Tree Huggers

Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign

by Kathie Durbin (more about this book and author)

Part 4: Raising the Stakes 1987-92
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“ . . . the historic richness of the salmon and steelhead resource of the West Coast will never be known. However, it is clear that what has survived is a small proportion of what once existed, and what remains is substantially at risk.”
—AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY, Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads, March 1991

We must now pay for the billions of board feet of cheap pine logged earlier in the century.”
—BOYD WICKMAN, Forest Health in the Blue Mountains: Insects and Disease, March 1991

Management that harms native ecosystems, or management out of ignorance or lack of respect for biodiversity, is no longer excusable.”
—REED F. Noss and ALLEN Y. COOPERRIDER, Saving Nature's Legacy, 1994

While the Bush administration pursued its strategy of delay, denial, and polarization, the ancient forest campaign in the Pacific Northwest was attracting belated attention from the national conservation groups, which had long maintained that the disappearance of the 141
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old-growth forests was a regional rather than a national issue. The Wilderness Society launched a forest inventory and forest mapping project to help lay the scientific and educational groundwork for a national campaign, and in 1989 opened an Oregon office to increase its visibility. The National Audubon Society launched its own forest mapping project, using volunteers. The National Wildlife Federation contributed the onthe-ground expertise of Rick Brown, a former Forest Service biologist hired to monitor timber sales out of its Portland office.

But though the national groups brought new visibility to the ancient forests, they failed to mount an effective lobbying effort to get Congress to protect them. In 1990, Indiana congressman Jim Jontz introduced a bill to create a system of ancient forest reserves. The following year, several large foundations agreed to fund a new organization that would work in Washington, D.C. to protect the Northwest's ancient forests. Meanwhile, grassroots activists were taking their ancient forest campaign on the road. Two political neophytes, inspired by the message, started a group called Save America's Forests to work for protection of forests in every region of the country.

Awareness of the broader consequences of forest liquidation was growing. In the early 1990s, fisheries biologists went public with a warning about the plight of Pacific salmon and the role of habitat destruction in their demise. At about the same time, forest activists unveiled new information about the extent of old-growth forest loss east of the Cascades. By the end of 1992, it was obvious that the conflict flaring in the forests of the Northwest involved far more than loggers versus owls.

 
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Chapter Seventeen

Going National


It was on a trip to the Pacific Northwest in early 1987 that George Frampton, president of the Wilderness Society, had his eyes opened to the rampant rate of clearcutting in the region's native forests. At the time, the carnage occurring in the nation's upper-left corner was not on the radar screen of any national conservation group in. Washington, D.C. The nationals had departed the field of battle in the Northwest after passage of the 1984 wilderness bills. Since then, grassroots groups still fighting to save roadless forests had been pretty much on their own.

"The local groups felt they weren't getting any help from the nationals," Frampton said. "I realized that something had to be done, that this was a national issue."

In the summer of 1986, Sierra Club President Doug Wheeler had organized a six-day trip to Southeast Alaska for an elite cadre of national conservation leaders known as the Group of 10. When he saw the scarred mountains of the Northwest, Frampton decided to bring the Group of 10 to the West Coast again. In the spring of 1988 these conservation bigwigs flew to Seattle and then got a bird's-eye view of the extent of logging courtesy of Lighthawk, an environmental air force that conducted aerial tours of the forest to show off the worst of the timber industry's handiwork. At a meeting in Seattle, James Monteith, executive director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, made a pitch for assistance from the Group of 10.

Grassroots activists in the Northwest were now ready to take their forest campaign to the next step, Monteith said. ONRC was widely regarded as one of the most effective statewide environmental groups in the nation. After a three-year fundraising effort, Monteith was in the process of moving its headquarters from a funky wood-frame house in Eugene to a tasteful suite of offices in downtown Portland to gain increased visibility.

By trip's end, the Northwest's old-growth forests were on the nationals' radar screens. For better or worse, the dance between the nation's conservation establishment and the zealous tree huggers of the Pacific Northwest had begun.
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DOING THE GOVERNMENT'S WORK
Under Frampton's leadership, the Wilderness Society took on three critical tasks: Inventorying and mapping the forests, describing their ecological significance, and analyzing the region's changing timber economy. Barry Flamm, the society's staff forester, was the first to identify the need for accurate, up-to-date maps of old-growth forests.

Frampton hired Peter Morrison, a forest ecologist with a master's degree from the University of Washington, to do the basic mapping and inventory work the Forest Service had failed to do. Using state-of-the-art geographic information system software, Morrison produced maps documenting how much old growth remained, where it was, and the extent of forest fragmentation. At the peak of his project, he was assisted by a paid staff of seven and a cadre of volunteers from among Seattle's computer hacker elite.

In June of 1988, the Wilderness Society published Morrison's work in "End of the Ancient Forests: A Report on National Forest Management Plans in the Pacific Northwest." The report analyzed draft management plans for 12 national forests in western Washington, western Oregon, and northern California. Using the Forest Service's own ecological definition, Morrison concluded that just 2.4 million acres of roadless old-growth forest—about half as much as the Forest Service claimed—remained in forests west of the Cascades.

The disparity was explained by the fact that individual forests were not required to use the ecological definition of old growth developed by Jerry Franklin's team. The definitions they did use varied widely from forest to forest. Moreover, the accelerated logging of the late 1980s typically was not reflected in national forest inventory data.

The numbers derived were thus sloppy and unreliable. Morrison's report was a wake-up call on how fast the old growth was disappearing. Throughout the 1980s, he found, the 12 forests had been logged at a phenomenal rate. By 1987, the timber industry was logging an estimated 70 acres of old growth—the equivalent of 129 football fields—every day. He warned that under forest plans for the 1990s, most future logging would occur in roadless areas. Over 15 years, if cutting at 1988 rates continued, nearly half the unprotected roadless acreage on the 12 forests would be gone. Over 50 years, two-thirds would disappear.

Morrison's most effective maps contrasted the extent of unlogged Olympic National Forest lands in the 1940s, in the 1960s, and in 1988. They showed an unbroken canopy transformed over four decades into a shredded quilt. The contrast with the adjacent intact forests of Olympic National Park was stark. "I used the slides often," said Melanie Rowland, an attorney for the Wilderness Society. "People literally gasped. "In a series of five other carefully researched studies, published in 1989  and 1990, the Wilderness Society laid out the scientific and economic
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arguments for protecting old growth. In 1990, the Wilderness Society and Island Press published Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest, a collection of essays edited by staff ecologist Elliott Norse, which described the ecological values of the forests in more depth and breadth.

In 1989 the Wilderness Society opened an office in Portland, signaling its growing commitment to the ancient forest campaign.

ADOPTING FORESTS    
Meanwhile, the National Audubon Society had undertaken its own, more modest mapping project. Audubon's Adopt-a-Forest campaign recruited volunteers to map old-growth tracts in several parts of the national forest system. In the Northwest, volunteers used Forest Service data, aerial photos, and on-the-ground observation to map all groves at least 300 acres in size that had trees at least 100 years old. The project's goal was to show the location of forest stands that still provided intact interior forests or native plants and wildlife.

Adopt-a-Forest mobilized grassroots activists throughout the Northwest. In Washington and Oregon, many local Audubon chapters became far more militant than their parent organization, filing lawsuits and appeals to challenge logging on lands they had come to know through in-the-field research.

In November of 1989, representatives of 100 Audubon chapters met in Eugene with members of the National Audubon staff from Washington, D.C. They hoped to persuade the national staff that it was time to approach forest protection in a new way—to focus on the ecological importance of old forests, not just their recreational and esthetic values. "The challenge was to persuade this venerable conservation group that it might be necessary to save fragmented forests for the owls, and save cutover forests for the fish," recalled Bonnie Phillips of Pilchuck Audubon in Everett, Washington, who organized the meeting. She found Audubon lobbyist Brock Evans, a veteran of the Northwest forest wars, quite resistant. "His concern," she said, "was, 'What can I sell back there?"

THE TONGASS CAMPAIGN
Meanwhile, another regional forest protection campaign, this one in Alaska, was attracting national attention and the ear of Congress. This was due largely to the efforts of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, a coalition of environmentalists, commercial fishing groups, and subsistence groups based in Juneau, Alaska. Formed in the early 1970s, SEACC worked to expose the waste, corruption, and environmental destruction Congress had set in motion with passage of the 1980 Tongass Timber Supply program. Bart Koehler, an intense, politically astute former Earth First! activist, became SEACC's executive director in 1983. He spent much of the next seven years traveling through the Lower 48 with a slide show on the Tongass, generating letters to Congress, and building a national campaign.
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SEACC had plenty of ammunition. The Tongass had become virtually an extension of two pulp companies that held 50-year contracts to log its timber. The Forest Service had given the companies veto power over land management decisions and had allowed them to destroy some of the most ecologically sensitive forests on the Tongass while taxpayers across the nation subsidized their operations to the tune of $40 million a year. The 1970s and 1980s had seen blatant abuses of the contracts, including antitrust violations and efforts to defraud the government of timber revenues.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a strong reform bill in 1989. No reform bill emerged from the Senate that year, but SEACC's on-the-ground documentation of environmental abuses kept the heat on. In October of 1990 Congress passed the Tongass Timber Reform Act, designating 300,000 acres of the Tongass as wilderness and protecting a million acres in all from logging. The bill represented not only a stunning victory for environmentalists but also a body blow to Alaska's three-member Republican congressional delegation, which had fought to protect the interests of Southeast Alaska's timber industry.

The major conservation foundations took notice of the Tongass victory and began discussing whether a similar model might work in the Pacific Northwest. "SEACC had the idea they should actually go to Washington and communicate directly with members of Congress, the administration, and the national media," said Tom Wathen of the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based foundation that was just getting involved in environmental grantmaking. "We proposed that the same model be used in the Pacific Northwest."

A FRIEND IN CONGRESS
U.S. Representative Jim Jontz, a combative Indiana Democrat, first visited the Pacific Northwest in 1987 at the invitation of Representative Bob Smith, a conservative eastern Oregon Republican with whom he served on the House Agriculture Forestry Subcommittee. Smith took Jontz to a meeting in his district on the timber situation. "I discovered there was a civil war going on, but you wouldn't have known it from the Northwest delegation or from the national environmental groups at that time," Jontz said.

In 1989 Jontz returned to Oregon to attend a forest reform conference organized by forest economist Randal O'Toole, who had become the nation's foremost advocate of incentive-based solutions to the federal timber conflict. O'Toole was convinced that if the Forest Service got more of its money from recreation and hunting and wildlife viewing fees and less from timber receipts, it would shift its priorities and begin managing the forests for those purposes. It was a view not wholeheartedly shared by his compatriots within the environmental community.

At the conference, Jontz described how Northwest lawmakers were  using the appropriations process to override court decisions affecting
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national forests. Afterward he toured the beautiful Metolius River Basin of central Oregon with forest ecologist Jerry Franklin and met with forest activists, who told him they had no hope that the Northwest delegation would support legislation to protect old-growth forests. Jontz said, "I'll help."

In the spring of 1990, Jontz introduced the Ancient Forest Protection Act, written by James Monteith and Brock Evans, among others. The bill called for setting up a process by which a group of independent scientists would choose areas worthy of protection in a system of ancient forest reserves based on their ecological significance.

Though it was opposed by the entire Northwest congressional delegation, the Jontz bill eventually attracted 145 sponsors.

Over the next two years many other bills offering solutions to the forest impasse surfaced. Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon introduced a bill written by the timber industry; Oregon's four Democratic House members introduced a middle-of-the-road forest protection bill. Democratic Representative George Miller of California introduced a bill offering relatively high levels of protection. None of them, including the Jontz bill, got as far as a vote on the House or Senate floor.

Environmentalists had enough power by then to stop a bad bill, but not enough power to pass a good one.

FREE-LANCING
By 1990 some activists had gone on the road with their message about what was happening to the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Lou Gold's winter road show was building a national constituency for protection of old-growth forests in the Siskiyous. Passionate and articulate, Gold touched people everywhere he went with his words and images.

Tim Hermach, a Eugene businessman and member of the Sierra Club Many Rivers Group, became a convert to the forest preservation movement after he reviewed the Willamette National Forest Plan. Hermach, a volatile and uncompromising activist, found the plan full of unwarranted assumptions about how much old-growth timber the Willamette could sell in the 1990s and how fast it could grow new trees to replace the native stands. In 1988, frustrated with the Sierra Club's incremental approach to halting the destruction of ancient forests, he formed the Native Forest Council to promote a devastatingly simple proposition: zero cut on the national forests.

Hermach scraped together $2,500 and published the first issue of Forest Voice, a tabloid that featured photos of the ugliest clearcuts in the Northwest, including many on the Olympic National Forest's Shelton Unit. He had 25,000 copies printed initially and sent them to Sierra Club members and other activists around the country. Eventually 1 million copies of that first issue circulated, delivering a payload of shocking images to a national audience.

 
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In the early 1990s Hermach became a favorite environmental source for East Coast reporters who were trying to sort out the tangled Northwest forest conflict, for readers far from the scene of battle. His zero cut message had the ring of integrity and the beauty of simplicity. He believed that only a national campaign could save native forests.

"I was always of the opinion that the forest issue could not be resolved forest by forest, state by state, or region by region," he said. "It was a national policy issue of concern to all Americans."

In 1989 former Earth First! activists Mitch Friedman and Ric Bailey bought a 730-year-old Douglas-fir log from a Port Angeles, Washington, timber exporter for $3,040, loaded the behemoth onto a flatbed truck, and drove it across the country to introduce the rest of America to the magnificence of the ancient forests that were falling in the Pacific Northwest.

Mark Winstein had recently sold his business in St. Louis and was looking for new challenges. He caught the Ancient Forest Rescue Expedition in a St. Louis parking lot and was moved to instant political commitment. Winstein had visited Washington's Olympic Peninsula and had hiked in the surreal Hoh River rainforest. He had never forgotten it.

When he asked what he could do, Mitch Friedman told him about Randal O'Toole's forest reform conference in Oregon. Winstein went. There he met Brock Evans and Jim Jontz. Jontz invited him to come to Washington, D.C. and work on forests as a volunteer. Winstein agreed. He rented a tiny apartment with a view of the Capitol Dome from his window.

After two months in Washington, Wmstein's money was running out. He called Brock Evans at National Audubon to find out what he was doing to save ancient forests. "I was shocked to find there was no national campaign," he said. Evans offered him $1,500 to compile a data base of people who had written to Audubon saying they wanted to protect forests.

Carl Ross, a musician in Long Island, New York, also took in the Ancient Forest Rescue Expedition. Unlike Winstein, he had never set foot in the Pacific Northwest.

Nevertheless, he immediately dropped everything and began proselytizing in the Big Apple to save ancient forests.

"I said, 'This is the most important thing,' and I threw myself into it," Ross recalled. "I made up ancient forest postcards and I handed them out at Jones Beach. I got up a petition to Congress. I called the local Audubon Society to get them involved. I was calling around the nation saying, 'We've got to have a national campaign.' I was like a nut."

In the fall of 1989 Ross went to a Washington, D.C., meeting of forest activists who were trying to stop the Rider from Hell. He was handed a list of congressmen and told to call them. Like Winstein, he was shocked. "I thought, 'Here's the most important issue in the world and they don't have a national campaign." The following February, he

 
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too tried to call Brock Evans to discuss ancient forests. Instead, he got Winstein. Ross came down to Washington. The two of them stayed up all night talking forests.

SAVE AMERICA'S FORESTS
In April of 1990, Ross and Winstein attended a forest reform pow-wow in Asheville, North Carolina, where Winstein spoke about the need for a national campaign. "I said it would cost $10,000 a month to start this. No one had any idea where it would come from." After his speech people came by to discuss the idea. Someone passed the hat and collected $500. Later, someone else sent Winstein and Ross a check for $2,000. And Save America's Forests was born.

Every legislative campaign needs a vehicle. Ross and Winstein wanted a bill that dealt with forests across the nation. They seized on a bill sponsored by Senator John Bryant, a moderate Texas Democrat, which prohibited clearcutting on the national forests. The Bryant bill wasn't going anywhere, and some mainstream groups saw it as a poorly written non-starter. But Ross and Winstein saw it as a rallying point.

From the beginning, it was scrape and hustle for Save America's Forests. Mainstream conservation groups raised money through membership dues, sale of magazines, and hefty foundation grants. At first, Ross and Winstein got no support from those traditional sources, and they got the cold shoulder from the nationals.

They decided to hold a rally in front of the Capitol, and sent out more than 4,000 postcards. Winstein's tiny apartment suddenly became the nerve center for a huge happening. On September 16, 1990, more than 800 people showed up for the Save America's Forests kickoff. The event, complete with people in animal costumes, made page one of USA Today.
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Chapter Eighteen

A Voice in Washington


In 1990, after putting out a few newsletters, holding a few meetings, and failing to stop the Rider from Hell, the Ancient Forest Alliance faded. This first attempt by national conservation groups and Northwest activists to work together in a campaign to save old-growth forests fell victim to internal politics within the Washington, D.C., conservation establishment.

National conservation groups seldom worked together effectively, in part because they were natural competitors. They competed for members, competed for press coverage, competed for access and influence on Capitol Hill, competed for the same pool of money from environmental grantmaking foundations.

Working with grassroots forest activists 3,000 miles away in the Pacific Northwest was, in some ways, an even bigger challenge for the nationals The chasm in values and lifestyles that separated conservation professionals inside the .Washington, D.C., Beltway from tree huggers in rural communities was in some ways wider than the divide between forest activists and timber workers, who at least shared the same physical turf.

The growing professionalism of the national conservation organizations by 1990 had increased their distance from the grass roots. By then, many of the largest organizations relied on direct-mail consultants to hone their message and boost their membership, on pollsters to test the political winds, and on their own lawyers, scientists, lobbyists, and policy analysts to advance their agenda. Increasingly, they also depended on funding from large foundations. Many of these foundations weren't content to write a check; in exchange, they wanted a piece of the action—a chance to set priorities and help design campaigns.

In the Northwest, the ancient forest campaign was on a roll by 1990. It was winning in federal court and attracting national media attention. The Ancient Forest Protection Act, introduced by Representative Jim Jontz, had given the campaign a legislative tool for winning permanent protection of ancient forests. But there still was no real coordination of the forest campaign at the national level, no strategy for countering the wise-use backlash, no strategy for lobbying Congress to pass a strong ancient forest protection bill.
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CULTURE CLASH
Melanie Rowland, a Seattle attorney, experienced the clash of cultures between the nationals and the grass roots directly after she accepted a job with the Wilderness Society that frequently took her to D.C. for strategy sessions. As conservation chair for Seattle Audubon, she had experience in the grassroots world. "I was used to discussing issues,"she said. "Out here in the Northwest, we'd discuss how much old growth, and where's the science, and how are we going to draw lines on the map, and which areas are really critical to protect, and what effect is it going to have on the spotted owl."

The talk around the table in D.C., she discovered, was all about access and influence, not issues. "We're sitting in a meeting and there are all these names of representatives and senators flying around. It was, `If we do this, you can imagine what Volkmer is going to do about that,' and 'If Sid Yates won't support us on this, we're dead, so has anyone talked to Sid Yates?' And I'd say, 'Wait. Who's Volkmer? Who's Sid Yates?"

Pragmatism was the currency of access. Lobbyists had to go to Capitol Hill with proposals that were perceived as politically viable. "If they thought you were going to come and waste their time by saying, `Protect all old growth in the Northwest,' they wouldn't even let you in,"Rowland said. The lot of an environmental lobbyist during the Reagan-Bush years was tough, she said. "You felt assaulted, you felt like an island. And it wasn't just the administration. Congress, although nominally Democratically controlled, was not real friendly environmentally. Trying to protect ancient forests, and having to deal with the Oregon and Washington delegations, you felt anything you could accomplish was a major, major thing."

In the early 1990s, the national groups were working on myriad issues besides ancient forests, from saving the Everglades to keeping oil drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The job of an environmental lobbyist was to juggle those issues.

The single-mindedness of the forest activists who made the trip to D.C. contrasted starkly with that Beltway reality, Rowland said. "They're looking at one piece of the country, one issue, and it is so important in their lives that they are willing to give up practically everything else in their lives. If they have another job, which most of them do, they're working that job full-time and the rest of their time they're working this issue, and probably next to their family it is the most important thing in their lives. And many of them don't have families. Their environmental group is their family, and the forest is their family. And the reason they are willing to make a shambles of their personal lives by spending thousands of hours working as volunteers in environmental organizations is that they are passionately, passionately dedicated to keeping the forests alive.

"Put those two world views together and what have you got? It goes

 
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beyond a failure to communicate. You grow up with completely different views of what's important, what's essential for your mental wellbeing, what is doable, what is not doable."

THE WESTERN ANCIENT FOREST CAMPAIGN
By 1990, James Monteith realized that although the national conservation groups had brought national publicity to the destruction of ancient forests, they were not inclined to help finance a regional grassroots political campaign to win permanent protection for those forests. As executive director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, he had been wooing small foundations since 1988, trying to raise money for a national campaign that grassroots activists could run themselves, with their own lobbyist based in Washington, D.C.

By early 1991 the time was ripe for an infusion of serious foundation money into the campaign. The Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation had received a large bequest from Dorothy S. Bullitt, the recently deceased matriarch of a national media empire, and was about to become a major player in Northwest environmental politics.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based foundation built on the Sun Oil fortune, had recently reorganized. Its board of directors wanted forests to be a focus and had considered a tropical rainforest campaign. But Josh Reichert, who had been hired by Pew to develop an environmental program, argued that the foundation should start closer to home, by investing in saving the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. The major foundations supporting environmental causes had formed Environmental Grantmakers to coordinate their philanthropic programs. It was Donald Ross of the Rockefeller Family Fund, coordinator of Environmental Grantmakers, who suggested that the foundations create a new group to represent the grass roots in D.C.

"There seemed to be agreement that the issue needed to be nationalized," Tom Wathen of Pew said. "You needed a media campaign to get people in other parts of the country to care. What we found was that there was no strategy, no idea of what they wanted and how they were going to get there."

"The movement was a little dysfunctional," agreed Bill Lazar, president of the Portland-based Lazar Foundation. "Things were happening quickly. People were speaking with many voices and many tongues. We thought the best thing to do was to jumpstart it and get out of the way." In January of 1991, Lazar called Bonnie Phillips of Pilchuck Audubon at her home in Stanwood, Washington, and asked her to come to Portland for a meeting about forming a new organization that would work in Washington, D.C., to represent grassroots forest protection groups in the Northwest. "I was already overwhelmed," Phillips recalled. "But I understood the need. Grassroots groups had no power."

Out of the January meeting came the Western Ancient Forest  Campaign, created to build a national constituency for saving ancient
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forests through permanent legislation. To assure geographic representation, Lazar asked Phillips, Monteith, Julie Norman of the southern Oregon group Headwaters, and Tim McKay of the Northcoast Environmental Center in Arcata, California, to serve as the new organization's board of directors. Monteith left the Oregon Natural Resources Council, his home for 17 years, to become the campaign's executive vice president.   

A NEW PLAYER IN TOWN
In April of 1991, WAFC hired lobbyist Jim Owens to become the new organization's Washington, D.C.–based campaign director. Owens had lobbied successfully for designation of the Smith River National Recreation Area in northern California. No one in the Northwest wanted the job; the joke was that because it required the successful candidate to live in the nation's capitol, anyone who applied would have to be rejected on grounds of insanity. The WAFC board of directors saw a need to make grassroots groups comfortable with the new D.C.–based campaign. But there wasn't much time. "The fenders wanted to move quickly," Phillips said. "They felt there was no mechanism in place and it would take too long. I made sure we had one good grassroots group for each one of the seven national forests in Washington. But we never came up with a decision-making process to answer the question, How does Jim Owens know what to say on behalf of the grass roots?"

"We had no sense of democracy or process of any kind, but we figured the four of us could reassure everyone of the opportunity and its remarkable potential," Monteith recalled. "Eventually we'd work on democracy, but right now we had a war to fight."
Owens hit the ground running in D.C. One week after he opened the office, he sent activists in the Northwest a complete briefing paper on the politics of ancient forests inside the Beltway. At the same time Fran Hunt, a lobbyist for the National Wildlife Federation, and Kevin Kirchner, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund's new D.C. lobbyist, had been deployed to work full-time on forest issues. A new cast of characters was emerging. Not only was the forest campaign getting funding, it was gaining prominence and attracting new members to the national groups.

But the nationals initially fought funding for the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, which they saw as competition for foundation dollars—and as evidence of their own failure to advance the ancient forest agenda. It took a year of hard work before Owens gained acceptance within the conservation establishment's inner circle.

START-UP PAINS
The campaign suffered another setback in its first year, this one over money and lobbying. Because WAFC did not yet have tax-exempt status, Headwaters had agreed to be the campaign's fiscal sponsor. That

 
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meant the Headwaters board had to be intimately involved in WAFC's financial affairs—a situation that created escalating tension between Monteith, WAFC's chief fundraiser, and Norman, the president of Headwaters. Monteith threw himself into an aggressive fundraising campaign. Over WAFC's first 14 months, he raised nearly $1 million in foundation grants. Meanwhile, Owens was lobbying Congress hard on behalf of the Jontz Ancient Forest Protection Bill. This made Norman nervous. She and Monteith disagreed on how much money the campaign could spend to lobby Congress under tax laws governing nonprofits. By the summer of 1992 the Headwaters board was refusing to release money to cover the campaign's expenses, precipitating a temporary cash flow crisis. In September of 1992, Norman alerted funders to her concern.

At a November 1992 board meeting, both Norman and Monteith resigned from the WAFC board. The hard feelings between them persisted long afterward. "It was horrible," Bonnie Phillips said. "Both of them showed a great deal of class in not having this explode within the environmental community." Norman refuses to discuss the episode. But Phillips says that, in spite of everything, Monteith got WAFC off on the right foot. "I am eternally grateful to James Monteith.

He was the only one with enough vision and insight to see how to make it happen." The Western Ancient Forest Campaign became a home base for visiting forest activists. They brought their maps and photographs and their passion for the forests to the nation's capital and tried to communicate that passion to congressional staffers who had never seen an ancient forest.

THE BIG TIME
But the foundations still weren't persuaded that all the pieces were in place for an effective national campaign. Pete Myers, of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, obtained a timber industry video that employed sophisticated television ads to counter the ancient forest message. Alarmed, Myers commissioned an outside analysis to determine where the ancient forest campaign stood.

Soon after, the foundations created yet another new D.C.-based organization, Americans for the Ancient Forests, to mount a national media campaign. They hired Bob Chlopak, a Washington insider who had worked for the Democratic National Committee, and gave him a budget of $1.5 million to run it. Chlopak retained a high-powered public relations firm to produce radio spots on the logging of the last ancient forests, featuring the strains of a harmonica and the whine of a chainsaw. He sent out sophisticated press packets aimed primarily at the national media.

Chlopak had excellent access to Democratic leaders in Congress. He joined Owens in lobbying for passage of the Jontz bill. But the entry of big-time Beltway politics into the campaign rubbed some grassroots
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groups back in the Northwest the wrong way. They considered Chlopak, and to a lesser extent Owens, outsiders. And some of them were chafing under the controlling hand of their Pew patrons.

GOING ALL OUT
Save America's Forests was already in business when the Western Ancient Forest Campaign arrived in town in mid-1991. If the national groups gave WAFC the cold shoulder, WAFC in turn spurned these penniless, rough-around-the-edges upstarts. Carl Ross, co-founder of Save America's Forests, said Jim Owens told him in an early meeting that he wouldn't help him, but he would use his organization shamelessly for his own ends. By then Save America's Forests had built a loose-knit coalition of several hundred groups and businesses that worked on forest issues. Save America's Forests became a crash pad for itinerant activists. "We were a hand-to-mouth operation," Ross said. "We went out and got discarded furniture from in front of police stations. We got used computers. We stretched our bills out." When the money dried up, they took cash advances on Mark Winstein's credit cards to pay the rent.

Its pecuniary state didn't stop Save America's Forests from throwing everything it had at campaigns it considered crucial. In 1992, when Jim Jontz faced a rough reelection campaign in Indiana, the office emptied out as the entire staff went to work on his campaign.

While the Western Ancient Forest Campaign focused on the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, Ross and Wmstein worked tirelessly to bring the various regions of the country and the disparate groups in D.C. together on forest issues. At the time, the forest campaign was split regionally. "Each region thought its own campaign was the most important," Ross said. "The Northwest had the biggest trees; the Northern Rockies had the biggest roadless areas."

Late in their second year, with $1,000 in the bank, Ross and Winstein got word that an unacceptable Montana wilderness bill was nearing passage in Congress. The Senate version, sponsored by Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, and Conrad Burns, a Republican, proposed to protect 1.1 million acres of rocks and ice while releasing 4 million acres of roadless national forest land for logging. Save America's Forests spent its last $1,000 putting out a postcard mailing all over the country, telling members to urge their representatives in Congress to defeat it.

The Baucus—Burns wilderness bill did go down to defeat. But after the Montana campaign, Ross and Winstein were flat broke. "In the winter of 1992," Ross said, "we sent out a little postcard to our mem bers printed on a dot-matrix printer saying, 'We desperately need your help. Can you send us $100? If you don't send us money, we can't pay our rent and we won't survive.'" The mailing raised $15,000. Save America's Forests was rescued from extinction.

The push to get a strong Northwest ancient forest bill through Congress ended in 1992. The Jontz Ancient Forest Protection Act

 
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never gathered enough momentum to overcome the Northwest congressional delegation's opposition. On June 17, 1992, another strong ancient forest protection bill came close to passage in the House Interior Committee, which was chaired by Democratic Representative George Miller of California. Environmental lobbyists believed they had the votes for passage, but at the last minute House Speaker Tom Foley, a Democrat from eastern Washington, pulled the plug. Foley sent his aide Nick Ashmore into the committee hearing room to speak privately with several committee members, and the slim margin for passage disappeared.

In November of 1992, Jontz was defeated for reelection. His bill died with his departure from Congress. The following January, with the election of a new administration, the action would move to the executive branch of government.

 
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Chapter Nineteen

Salmon Are an OId Growth Species


The life cycle of the wild Pacific salmon is one of the great mysteries of nature. Spawned in cold mountain streams or lakes, the salmon smolt is imprinted with the memory of its birthplace. Young salmon carry that memory with them as they float downstream with the current, spend their adult lives at sea, and finally return to the exact bed where they were hatched, there to spawn and die. Salmon are as much a part of the Northwest's natural heritage as its great conifer forests.

Historically, the lower reaches of streams provided the most productive salmon spawning habitat. But heavy logging on downstream private lands throughout the 20th century steadily pushed salmon into the headwaters of streams on public land. By the 1980s, streams on both public and private land across the Northwest had been trashed. Logging and careless road-building on unstable soils had triggered landslides, burying salmon spawning areas in silt. Removal of large conifers along streambanks had deprived fish of resting pools and cooling shade.

East of the Cascades, logging and road-building, livestock grazing along streams, and large withdrawals of water for irrigation all contributed to severe stream degradation. Entire stocks of salmon and steel-head that had once spawned in Northwest streams were lost, a natural bounty squandered.

Yet despite growing documentation of the damage, federal and state forestry officials dragged their feet on protecting habitat for salmon and steelhead throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Ranchers' and farmers' groups fiercely fought restrictions on their grazing privileges and water rights. Timber companies wanted the big conifers that grew on valley bottoms, near streams.

Federal and state fisheries biologists in the Pacific Northwest seethed in silence over the loss of unique salmon and steelhead stocks and the damage inflicted on their habitat. In 1991, as irrefutable evidence of stream degradation and salmon declines accumulated, they broke their silence. The plight of Pacific salmon spilled over into the evolving forest protection debate—and transformed that debate virtually overnight.
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THE OREGON RIVERS COUNCIL
Bob Doppelt, Chicago-born and educated at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, forsook a career as a counseling psychologist to become a river rat and outfitter in Oregon.

By the mid-1980s, his customers were beginning to complain about poor fishing on Oregon's Rogue and Deschutes Rivers and on the Salmon River in Idaho. Doppelt began thinking about the need to protect the wild, free-flowing rivers of his adopted state.

On a float trip through the Grand Canyon in 1985, he read Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee's classic portrait of conservation legend David Brower, which described Brower's unsuccessful battle against the Bureau of Reclamation's Glen Canyon Dam. Soon after his return he contacted two friends about starting a river protection group. They liked the idea. So did Senator Mark Hatfield. "Hatfield was looking for a legacy, and he knew the old-growth battle would get worse," Doppelt recalled. Protecting rivers seemed less controversial than protecting valuable commercial forests. In 1987 the Oregon Rivers Council, a coalition of 28 groups ranging from the Oregon Kayaking and Canoe Club to the National Wildlife Federation, made its debut on Oregon's environmental scene.

The National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, passed by Congress in 1968, provided a vehicle for protecting free-flowing river sections from dams and destructive development. In 1988 the council, working closely with the Sierra Club and with Hatfield, won passage of the Oregon Omnibus Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the first-ever comprehensive statewide rivers protection act passed by Congress. The 1988 bill protected 40 Oregon rivers and river sections in their free-flowing state—a total of 1,500 river miles and 500,000 acres of adjacent land—and required federal agencies to develop plans to preserve the wild, scenic, and recreational values of these areas.

Getting a bill through Congress and getting the agencies to take it seriously were two different things, however. By the early 1990s the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management still were dragging their feet on writing plans to protect the designated streams from harmful logging, livestock grazing, and development. They had taken no steps to limit damage on private land bordering protected streams. Doppelt realized he had underestimated the agencies' ability to stall and finesse. And most of the state's rivers, those left out of the bill, still had no protection.

"I started wondering, What have we accomplished for fish>" Doppelt said. He began talking to fisheries biologists about what true protection of river systems would require.


THE ANDREWS WORKSHOP
In October of 1990, Doppelt and Charlie Dewberry, the council's recently hired fish habitat specialist, organized a workshop at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest near Blue River, Oregon, to discuss fish protection. They invited many of the nation's top fisheries and aquatic
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biologists. Most of the invited scientists subscribed to a school of thought on stream protection known as the "river continuum concept." An outgrowth of a six-year National Science Foundation project, its premise was that a river's functions could be understood only by studying its entire ecosystem, from headwaters to estuary and from floodplain to ridgeline.

To Doppelt's amazement, almost everyone accepted the invitation. Fifteen of the nation's leading experts on rivers and fisheries attended, including prominent Forest Service research biologists Jim Sedell and Gordon Reeves. "When we asked why they would come to a meeting called by a relatively small river conservation group, they said it was because no one had asked them to help put their research into policy form before," Doppelt said. "They had written a report for the National Science Foundation and it had sat on a shelf."

The biologists were sharply critical of fish protection standards in the Forest Service's new national forest plans. They said the 100-foot unlogged buffer strips the plans required along major fish-bearing streams were inadequate. They said the plans also should require buffers along streams with no fish and along streams that flowed only part of the year as well, because those smaller streams carried sediment downstream to where the fish were. They said entire floodplains, not just narrow strips along streambanks, should be considered in aquatic conservation plans. They talked about the need to protect the refugia—the last best habitat for fish. Jim Sedell came up with the slogan, "Protect the best, restore the rest."

After the meeting, Doppelt convened a team of Oregon fisheries biologists, who drew rough maps of the most intact watersheds remaining on the Pacific Coast. Doppelt laid them over a map of the wild and scenic rivers protected by the Oregon Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. There was almost no overlap.

The Andrews gathering was to prove a seminal conference—one of the first gatherings at which leading aquatic scientists from federal and state agencies and universities discussed their vision of watershed protection in policy terms. It jelled professional opinion about what needed to be done. The principles articulated during the two-day meeting—protect riparian areas and key watersheds, protect the best refugia, don't just put a Band-Aid on places that are hemorrhaging—soon became the standard for stream protection across the Northwest. Out of them came the Rivers Council's aquatic conservation strategy, federal stream protection standards for salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, and the concepts that would provide the foundation for President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan in 1993.

In 1993, Doppelt changed the name of his organization to the Pacific Rivers Council to reflect its expanding range of concern.

SALMON AT THE CROSSROADS
On the heels of the Andrews conference, in March of 1991, the American Fisheries Society published a startling report, "Pacific Salmon at

 
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the Crossroads," by fisheries biologists Willa Nehlson, Jim Lichatowich, and Jack Williams The three compiled the report from field data gathered by fisheries biologists all over the country. The Crossroads report warned that 214 runs of naturally spawning Pacific salmon were in decline and at risk of extinction. It said many factors, including hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and overfishing in the ocean, were responsible for this crisis. But it laid a large part of the blame on habitat loss and timber operations, especially in undammed streams where coastal coho salmon spawned.

The report's release prompted a major story in the New York Times. Soon after, the Washington, Oregon, and California chapters of the American Fisheries Society did their own studies of Pacific salmon runs. They identified still more stocks in decline. The 30-page report reached many of the same conclusions biologists had agreed upon at the Andrews conference. It stressed that wild salmon stocks must be preserved to maintain the natural genetic diversity that would allow them to survive ecological disturbances and climatic changes. And it called for "a new paradigm that advances habitat restoration and ecosystem function."

GANG OF FOUR
In 1991, ancient forest legislation was going nowhere in Congress. Jim Lyons, staff forester for the House Agriculture Committee, came up with an idea to get things moving by providing members of Congress with a menu of options from which they could build forest protection legislation.Lyons knew Forest Service wildlife biologist Jack Ward Thomas, University of Washington forest ecologist Jerry Franklin, and Yale University Forestry Dean John Gordon from their days together on the Society of American Foresters old-growth study team in the mid-1980s.

He knew Norm Johnson, the Oregon State University forest economist who had developed the computer program used in national forest planning to project timber yields. Lyons persuaded Harold Volkmer, the Missouri Democrat who chaired the forestry subcommittee of House Agriculture, to appoint the four to a new team that would develop options for protecting owls and other old-growth species. Volkmer told the team, "Don't surprise me with some damn fish."

The new team, immediately dubbed the Gang of Four, comman deered a large convention hall in Portland and enlisted scientists and resource specialists from all over the Northwest for the crash project. Bob Doppelt saw his chance. He called Norm Johnson and invited him to come to Eugene and have a look at his watershed maps. Doppelt put a mylar map of old-growth reserves developed by spotted owl biologists on top of the map of key watersheds. This time, there was a 60 to 70 percent overlap. "We said, 'Of course the best habitat for the owl is going to be the best habitat for the salmon," Doppelt recalled.

"It's the last intact forest. It's the roadless areas, primarily." Johnson, intrigued, asked Doppelt to suggest some fisheries biologists who
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could confirm the information. Doppelt put him in touch with Gordon Reeves and Jim Sedell. Sedell and Reeves, two of the Forest Service's strongest advocates for protection of fish habitat, joined the team, making it the Gang of Four Plus Two.
Reeves had recently done battle with the national forest side of his agency over two proposed timber sales in the North Fork of the Elk River on Oregon's South Coast. His research in the North Fork since 1985 had led Reeves to conclude that this stream produced more coho salmon per mile than any other coastal stream outside Alaska.

In August of 1990, the Siskiyou National Forest advertised two sales in the high reaches of the North Fork watershed. Jim Rogers of the environmental group Friends of Elk River sued to stop the sales. The Forest Service auctioned them anyway.

When Reeves learned his own agency planned to log in the North Fork watershed, he warned the acting Siskiyou forest supervisor that cutting trees on its steep, unstable soils would harm the North Fork's world-class fishery. In January, recognizing it had a losing case on its hands, the Siskiyou National Forest withdrew the sales.

Jim Sedell had recently conducted an important research project focusing on the loss of salmon habitat in the Upper Grande Ronde River of northeastern Oregon, a critical spawning area for endangered Snake River spring chinook. Between 1957 and 1989, numbers of adult spring chinook in the 240,000-acre basin had dropped from about 3,000 to fewer than 400.

Sedell and a colleague counted the number of large pools in the Upper Grande Ronde and compared their 1991 findings with those from a similar survey done 50 years earlier. They found the number of deep pools, where salmon rest on their return journey to spawn, had declined by 59 percent as sediment from logging, grazing, and roads washed into the river. The findings provided some of the most solid evidence yet that land management activities were contributing to the salmon's demise.


THE WATERSHED OPTION
At the Portland convention center, 200 scientists and resource specialists spent several weeks poring over maps, transparencies, and field notes. Finally, a watershed option took shape. It defined 137 "key watersheds" critical to the survival of Pacific salmon, from the Canadian border to San Francisco Bay and east to the Snake River in Idaho. Some of these watersheds provided habitat for threatened fish stocks. Others contained exceptionally high-quality habitat and pure water. Within all of them, the scientists proposed removing or storm-proofing old logging roads to prevent erosion, logging on a 180-year rotation to avoid disturbing recovering soils, leaving wider unlogged buffers along streams, and keeping roads out of roadless areas. This watershed option quickly became the new standard in the evolving forest discussion.

On July 24, 1991, the Gang of Four released its report to Congress. It revealed that protecting salmon would carry a high price tag. Under

 
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even the least restrictive watershed option, the annual timber yield from federal lands in the spotted owl region would decline from 2.6 billion board feet to 1.5 billion board feet.

But political opposition to the concept was muted Salmon, unlike spotted owls, were a resource the Northwest valued and identified with. Salmon also produced jobs—in commercial and sport fishing and in coastal fishing communities.
Within the top levels of the Forest Service, the implications of the Gang of Four report ticked like a time bomb with a short fuse. The agency appointed two task forces to review salmon protection measures in the new forest plans. The review was overdue. Each national forest had been left to its own discretion on how much protection to provide for fish in the new forest plans. Not surprisingly, the plans, when they finally came out, varied widely.

In August 1991, a regional panel reported that the new plans were not specific enough to determine whether or not they would protect the long-term viability of native fish runs. In October of 1991, Jeffrey Kershner, national manager of Forest Service fish habitat programs, strongly endorsed the Gang of Four's fish protection measures, saying they would provide "a strong basis for a conservation strategy" for sensitive wild fish across the region. There was no way out of it. Like it or not, the Forest Service would have to start taking fish protection seriously in the owl forests west of the Cascades.

RETREAT ON THE GRANDE RONDE
East of the Cascades, in the realm of the Snake River salmon, the Forest Service continued to stall on salmon protection, even with the full power of the Endangered Species Act breathing down its neck. Though dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers were largely responsible for decimating the wild Snake River runs, Jim Sedell's research on large pools and other studies had documented the heavy toll exacted by logging, livestock grazing, and road-building.

The listing of the Snake River chinook and sockeye salmon appeared imminent when Senator Mark Hatfield convened a salmon summit in October of 1990 to try to head off legal gridlock over wild salmon. He asked federal agencies to agree to voluntary salmon-protection measures. Participants included not only state and federal agencies but also the Indian tribes of the Columbia Basin: the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, the Yakama Indian Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the Nez Perce.

These tribes had harvested the abundant salmon of the Columbia and Snake Rivers for commerce, subsistence, and spiritual ceremonies over many thousands of years. Though their best fishing places had been drowned by Columbia and Snake River dams, they retained treaty rights, upheld by the federal courts, to fish for salmon at usual and accustomed areas. The question by 1990 was whether or not
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there would be any fish left in the river for them to take.

At Vey Meadow in northeast Oregon, the Grande Ronde flows out of the logged, mined, and grazed Wallowa—Whitman National Forest across a broad valley on its way to its confluence with the Snake. Vey Meadow lies within the 6 4-million-acre territory the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla ceded to the U.S. government in 1855. Fallen logs and snags are few and far between in this stretch of the river, and the shading willows are gone, a casualty of cattle grazing. Without shade, summer temperatures can exceed a fish-killing 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

When he was a boy growing up on the Umatilla Reservation, Michael Farrow came to Vey Meadow to learn how to hook a salmon. But when the number of spawners began to decline sharply in 1977, the tribe closed its own Grande Ronde salmon fishery. Farrow, who eventually became the director of natural resources for the Umatilla Tribes, regretted that his own sons had never fished the Upper Grande Ronde.

In 1991, the Forest Service agreed to participate with biologists and hydrologists from the Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and the state of Oregon in developing a restoration plan for this critical spawning area. The resulting plan to bring salmon back to all the spawning streams of the Upper Grande Ronde was a model, one Farrow believed should be adopted throughout the Blue Mountains.

It recommended establishment of protective stream buffers, restoration of native plant communities in floodplains, the return of woody debris to the river channel, and reestablishment of the river's natural course. It set forth processes for cleaning up mining wastes, reducing road densities, and restricting or prohibiting livestock grazing near streams. Farrow promptly implemented the recommendations on the Umatilla Reservation. Among other changes, the tribe stopped cutting trees larger than 16 inches in diameter along salmon streams and prohibited logging on slopes greater than 35 percent. But the Forest Service lacked the political will to follow through. Though the Wallowa—Whitman National Forest supervisor agreed to the tough new standards, ranchers and timber companies opposed it, and in May of 1992, Forest Service Regional Forester John Lowe killed it.

In 1994, the Forest Service offered a much weaker Upper Grande Ronde plan. Farrow sent a scorching letter to the local district ranger, asserting that the agency's new plan violated the federal government's trust obligation to tribes in the basin.

"The spring chinook population in the Upper Grande Ronde is no longer strong enough to withstand the political machinations that the La Grande District has allowed during the last two years," he wrote. "These fish can no longer wait for you to attempt to gain political consensus. The compromises made in the draft conservation strategy, and the 97 years it has taken the U.S. Forest Service to begin planning for watershed conservation, will combine to result in the loss of these precious and ancient fish.”
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Chapter Twenty

The Forgotten Forests

In the early 1990s, as the owl wars raged west of the Cascades, a quieter and more complex forest drama was building over the great pine forests of eastern Oregon and eastern Washington.

Like the old-growth forests of the rainy Pacific slope, the open, arid forests of the Intermountain West had been transformed by a century of overcutting. But these forests had no spotted owl—no single species closely associated with all forest types east of the Cascades—to represent them in court. And the selective logging typical on these forests wasn't as visually shocking as the stark geometry of westside clearcuts.

Eastside forest activists, thinly scattered across a vast region, had to devise a different strategy if they hoped to save the last of the stately old-growth ponderosa pine and western larch. In 1992, after several years spent laying the groundwork, they made their move.

The forests of the east side were even more fragmented than those west of the Cascades. Giant pines had been logged for railroad ties, for timbers to shore up mine shafts, and for log cabins to house the miners, ranchers, and loggers who settled this country of harsh climate and scarce water. In time, a timber industry grew up, focused on the big yellow-belly ponderosas, so named for their fine yellow-hued wood.

High-grading—the practice of taking the most valuable pine and larch and leaving the less valuable conifer species behind—was so visible that by the 1990s the Forest Service itself was forced to acknowledge what was written across the landscape. In the 1980s, when national forest planners east of the Cascades conducted inventories of old growth, they discovered they had far less than they had believed. On central Oregon's Deschutes National Forest, where the new inventories showed a 40 percent disparity, the agency was forced to make steep reductions in logging levels.

In 1989, the National Audubon Society reached cooperative agreements with national forest supervisors in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington to conduct updated, on-the-ground inventories of old-growth stands east of the Cascades and field test the agency's own reports. The unusual arrangement, part of Audubon's national Adopt a-Forest program, would give the Forest Service its first credible
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information on the extent of eastside old growth. And it would give conservationists ammunition to launch an effective eastside forest protection campaign.

A handful of eastside activists had worked tirelessly since the 1970s to protect the roadless areas of eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. They won an important victory in 1984 with designation of the 121,400-acre North Fork John Day Wilderness, which preserved habitat for large herds of deer and elk and a free-flowing salmon stream in the rugged Blue Mountains.  But by the close of the 1980s, most forests east of the Cascades remained open to logging and livestock grazing.

Volunteers in the Audubon forest mapping project ventured into remote draws and rugged canyons, often on foot or horseback, to look for pockets of old-growth ponderosa pine, western larch, and, on wetter sites, Douglas-fir and white fir. They used aerial photos, logging records, and other Forest Service data to narrow their search. They explored valleys that logging roads had not yet reached. What they found revealed not only the scarcity of old growth but also the fragmented condition of the heavily roaded eastside national forests.

A FOREST HEALTH "EMERGENCY"
In the late 1980s spruce budworms, pine bark beetles, and Douglas-fir tussock moths began munching their way across 2 million acres of the Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon. A crisis mentality gripped the Forest Service with the first reports of this "forest health emergency" east of the Cascades.

The reasons for the epidemic of defoliating and tree-killing insects were complex. Fifty years of fire suppression and a century of high-grade logging and livestock grazing had dramatically altered the composition of the eastside forests. In many logged areas, old-growth ponderosa pine, naturally resistant to insects and fire, had been replaced by dense stands of Douglas-fir and white fir, species more vulnerable to both.

From an ecological perspective, the insects were merely doing their job by thinning out these weaker trees. But in their wake they left ghostly stands of dead spires, which alarmed motorists driving along Interstate 84 through the Blue Mountains.

Fire too was a natural forest shaper east of the Cascades. Frequent natural ground fires had created the open, parklike ponderosa pine stands. Before the arrival of white settlers, native people had employed fire actively to open the forest and create habitat for game. But in the mid-20th century the Forest Service began an aggressive, almost religious campaign to snuff out forest fires. Smokey Bear drove home the message that fire, all fire, was bad for forests and wildlife. By the 1980s, fire had been excluded for so long that the forest floor in some areas was piled with dead wood—potential fuel for major stand-replacing wildfires—not only in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington but across the Intermountain West.
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NO SILVER BULLET
Boyd Wickman, a Forest Service research entomologist, studied cycles of insect infestations in the forests of the Intermountain West for 25 years and in California for 10 years before that. In 1991, in a paper prepared for a research institute, Wickman warned that forest managers might have to start over to erase the mistakes of a century.

Each piece of the solution—prescribed fire, biological control of insects, and conversion of overstocked forests through thinning—would carry heavy costs and high risks, he said. Moreover, truly restoring the forests would require conserving virtually all remaining old-growth ponderosa pines in the Blue Mountains, both for their genetic traits and as a source of seed to grow healthy new pine forests.

"We will not achieve healthy forests overnight and there are no silver bullets," Wickman wrote. "We must now pay for the billions of board feet of cheap pine logged earlier in the century. We will pay and pay and probably see little or no return on our investments in our lifetime."

Wickman's paper never was formally released by the Forest Service, and Wickman's message that the remaining old-growth pines should be preserved fell on deaf ears.

The Forest Service was slow to embrace the concept that fire was not the enemy in these forests or the notion that insect infestations were part of a natural cycle. Forest managers could not bear to see diseased trees "go to waste" in the forest when some of their commercial value could be salvaged by logging them.

In late 1991 the Portland regional office of the Forest Service launched a massive salvage logging campaign to cut as much of the dead timber as possible, as quickly as possible. The rush to salvage won strong support from the timber industry and from members of the Northwest congressional delegation. Platoons of Forest Service employees from forests west of the Cascades were detailed to eastside forests in a crash program to help lay out the sales.

But the loaned timber sale planners were not familiar with the ecology of Blue Mountain forests. Because most of them had no opportunity to get out on the ground during the winter, they marked sales on maps, using outdated forest inventories. Many of the "salvage" sales they laid out contained mostly healthy old-growth trees.


BLUE PAINT ON BIG TREES
In 1991, Karen Coulter moved with her partner, Asante Riverwind, and her young son, Sasha, from Washington to 40 acres of backcountry near the tiny eastern Oregon community of Spray. They lived in a yurt without running water or electricity at the edge of the Umatilla National Forest, raised goats and chickens, and kept three horses for exploring the forest at their back door. By candlelight and oil lamp, Coulter put out a newsletter, Pacific Mountain Wildcat, on a manual typewriter, alerting others to logging activity in northeastern Oregon.

Coulter, a longtime Earth First! activist, had decided to try to work  within the mainstream to protect the forests. More than most activists,
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she and Asante tried to live their principles—to live lightly on the land and in harmony with their rural neighbors and local Forest Service officials. In 1992, Coulter got a seasonal job conducting a rare plant inventory for the Umatilla National Forest. At the same time, she was mapping old growth as an Adopt-a-Forest volunteer.

Coulter spent the summer of 1992 roaming the mountains and canyons of the national forest's Heppner District. In her explorations, she discovered groves of old-growth ponderosa pine in canyons the Forest Service had seldom visited. She fell in love with the old pine and larch and the creatures of the Blue Mountain forest. Her survey revealed something else: large, sound trees marked with blue paint, indicating they were to be cut as part of so-called "salvage sales" in areas infested with insects.

She and Asante obtained Forest Service studies by entomologists and forest ecologists. They read up on the role of insects in eastside forests. They concluded that many of these stands did not need salvaging. Coulter took her information to Delanne Ferguson, the Heppner district ranger, who sent a silviculturist into the field to verify her report. As a result of Coulter's on-the-ground work, Ferguson ordered changes in the district's salvage logging plan to reduce the number of sound, healthy trees removed.

Progressive district rangers like Ferguson were eager to move beyond politically driven "salvage logging" and begin practicing true forest restoration. They had drawn up plans for using prescribed burns to remove dead wood, breaking up soils compacted by grazing and logging, and repairing damaged streams. But though many eastside forests desperately needed this kind of long-term restoration, Deputy Northwest Regional Forester John Lowe told them it would be tough to justify the cost to Congress.

At appropriations time, it was far easier to get money for salvage sales that benefited mills and local communities than for costly projects to heal damaged forests.


NO PLACE TO HIDE
The forest activists who took part in the mapping of eastside old growth meant everything to the campaign that was slowly taking shape in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. They were its eyes and ears and its sturdy legs.

"Our people have been on every unit of every sale," said Judith Johnson of National Audubon, who coordinated the eastside surveys. "It's been an education for the people in the ranger districts. They've had to walk these units too. Suddenly they've had to focus on old growth, riparian zones, and wildlife. The whole process has enabled Forest Service employees to do their jobs better."

Yet eastside activists knew they couldn't count on political support for saving forests, either in Congress or in their own communities.

Environmentalists east of the Cascades walked a precarious line. Unable to hide behind the anonymity that cities offer, they were highly
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visible in isolated communities that lived by logging, grazing, and farming. Their allies were hundreds of miles away. Their adversaries stood next to them in line at the grocery check-out stand.

Living in conservative rural communities required them to eschew the deliberately inflammatory rhetoric of their city cousins "You're more circumspect," said Tonia Wolf, a central Oregon activist. "I'm really aware of the consequences of the requests that I make. I have to keep checking my position to make sure I'm not on some self-indulgent trip."

Wolf worked to protect the wildlife and old-growth pines of the Ochoco National Forest. Like many eastside activists, she saw herself as the last line of defense against overcutting and overgrazing on public lands. "I'm the only one doing this on the Ochoco," she said. "If I leave it, it will die." Not just the campaign, she said. The forest itself.

Environmentalists had few congressional allies east of the Cascades. Their most influential adversary in the early 1990s was Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley, who represented an eastern Washington district. On matters affecting his home turf, no one in Congress would take Foley on.

During his long tenure in Congress, Foley had made no secret of his support for the timber industry. In 1976, during debate over the National Forest Management Act, Foley argued against an economic test for logging of "marginal lands"—those where the costs of selling timber might exceed returns to the federal treasury. He warned that such a test might bar logging "in great portions of the national forests"—including the Colville National Forest in his own House district.

In May of 1992, Foley announced that he would not support legislation to protect eastern Washington's old-growth forests. At the time, roads and clearcuts were carving the Colville at an unprecedented rate. The Spokane-based Inland Empire Public Lands Council launched a high-profile campaign to hold Foley's feet to the fire. In June, eight billboards appeared in the Spokane area featuring a photo of a large, freshly logged clearcut and the message: "Your Colville National Forest: A clearcut shame!"


NOT ENOUGH HABITAT
The first attempt to save eastside old growth through the federal courts failed. In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Oregon Natural Resources Council, and other groups filed suit against the Forest Service charging that the Winema National Forest's 1987 draft forest plan violated the National Forest Management Act. They said the Winema, in southern Oregon on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, had disregarded studies by the Forest Service's own biologists, failing to set aside enough habitat for five sensitive species: the pine marten, the pileated, three-toed, and black-backed woodpecker, and the northern goshawk. A federal magistrate eventually upheld the plan's legality. But  the campaign on behalf of eastside forests was just beginning.
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The field reports from Audubon Adopt-a-Forest volunteers showed that logging had reduced the extent of old growth outside wilderness areas on the east side by at least 80 percent. They also revealed that planners had engaged in what amounted to a paper exercise in order to comply with a federal wildlife protection law.

To accommodate species associated with old growth, like the goshawk and woodpecker, they had laid out small old-growth reserves in a grid across the landscape. But at least 20 percent and possibly as many as half of these reserves didn't even contain old growth. Many had been logged in the 1980s. Where reserves did not meet the biological definition of old growth, planners had labeled them "capable" old growth, on the theory that someday, if left alone, they might produce suitable habitat.

The agency's own research biologists had concluded that old-growth areas set aside for wildlife were far too small and that much of the habitat within them would not support old-growth species. For instance, a study by Forest Service research biologist Evelyn Bull revealed that nesting pileated woodpeckers needed four times as much protected habitat as the agency had set aside for them. When Audubon surveyors looked around for replacement old growth within a five-mile radius of these wildlife reserves, in many cases they found it simply did not exist.

The Forest Service was not eager to release this new survey data. But it was quickly forwarded to Nathaniel Lawrence, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. Forest activists now had the documentation they needed to move their campaign east.

 
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 President Clinton and Vice President Gore listen intently as forest ecologist Jerry Franklin (at left, back to camera) explains the principles of "new forestry" at the Northwest Forest Conference, held in Portland on April 2, 1993.

 
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