the Northwest Forest Plan that would eliminate protection for most old-growth reserves on 2.8 million acres in Western Oregon overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
Eventually, under what came to be known as the “Global Settlement,” the Bush administration agreed to undertake all those changes. Environmental attorneys, led by the Seattle office of Earthjustice, girded for battle against the administration’s strategy to dismantle the Northwest Forest Plan.
In July 2002, lightning sparked the first of five fires in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest, home to the most botanically diverse conifer forest in North America. Over the next several weeks the blazes, driven by strong winds and record high temperatures, merged, eventually scorching 500,000 acres of national forest. The “Biscuit fire” became the largest wildfire in Oregon’s recorded history.
Local foresters initially proposed a program of careful forest restoration with minimal salvage logging. But the Bush administration, pressured by Oregon timber interests, ordered planners back to the drawing board to come up with a more aggressive salvage plan. Bush political appointees also saw a chance to use the Biscuit fire as a test case for their “healthy forests” campaign, ostensibly designed to save the national forests from devastating wildfires through aggressive thinning and salvage logging.
The project drew forest activists back to the barricades. Over their passionate objections, rare, botanically diverse forests bordering the Kalmiopsis Wilderness were logged in a project that ended up costing the federal government millions of dollars. Ironically, local timber companies had little interest in salvaging the low-value timber. In 2004, the Bush administration announced that it was suspending the Clinton Roadless Area Rule and replacing it with its own strategy, which would allow the governors of individual states to petition the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to protect federal roadless areas within their states. The Bush rule did not guarantee that the Agriculture Secretary would grant those petitions. Again, environmental groups went to court to challenge the administration.
Meanwhile, attorneys for environmentalists were scoring some victories in their effort to preserve the Northwest Forest Plan.
Eventually, federal courts upheld the aquatic conservation strategy and portions of the “survey and manage” protocol.
In 2007, after formally reviewing the status of the northern spotted owl, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a draft recovery plan that attempted to make the case that habitat loss was no longer the major threat to the owl’s survival. Instead, their plan proposed an all-out assault on the barred owl, a larger and more aggressive owl that had invaded the spotted owl’s habitat and was competing with its smaller cousin for prey.
The plan drew scorn from biologists, and the agency returned the following year with a revised and scientifically credible recovery plan that reaffirmed the need to protect habitat for the owl, whose numbers have dwindled to fewer than 5,000 across the Pacific Northwest.
Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Land Management was busy developing a strategy it called the Western Oregon Plan Revision. Dubbed WHOPPER by environmentalists, the plan proposed to double logging levels on the 2.8 million acres of former railroad grant lands in Western Oregon covered by the Northwest Forest Plan. Making timber production the dominant use on these highly productive lands would be “a potent tool for achieving the 1.1 billion board feet goal,” the industry said in a document outlining its strategy.
This was the situation when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. His views on federal public lands issues were unknown. But when Obama appointed Ken Salazar, a popular and progressive U.S. senator from Colorado, as his Secretary of the Interior, environmentalists took heart.
In March, Oregon conservationists celebrated the passage of a landmark wilderness bill that designated 200,000 of wilderness in Oregon. The bill, championed by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and signed by President Obama, protected roadless areas across the state that forest activists had fought to protect since the 1970s, including coastal forests in Southwest Oregon and surrounding Mount Hood.
In June, the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, announced that it had completed its review of the status of the marbled murrelet. Its biologists had concluded that the robin-sized seabird’s numbers had declined at an estimated rate of 4.3 percent annually between 2003 and 2008 between San Francisco and the Canadian border. Contrary to assertions from the timber industry, that
population was discrete and warranted continued protection for the bird under the federal Endangered Species Act, the service said.
More good news followed. In July 2009, Salazar announced that the Obama administration would abandon the Western Oregon Plan Revision because it did not believe the plan could be defended in federal court.
The plan had been pushed through under the political influence of former Bush administration Interior official Julie MacDonald and failed to meet standards for scientific review, Salazar said. It was, as a result, "based on a legally indefensible process," he said. "It will not stand up in court, and if we attempted to defend it in court, it could lead to fruitless years of uncertainty and inaction."
Salazar pledged to quickly deliver as many environmentally sustainable timber sales as possible to the struggling logging communities of western Oregon. Environmentalists have not challenged those sales.
In August 2009, a federal court ruled that the Bush administration plan to let states decide whether to protect federal roadless areas was illegal, and it ordered the 2001 Roadless Area Rule reinstated.
There had been losses, but most roadless forests in the Northwest had survived the eight-year onslaught orchestrated by the Bush administration and its timber industry supporters.
The Northwest Forest Plan never met its timber targets. But in the intervening 15 years, the timber industry had changed. Few old-growth mills remain. A collapsing home construction market has plunged the industry into a deep recession. Private timber is filling a diminished demand.
Change in national policy come slowly. The mantra of the wilderness movement, “Every victory is temporary, every defeat is permanent,” rings true.
Still, in the fall of 2009 it feels as if a new paradigm has taken hold. The prevailing view of what constitutes the highest and best use of our public lands has changed, perhaps permanently. In the Northwest, the debate has shifted from whether we should enter the last groves of ancient forest to how we can restore forests ravaged by more than a century of logging and fire suppression.
Credit the evolving science of ecology, credit the progressive politics of a new President, credit an urbanized America that prizes the nation’s shrinking islands of wild nature even as they fall to the backhoe and bulldozer.
Credit too that band of tree huggers from the 1970s who, armed with science, passion and a commitment to future generations, refused to give up.
They changed history. This is their story.
