Tree Huggers

Chapter Twenty-one

Presidential Politics

In the wake of the God Squad debacle, in the middle of a reelection campaign, and with the Rio Earth Summit looming, President George Bush needed something to polish his administration's tarnished environmental record.

George Bush had promised during the 1988 campaign to be "the environmental president." No ideologue on environmental issues, he had restored credibility to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish and Wildlife Service, badly damaged by the Reagan administration's frontal assault on environmental laws.

But whatever Bush's good intentions, they had been undermined by right-wing factions within his administration, including Vice President Dan Quayle, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, and the crew at the Interior Department under Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan. In mid-1992, as the administration became more deeply mired in political quicksand over management of Northwest forests, Bush moved to control the political damage.

EMPTY PROMISES
On June 4, 1992, Forest Service Chief F. Dale Robertson stepped up to the plate when he announced his agency would abandon clearcutting as its preferred method of logging and begin practicing "ecosystem management" on its lands. Cy Jamison, director of the Bureau of Land Management, chimed in with a vague promise that his agency would adopt a policy of "total forest management."

The politically timed and largely symbolic announcements came on the heels of Bush's announcement earlier in the week that the United States would contribute $150 million to help save the world's forests. Bush clearly hoped that would defuse criticism that the United States had no moral standing to deplore deforestation in the tropical rainforests while it continued to clearcut its own virgin forests.

But any goodwill the shift might have bought Bush was quickly erased a week later, when the New York Times published satellite photos from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. The images, each depicting about 1,000 square miles, contrasted the view of a tropical rainforest and a section of the Mount Hood National

 
the alarm on global warming, ozone depletion, and worldwide deforestation. He had led the congressional delegation to the Earth Summit. In his book, Gore called for the United States to lead by example in ending global deforestation.

"In the United States, particularly in heavily logged regions like the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, there is a renewed assault on the great stretches of temperate rainforest that are so important to us," he wrote. "In national forests throughout the country, logging roads are being built in order to facilitate the more rapid logging, even clear-cutting, of public lands under contracts that require the sale of the trees at rates far below market prices."

Gore even boasted that he had "helped lead the successful fight to prevent the overturning of protections for the spotted owl": "In the spirited Senate debate, it became clear that the issue was not just the spotted owl but the 'old growth' forest itself. The spotted owl is a so-called keystone species, whose disappearance would mark the loss of an entire ecosystem and the many other species dependent upon it. Ironically, if those wishing to continue the logging had won, their jobs would have been lost anyway as soon as the remaining 10 percent of the forest was cut."   

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Bush promptly nicknamed Gore "Mr. Ozone" and started ridiculing his environmental doomsday rhetoric on the stump. Clinton reacted by trying to soft-pedal his running mate's reputation as a radical environmentalist. Gore began backing away from his own printed words. In a debate between the vice-presidential candidates, Quayle accused Gore of calling for a $100 billion global Marshall Plan to solve Earth's environmental crises, with the United States and other prosperous industrialized nations footing the bill. Gore denied his book had advocated that and ducked the opportunity to defend the book's themes before a national TV audience.

Bill Clinton's own environmental record as governor was not stellar. In the 1970s, timber companies had begun rapidly converting the virgin mixed hardwood-and-pine forests of Arkansas to pine plantations. Hardwood species most valuable for wildlife—hickory, pawpaw, and persimmon—were routinely poisoned to keep them from competing with pine. Weyerhaeuser Company and Georgia Pacific Corporation became major players in this wholesale forest conversion when they bought up a number of private land holdings in the state and replanted them with pine.

In 1979, during his first term as governor, Clinton appointed a citizen task force on forest practices, which held hearings around the state to discuss what should be done about the forest conversion problem. But nothing came of the effort because in 1980, with substantial help from the timber industry, Clinton was defeated for reelection. In 1983, after he was reelected, Clinton gave the timber industry in his home

environmentalists or the owl for the impasse. He took the longer view. The economic transition occurring in the Northwest, he said, was like others occurring all across the nation, even in his home state

ENTER THE MARBLED MURRELET
Meanwhile, another forest bird stirred up new problems for George Bush.

On September 28, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under a federal court order, announced that it would list the marbled murrelet as a threatened species in Oregon, Washington, and California. The elusive, robin-sized seabird spends its life in coastal waters and nests in old-growth conifers up to 50 miles inland. Biologists believed the murrelet was even more dependent on old-growth stands than the spotted owl.

Forest Service officials in Portland were in denial about the plight of the murrelet. They remarked that the bird could just use the same habitat the Forest Service had already set aside for the spotted owl.

During the murrelet's summer nesting season, logging of murrelet habitat was barred. But in late September of 1992, at the end of the nesting season, and with the listing of the murrelet as a threatened species imminent, officials in the Forest Service's Northwest regional office allowed logging of murrelet habitat to resume. Trees fell within one of the most important murrelet sites on the Olympic National Forest, an area where biologists had counted 124 murrelet sightings in one 40-acre old-growth tract. Environmentalists denounced the incident, saying it constituted "blatant and calculated disregard" for the Endangered Species Act. And George Bush got another black eye.   

KEEPING A PROMISE
Bill Clinton was elected with key support from Oregon and Washington. The week after the election, a gleeful Bruce Babbitt kept a speaking engagement at a water law conference at Portland's Lewis & Clark College. Babbitt, former Arizona governor and president of the League of Conservation Voters, already was rumored to be Clinton's top choice for Interior Secretary. As governors, Babbitt and Clinton had worked together to help found the Democratic Leadership Council, an effort to blend a liberal social agenda with conservative fiscal policies.

Babbitt promised confidently during his Portland appearance that the Clinton-Gore administration would restore environmental credibility to the federal government. He attacked the resource extraction industries for trying to subvert environmental laws and for their "record of abuse and excess." He praised the Endangered Species Act, calling it "the single most inventive and trail-blazing law of this century." It must never be weakened, Babbitt said.

On December 16, as the Clinton transition team began its work in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton's promise to hold a forest summit in the Pacific Northwest was high on the agenda. Tom Tuchmann, forestry staffer for the Senate Agriculture Committee, was summoned to Little

He pitched the Pacific Rivers Council's aquatic conservation strategy as a job-creating program. Not only would restoring battered salmon runs help revive the commercial and sport fishing industries, he said, taking out roads and culverts in key watersheds could also put unemployed loggers back to work.

"Jim got very intrigued," Doppelt said. "He is the one who called Katie McGinty. They had a major political problem on their hands with salmon, and they didn't want to go through this twice. The second they understood there were jobs associated with this, they were with us."   

THE FIRST RETREAT
The honeymoon was to be of short duration. On January 20, 1993, during his confirmation hearing, Babbitt defended the Endangered Species Act before western Republicans. "When we start extinguishing links in the ecological web of the Western landscape, we take enormous risks and ultimately threaten our ability to live in harmony and productively in that environment," he said.

"You are walking right into the middle of a hornet's nest," warned Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, one of the law's harshest critics. But Oregon's senior senator, Republican Mark Hatfield, gave Babbitt a surprise vote of confidence, saying he had the potential to become one of the nation's greatest Interior secretaries. Mark Rey, the timber industry's politically savvy D.C. lobbyist, praised both Babbitt and Espy and urged the Senate to confirm them. "Both have demonstrated knowledge and experience about natural resource issues, and they are expected to share President Clinton's dual concern for the environment and the economy," he said.

On February 17, in a speech to Congress describing his deficit-reduction plan, Clinton gave environmentalists reason to cheer when he vowed to stop selling federally subsidized timber, livestock forage, and hard-rock minerals. The new president promised he would push for a 12.5 percent royalty on precious minerals taken from federal land, a phase-out of timber sales that cost the federal treasury more to administer than they brought in, and an unspecified increase in the fee ranchers paid to graze cattle on federal land. Babbitt wasted no time announcing that he would prepare a bold proposal to reform the federal grazing program from top to bottom.

Western senators and governors who had delivered their states to the Democrats were livid. In mid-March, Democrats Max Baucus of Montana and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado demanded and got a meeting with Clinton and Gore. Afterward, Baucus said the president had "recognized the adverse impact that his plan would have on Montana and other Western states." Soon after that, a White House spokesman said the proposal to phase out subsidies would remain in the president's budget but that Clinton would allow Congress to delete it.

In the absence of White House support for a hard line, Babbitt was

Chapter Twenty-two

A Friendly Administration

The Old Ashland Armory hummed with high anxiety on the first weekend in February 1993, as forest activists from Southeast Alaska to the Sierras converged on the college town of Ashland, Oregon, for an urgent strategy session.

Julie Norman, president of the environmental group Headwaters, was nervous. She knew the ancient forest movement had reached a critical juncture. A dozen years of Reagan-Bush had forced activists to become effective political adversaries. The Clinton administration was just two weeks old, but already the political climate was shifting. The question on her mind, on everyone's mind, was how the Northwest's old-growth forests would fare with this new "friendly" administration.

In organizing this conference, Norman had taken a risk. Most gatherings of forest activists were tribal affairs, where tree huggers could let down their guard, trade tactics, party, argue, commiserate, and reinforce each other in the work they all shared: saving the forests, if necessary one tree at a time.

But this year her intuition told her the tribe needed to hear new messages, new voices, if it was to save itself from a growing insularity. She had invited Agnes Tao-Why-Wee Pilgrim, the oldest known descendant of the Takelma people, to speak about the Native American relationship with the forest. She had asked Jennifer Belcher, the newly elected Washington state commissioner of public lands, to deliver straight talk on tactics.

Logging contractor Tom Hirons, a wise-use leader who harbored an inchoate desire to reach out across the chasm that divided him from environmentalists, would be speaking. So would Denny Scott, a national officer in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Scott had made the tough decision to explore with environmentalists the possibility that labor and the environmental movement might share common ground in the coming showdown. It was a bold step; until now, unions had allied themselves with timber companies in the campaign to keep federal timber flowing to Northwest mills.

Norman had tacked a number of banners to the walls that conveyed her own philosophy. The one that seemed most relevant today was from

grassroots organizing and quick-response press releases and news conferences—to argue that environmentalists were destroying a way of life. The forest preservationists were on the defensive politically, accused of callous indifference to the plight of unemployed loggers.

Several D.C. environmental lobbyists had flown west to be in this hall today. They had a message for the battle-worn ground troops: Overnight, the world had changed. And so must their movement.   

THE CHALLENGE
"You are a group of people who have changed history," said Jim Owens of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign. "You've taken this issue across the nation. The president has given the signal that this is going to be his top environmental priority. But we're in a new political environment. Twelve years of Bush and Reagan have caused us to be very defensive. Now the challenge is to move forward, to identify the paths of progress, to figure out how to work with a friendly administration."

Owens urged the activists to help educate new members of Congress and to work with governors and friends in the administration. Most of all, he said, they must help reduce the polarization in the Northwest by reaching out to new audiences: retired citizens, nurses, church groups. "We need to refocus our energy," he said. "We have common shared values. Why do we live here? We want the trees on the hill, the fish in the streams. We can't get a bill passed that achieves our goal until we change the political environment in these communities. The members of Congress like to be green, but we need to help them, because the environment they operate in is not green."

Kevin Kirchner, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, warned the activists not to pin all their hopes on continued court injunctions. "The courts have served as a backstop, but there's no way we can sue over every timber sale," he said. "The courts ought not be an agent for social change but a brake on environmental destruction."

Jim Britell, the street-smart conservation director for Kalmiopsis Audubon on the southern Oregon Coast, had some harsh words for his friends in the movement. "Many of you are apolitical," he said. "You don't vote, don't give money." He lectured them for letting Jim Jontz take the fall for them. About 30 environmentalists, Britell among them, had gone to Indiana to canvass and raise money for Jontz. It hadn't been enough.

"Embracing environmentalism cost Jontz 200,000 votes," Britell admonished. "If we want access, we can give money, we can volunteer, but somehow we have to pay our way. We have to find our roots, with the labor movement, with the populists, with the Democrats. Let's learn the proper lesson from our experiences."

Even Andy Kerr, veteran conservation director for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, who had cultivated an image as the movement's attack dog, tried to get into the spirit of the occasion with

Each person in the room had sacrificed to protect the forests. In return, the work of saving the forests had given their lives purpose. They could be forgiven for not being receptive to the message that Bill Clinton's election meant not victory, but more compromise.

As for outreach, forest activists had been vilified, threatened, and ostracized for their role in shutting down the forests. Though some rural activists had reached an uneasy accommodation with loggers and millworkers that allowed them to live side-by-side in small communities, their values and world views remained far apart. Tree huggers had developed the protective armor they needed to survive in rural outposts. It was hard to see how they could make timber workers their political allies.

A more complicated dynamic was at work as well. Politicians tended to group environmentalists with advocates for workers' rights, civil rights, and social justice under the progressive Democratic umbrella. Yet the two movements sprang from different origins. The labor movement, born out of the mobilization of exploited workers, had achieved its power through often-bloody political confrontation. The early nature conservation movement was a movement of the privileged and politically influential. Its leaders, many of them Republicans, hobnobbed with presidents. In the Northwest, the labor and conservation movements seldom had been natural allies.

The environmental movement reborn on Earth Day 1970 was more egalitarian. Yet many forest activists still felt more comfortable communing with the forest than communicating with their working-class neighbors, more confident taking on federal agencies than engaging the political system directly by campaigning or running for office.

As Andy Kerr once said when accused of lacking compassion for timber workers: "We're not humanitarians, we're environmentalists."

The forest protection movement's reliance on a mix of passion, science, technical mastery, and political pressure had served it well during the Reagan-Bush years. But a moderate Democrat with traditional ties to labor and human rights groups was now in the White House. Could the movement survive in this new political climate?

As activists debated strategy, they chose not to grapple with the need to broaden their political base directly. Instead, a consensus emerged: They would fight to save all the old growth, all the roadless areas, all the pristine salmon streams. On that, compromise was impossible.

Moreover, they were now ready to raise the ante. It was time to confront the new administration with the need to protect forests on the other side of the Cascades.


EXPANDING EAST
On March 30, three days before Clinton's forest summit, activists armed with the Audubon Adopt-a-Forest surveys and a sheaf of Forest Service wildlife studies held a press conference in Portland. Nathaniel Lawrence, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, announced that he

Chapter Twenty-three

Summit in Portland

On April 1, 1993, Bill Clinton, hatless in the rain, made his way through a throng of supporters outside the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland. His step had a confident bounce. In the third month of his administration, the new president still believed all things, even the conflict over old-growth forests, could be resolved if the right people were brought to the table. Tomorrow, at his promised Northwest Forest Conference, the process would begin.

Clinton was committing extraordinary resources to the daylong event. Among those in attendance would be Vice President Al Gore, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner, and Alice Rivlin of the Office of Management and Budget.

They would sit around a vast conference table with scientists, environmentalists, economists, timber industry executives, small business owners, labor union representatives, loggers, local officials, and tribal leaders—even a Roman Catholic archbishop. They would discuss problems and solutions. Conspicuous by their absence would be members of the Northwest congressional delegation. This was to be an administration show all the way.

The announced purpose of the event, a combination teach-in and regionwide town hall meeting, was to give the new administration guidance as it began crafting a solution to the forest impasse. Equally important to the new administration was to place the new president squarely in the middle of the forest debate. In a region that had helped him defeat George Bush, it was important not to take sides or fix blame.

The new president promised that he would exert leadership and not let the conflict continue to fester as his predecessor had. Breaking legal gridlock, he said, would require the federal agencies involved in the forest impasse—the Forest Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Marine Fisheries Service—to work together, not at cross-purposes. With the God Squad spectacle still a vivid memory, it was an appealing idea to just about everyone except wary environmentalists. Legal gridlock, after all, was what had kept the federal timber sale program tied up in court during most of the Bush administration.

Babbitt sat enthralled on a Saturday afternoon as he listened to speaker after speaker discuss the need to restore the Applegate watershed and manage all of its natural resources sustainably. Afterward, he proclaimed the Applegate Partnership the wave of the future.

“I may be witness today to a very important beginning," he said at an impromptu news conference. "It's important to know there are a few places on this battlefield where people have put down their weapons and started talking to each other.”

The administration's desire to strike a balance and work toward consensus also drove selection of the 52 invited speakers who would make up the three conference panels. Organizers chose the panelists carefully, with an eye to avoiding advocates of extreme positions. When the list of speakers was released, only days before the conference, Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council wasn't on it.

Environmentalists protested. Despite his combative, hard-line position on forests, or perhaps because of it, Kerr had become a national and highly visible spokesman for the ancient forests. Someone explained to the administration that it could not have a forest conference without Andy Kerr. His name was added at the last minute. When the Oregon Lands Coalition protested that it wasn't represented, Jackie Lang, the coalition's articulate spokeswoman, also got an eleventh-hour invitation.

But even as the administration worked to position itself at the center of the issue, behind the scenes its options for finding a solution Clinton could sell as "balanced" were narrowing.

THE SAT REPORT
On March 19, the administration delivered a little-noted but enormously significant document to Judge William Dwyer: a massive report prepared by a 24-member scientific panel headed by Jack Ward Thomas. The Scientific Assessment Team (SAT) report offered the first look at the consequences of true ecosystem management. A few people, including Thomas, recognized it as a preview of the plan the Clinton administration would have to assemble after the drama and hoopla surrounding the Forest Conference subsided.

The Forest Service had asked Thomas to oversee preparation of the SAT report in response to an order from Judge Dwyer in the ongoing lawsuit against the Forest Service over owl protection. Dwyer had directed the agency to move beyond owls and to develop a plan that would also protect 32 other sensitive species associated with old-growth forests, including the marbled murrelet, recently listed by the Fish and Wildlife Service as a threatened species. In effect, Dwyer had ordered the Forest Service to write not an owl plan but an ecosystem plan.

At Thomas's suggestion, the SAT scientists expanded their inquiry. They attempted to assess the status of no less than 667 species of animals, plants, and fungi and predict how various levels of logging would affect each one. It was an unprecedented effort to measure impacts on biological diversity:

in using this national forum to hear the unvarnished truth. Clinton refused to put the log export issue or eastside forests on the agenda. The list of invitees itself raised some eyebrows: It was heavy on loggers, millworkers, corporate officials, and timber community leaders. Speakers were required to submit their comments in advance.

SOFTENING THE MESSAGE
On April 2, the police lines went up at dawn around the Convention Center, a new Portland landmark locals had nicknamed Twin Peaks for its two bottle-green spires. A soaking Oregon rain, the kind that makes Douglas-firs grow better in the Northwest than anywhere else, pelted the few sign-toting protesters who stood on the sidewalk hoping to get a glimpse of Clinton and Gore as they hustled into the building. In the foothills at the fringe of the city, heavy clouds off the Pacific Ocean dumped rain over the clearcuts, young plantations, and old-growth forests.

Kimbark MacColl, a respected Portland historian, had been asked to provide an historical overview of the timber industry in the Northwest. With other panelists, he was shuttled by bus to the Convention Center, where he handed over his prepared text. As he drank coffee in the lobby, Portland attorneys Jeff and Kristine Rogers approached him. The two, close friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton from college and law-school days, had worked closely with the White House on organizing the conference.

"They said, 'We'd like to discuss your talk.'" MacColl recalled. "They explained that the White House didn't want anything too sharp. It was 'work the land' rather than 'exploit it.'" Soon after, Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's press secretary, approached MacColl and asked him to soften his message. "I decided that when you're about to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it," he said. "It was the first time I'd ever given an authorized speech."   

TALKING TO THE PRESIDENT
Today the world would be watching the Northwest, if only through the jaded eyes of the White House press corps. Throughout the region, there was a sense that history was about to be made. It was as if the forest preservation campaign of two decades were culminating in one marathon seminar.

Reporters from around the world submitted to security checks and filed into the cavernous concrete basement vault that had been transformed for the day into a media center. Most of them would watch the eight-hour proceedings on small television sets, straining to hear over the din of conversation. Members of the national press corps filed their stories early, patching a few sound bites onto backgrounders prepared in advance. They wanted to get this exercise over with and move on to the main event, Clinton's Saturday summit with Boris Yeltsin.

The 54 invited participants and several hundred invited guests

agreed upon for a resolution of the forest conflict: "We must disturb no more of the remaining refuges of biodiversity. We must establish reserves for suitable habitat for threatened species. They must encompass the eastside forests as well as the westside forests. The decline of our forests' health must be dealt with at its source. The future of both the environment and the economy lies in restoration and in second growth."

"To achieve this," Norman added, "will require nothing less than a revolution in the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

BLAME ENOUGH FOR ALL
Jack Ward Thomas was on the final panel, the one dealing with solutions. He had already had his chance to speak to the president privately. He had agreed to help extricate Clinton from the mess he had inherited. Speaking from hand-scribbled notes, Thomas asked the president on this day for clarity in the midst of ambiguity.

"The focus of the National Forest Management Act is a tough call," Thomas said. "If you don't perform under that act, you have to go to the penalty box, which is the Endangered Species Act. We have a de facto policy of biodiversity protection for federal lands. If it's not so, we need to say that clearly. You command natural resource agencies that have incredibly talented people who can do incredible things when they understand their mission."

"All sides speak the word 'balance," Thomas said. "They all mean different things. That leads to misunderstanding. I think it means obey the law, then minimize the economic costs."

Moving to protection of ecosystems rather than single species "is not going to be simple, it's not going to be cheap," Thomas warned. "Ecosystems are not only more complex than you think, they're more complex than you can think."

The owl, said Thomas, was a fork in the road. "As we move on with the rest of our lives, we can't go back. There's no point in looking at the past except to learn from it. In the past is blame enough for all of us. In the future perhaps there will be credit enough to go around."

Clinton looked straight at Thomas and nodded, as if to say he got the message loud and clear.

At the outset, some of the scientists believed they were supposed to develop a single conservation strategy that would become the president's plan. But the administration soon issued new marching orders, asking for a range of options from which Clinton could choose. That meant a less free-wheeling, more systematic analysis would be required.

The scientists began by reviewing all the previous studies that had brought the federal government to this moment. There were nearly 50. They singled out the ones that could pass muster scientifically for further consideration. Eventually, they chose eight options for detailed evaluation.

The first computer runs predicting timber harvest levels under the eight options jolted even Thomas. Protecting all those plants and animals, with a moderately high level of certainty that none of them would go extinct in the foreseeable future, meant that very little logging could occur in the owl region. "We were shocked there was so little wiggle room," Thomas said later.

In early May, the various FEMAT working groups presented their work to the full team during an all-day session in Portland. Several administration officials and government lawyers also attended. During the presentations, it became clear to Thomas that none of the eight options were politically viable. None articulated a core philosophy or vision of how the forests should be managed for future generations. More to the point, only two options would produce more than 1 billion board feet of timber, and both of those were likely to be rejected by Judge Dwyer. Others clustered at 600 to 700 million board feet. Option 1, the greenest, came in at just 200 million board feet—virtually a zero cut.

George Frampton also recognized that numbers like those wouldn't fly. "If that was to be the timber cut in the final alternatives, it wouldn't be acceptable," he said. He contends the scientists on the team knew it too. "They knew what the political margins were."

Rumors spread quickly. Timber industry lobbyists and their friends in Congress went straight to Tom Collier, Interior Secretary Babbitt's chief of staff. According to Frampton, Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat, delivered the administration an emphatic ultimatum: "We've got to have 2 billion board feet."

Thomas himself clashed with Collier a number of times. "We had our confrontation over the line between politics and science," he recalled. "They wanted an easy life."


OPTION 9
Thomas felt the weight of destiny upon him as he flew back to Portland in late spring of 1993 after yet another briefing in Washington, D.C. He had not gotten this far without political savvy. He knew he had to give the president an out. In the sealed sanctuary of the bank tower, he called his colleagues together. "We have to do better, guys," he said. "Who will help me try one more time?"

Among those who stepped forward were his old buddies from the owl team, Eric Forsman and Charles Meslow, and University of Washington forestry professor

credible plan would not produce more than 1 billion board feet," Frampton said.

When Frampton got his first look at Option 9, he himself objected at first to allowing logging within forest reserves. Ultimately, though, Frampton signed off on Option 9. "I was persuaded," he said, "that the desire for certainty was not a scientific instinct but a political instinct."

Thomas knew Clinton would pick Option 9 because, among the options that could pass muster with Judge Dwyer, it was the one that would allow him to sell the most timber. He also knew the president had hoped for a plan that would allow him to sell much more. But Option 9 was the best he had been able to deliver. "Do I think there was false hope created? Yes," Thomas said later. "But no one should have been surprised by 1.2 billion board feet."

Thomas flatly denied that the Clinton administration had directed the outcome of the FEMAT process. "I never detected that they were trying to do anything but the right thing," he said. "One of the biggest lies to come out of this is that we were pressured to do Option 9." If anyone was putting pressure on the team, Thomas insisted, he himself was the culprit.

He recalled that late in the process, Katie McGinty, director of Clinton's Office of Environmental Policy, called him and said, "I hear you're being pressured to produce more timber. If there's one SOB putting pressure on you, I want to know who it is." Thomas's response was: "It's me!"   

PLEASING NO ONE
By mid-June, rumors began circulating about a new option for westside forests that had been written on a fast track, with only cursory scientific review. As details of Option 9 began to leak out, intense political posturing began.

On June 21, House Speaker Tom Foley told reporters that Clinton's preferred plan had virtually no chance of winning congressional approval. "Many in Congress feel there has to be a plan which provides significantly larger than 1.2 billion board feet of allowable cut in order for any kind of forest products industry to survive on federal lands," Foley said.

The Oregon Lands Coalition, briefed in late June, fired off a press release denouncing Option 9 even before it was made public. "The President and his wet-behind-the-ears process people have made a fatal miscalculation," fumed Merrilee Peay of the Eugene-Springfield Yellow Ribbon Coalition. "They seem to think Middle America is going to stand by and allow a small group of elitists—career environmentalists—to decimate hundreds of small towns and thousands of small businesses."

Environmentalists for once held their tongues. Though they were apprehensive, without the actual plan and maps in hand, they could not say much that was substantive. Besides, their friends in the administration were acting as if they were about to hand them a huge victory.

scientific underpinnings, the assumptions on which it was built, and the political motives that prompted the administration to choose Option 9 over Option 1, which offered a much higher level of certainty that most old-growth species would survive.

Some of the decisions the map-drawers made defied logic. The steep-sided watershed of Still Creek east of Portland, forested with natural stands of Douglas-fir, cedar, and hemlock 80 to 100 years old, is on of the last nearly intact valleys in the Mount Hood National Forest. When Regna Merritt of the Oregon Natural Resources Council studied the maps, she discovered that under Option 9 nearly all the watershed would be open to logging—logging that would be clearly visible from historic Timberline Lodge near the Mount Hood summit.

State and federal fisheries biologists considered the lower 11 miles of Still Creek so important to chinook salmon that they had invested nearly $350,000 in repairing the damage from old logging and road-building activities upstream in an effort to restore salmon spawning beds. There was a real risk that future logging on its steep slopes would trigger landslides, wiping out that investment. Option 1 would have protected most of the watershed. Under Option 9, nearly all of it was in the matrix.

As they studied the maps, environmentalists found many similar compromises. An analysis by the Wilderness Society revealed that in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, in the southern Washington Cascades, many roadless areas bordering wilderness had been left in the matrix, further fragmenting the forest, while some of the forest's most heavily logged lands were protected in reserves.

In the Siskiyous, Option 9 placed more than 30,000 acres of burned-over, heavily roaded BLM plantations in a reserve while leaving several pristine roadless areas open to logging. "I'm happy that this is an ancient forest reserve," Dave Willis of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council said on a tour in September of 1993, as he gazed out at stump fields. "What I don't get is why they're going to cut ancient forests they already have in exchange for lands that might become ancient forest reserves someday.

SCIENTISTS WEIGH IN
In the fall of 1993, after the Clinton administration formally proposed the adoption of Option 9, scientists began to weigh in. Their verdicts, for the most part, were damning: They found the plan was based on untried scientific theories, posed unacceptable risks to salmon and marbled murrelets, and might not even assure the recovery of spotted owls.

The Wildlife Society criticized Option 9 for dumping the 50-11-40 rule, developed by the Interagency Scientific Committee in 1990 to assure that enough forest cover would be maintained to allow owls to disperse across the landscape. Instead, Option 9 relied on narrow forested stream buffers and small patches of trees in clearcuts to connect the old –growth reserves.

Chapter Twenty-five

Splitsville

The mood within the forest preservation movement was bitter on the weekend before Thanksgiving 1993, as forest activists met in a stark Portland State University lecture hall for a blood-letting. This tense night found James Monteith and his old sidekick Andy Kerr on opposite sides of a debate over a recent compromise struck with the Clinton administration.

Reluctantly, and with much agonizing, the Oregon Natural Resources Council and most other plaintiffs in the long-running lawsuit against the Forest Service had succumbed to bullying from the administration. They had agreed to the release of 52 timber sales from their hard-won injunction. The administration had threatened to throw its support to a congressional rider shielding its new forest plan from legal challenges if they didn't go along.

For those who had lived through the 1989 Rider from Hell, it was deja vu all over again. The 1989 rider had forced the release of more than 1 billion board feet of timber from an injunction in this same lawsuit. Then, environmentalists had chosen the sales to be released with a gun at their head. This time, they had done it voluntarily. Critics of the compromise called it the Deal of Shame It was a moment of realpolitik no one could have predicted.

SHOWING GOOD FAITH
The pressure began even before the administration unveiled Option 9 in July. Tom Collier, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's chief of staff, urged environmental plaintiffs to agree to the release of 200 million board feet of timber from the injunction Judge William Dwyer had imposed in 1991. Collier's emissaries in the negotiations said cooperation would be a sign of good faith—a signal that environmentalists were committed to a peaceful resolution of the forest impasse. Not so coincidentally, springing some timber would also allow Babbitt to save face over his foolish promise to the timber industry that the administration could sell 2 billion board feet of timber in its first year.

Collier wielded a stick as well as a carrot. Without this "good-faith effort," he said, Babbitt would recommend to President Clinton that he support legislation declaring his new plan immune from legal challenges.

Tuttle, a former banker and central Oregon county commissioner, went head-to-head with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. At one point, he said, SCLDF attorneys Vic Sher and Todd True threatened to fire ONRC as a client if he refused to go along with the deal.

Melanie Rowland, a lawyer for the Wilderness Society, took a more pragmatic view. "It was clear to me that Congress was still not friendly to us, that the Clinton administration was critical. We had to have their support. If we didn't, I didn't see any way we could hold on to our victories."

"It was partly that we had to deal with this administration in a different way. We trusted some people, but they were now political animals in a very shaky administration. We had a need to seem flexible. What looks firm and principled in one situation looks rigid and uncompromising in another."   

FACING THE TIGER
Those arguments held little sway on this November night, at a meeting called to vent passions over the Deal of Shame James Monteith, who had left the Western Ancient Forest Campaign and started his own group, Save the West, reminded the partisan grassroots audience what the deal actually signified. "The political strategy of permanent protection has been our goal for 20 years," he said. Never before had forest activists been voluntary parties to the destruction of old-growth forests.

"The rider was our opportunity to turn around and face the tiger and fight to win," Monteith told the crowd. "Most of us felt the rider was a bluff, and if it wasn't a bluff, we thought we could defeat it. I don't sense that Babbitt is through with us, through with working us over to see what else he can get out of us."

"I have to refuse to accept this notion that we've lost the ability to defend against riders," agreed Lou Gold of the Siskiyou Project. "The ability to go to court and win means something only if we can defend against riders."

Other activists argued passionately that the plaintiffs had no right to give up the injunction. "The forests aren't ours to bargain away. They belong to the species who live there," said Asante Riverwind, who worked with his partner, Karen Coulter, to save forests in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. "We can't forget the power of the grassroots movement that got us here. We have to get away from a situation where a few people in a few environmental groups can be put in a room and blackmailed."

Jim Britell of Kalmiopsis Audubon accused his fellow activists of failing to adequately explain the Clinton plan to the public and the press. "The media don't understand that the Clinton plan cuts old growth," he said. "The people who are most radicalized about the Clinton forest plan are those who read it."

Tim Hermach of the Native Forest Council lambasted the movement for bowing to political pressure. "Bill Clinton today is between

being torn asunder by a debate about who controlled it—the uncompromising grassroots activists who had created and sustained it out of their own deep commitment, or the national conservation groups and big foundations, latecomers to the campaign, which had close ties to the new Democratic administration and which now wielded so much influence.

In June of 1993, shortly after he became ONRC's executive director, Larry Tuttle received a lesson in the cost environmental groups might pay if they challenged the Clinton administration head-on over forest policy. Tuttle met with Tom Wathen of the Pew Charitable Trusts in New York to discuss the possibility of a Pew grant to support a major ONRC grassroots organizing effort. "We were going through an agonizing debate about our real relationship to our grass roots," Tuttle recalled. But Wathen told him, "No, that's not going to work."

What Pew was willing to support, Wathen said, was a monitoring program to ensure that the Forest Service and BLM followed Option 9. Wathen also told Tuttle that if he wanted Pew money, ONRC would have to enter into a written agreement with other groups funded by Pew that worked on forests.

Tuttle went back to Portland and told his staff, "I think we should run away from this money as fast as we can. We'd lose our independence." Andy Kerr and the ONRC board of directors disagreed. "Things blew up at that point," Tuttle said. After Tuttle left the following year, Kerr took over as executive director and accepted the Pew money.

Wathen, a lawyer, said it was obvious as soon as Option 9 was released that it would survive new challenges because the administration had made a good-faith effort to adopt a legal plan. The question the new plan posed for foundations funding the ancient forest campaign, he said, was what to do next. "Option 9 changed the status quo. It didn't get us the inviolate reserves, so the question was, How do you improve it?"

The solution the foundations came up with was to fund an intensive monitoring program that would assure the agencies followed the new plan to the letter and document violations. "No one came up with a better solution," he said. No one, he added, was forced to take the money.

Tuttle traces the day environmentalists began to lose the ancient forest campaign to the day they allowed foundations to become major players. At that point, he said, they turned their attention from grassroots organizing to the technical and scientific arguments for forest preservation. "The question is whether the scientific approach to forest protection helped us or hurt us. By directing organizational efforts away from the grass roots toward gathering facts, we drained all the passion out of the movement."

Not everyone agreed with Tuttle's view. But it was clear that in this new political era scientific and technical arguments alone would not save the ancient forests.

interest group," he accused. "'Settle and move on' is their mantra."

These were not new arguments in the fractious ranks of the movement, although on this day they were put forth with a harshness seldom heard in public. But asking Arnold to join in the movement-bashing was an audacious move.

St. Clair defended the decision to invite Arnold onto environmental turf. "If we have any chance of prevailing as a political movement, we have to demystify the opposition," he said. "Who knows, we may even find some common ground, or a common enemy.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Before this sea of adversaries, Arnold, a stiff and aloof man, proceeded to attack the national groups by name and offer tips on where to get the goods on them. He suggested that grassroots activists could use the information in his report to achieve their own goals. "It's not a point of agreement," he said, "but a point of mutual utility."

As he recited the names of tax documents and reports, however, a light bulb went off in the audience. Someone stood and demanded to know, "Are you here to divide and conquer?"

Then David Brower, elder statesman of the movement, stood and demanded of Arnold, "What do you want to see trashed next on the planet?"

"The idea that wise use is a bad thing," Arnold said lamely.

Environmentalists now went on the offensive. They demanded that Arnold explain his world view. "What you people do is come in and polarize communities," one woman in the audience declared.

Mitch Friedman stood to defend the role of foundations. In 1989, Friedman, a former Earth First! activist, had made a decision to become involved in two giant wildland projects, the campaigns to protect the Greater Yellowstone and North Cascades ecosystems. Foundation funding had allowed him to build the case with scientific arguments and computer-assisted mapping. "It wouldn't have happened without them," he said. "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need all the help we can get to counter the wise-use movement."

It fell to Lou Gold, grizzled protector of the Siskiyous, to bring the emotional debate to closure. Because he had traveled around the country with his slide show, building a base of 10,000 members in 45 states for protection of the Siskiyous, his organization, the Siskiyou Regional Education Project, had been free of outside pressure, Gold said.

"No foundation has twisted our arm, no national group has undercut us. When you have that relationship with place, and you have adequately communicated it, then no one can take that away. I don't want to spend all this time debating and second-guessing. I have a deep faith in our message."

opposition among the agency's traditionalists.

The Senior Executive Service was a cadre of 6,800 high-ranking federal civil service employees. Its members were chosen by invitation from other members. They qualified for top posts in government by undergoing special training in the intricacies of administration and budgeting. Since 1978, Forest Service chiefs had been drawn from the Executive Service's clubby ranks. Even before that, new chiefs traditionally had been selected by their peers. To break that precedent, critics said, raised the specter of politicizing an agency that prided itself on professional leadership. In truth, however, few federal agencies are more intensely political than the Forest Service, especially in regard to how it chooses its chief.

As rumors of Thomas's imminent appointment flew in October of 1993, former Forest Service Chief Max Peterson wrote to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, Lyons's boss, urging him not to "politicize" the chief's position. If he did, Peterson warned, there would be nothing to stop some future administration from replacing Thomas with its own hand-picked chief, who might be far less qualified for the job. "We believe the proper management of natural resources requires a longterm view—not the shorter view often engendered by the political process," Peterson wrote. Seventy forest supervisors from around the country signed the letter.

Some who signed genuinely feared for the professional integrity of their agency if its chief served only at the pleasure of whatever administration was in power. But others objected to Thomas because his background was in wildlife biology, not timber. Though he was clearly a "career professional," in the hierarchy of national forest management he was an outsider. He had never put up a timber sale.

The flap over how the next chief would be chosen left both Thomas and Robertson twisting in the wind. In late October of 1993, as Lyons tried to get the paper work through the Office of Personnel Management to put Thomas in the job, things got so ugly that he was forced to announce Robertson's reassignment. David Unger, an assistant chief, was named acting chief temporarily.

Environmentalists in the Northwest generally welcomed the prospect that Thomas would take the reins of the agency most responsible for liquidating ancient forests. Whatever their opinion of Option 9, they understood that Thomas had shown real courage in presenting the Interagency Scientific Committee's path-breaking 1990 owl strategy, and consummate political skill in handling the fallout.


ANSWERING THE CALL
When the call finally came on November 16, 1993, it came over a loudspeaker at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where Thomas and his wife, Margaret, were between planes. They were headed home after spending 20 frustrating days in Washington, D.C., waiting for his appointment as chief to be announced. Answering the page, Thomas

before the. April 1993 Forest Conference, at which Jim Lyons and Interior Department forest specialist Tom Tuchmann met with forest supervisors and BLM district managers in the Northwest. These young upstarts rubbed the old guard the wrong way, Hennessey said. "Lyons told them, 'I want you to know that I want you on board, I want you to be involved. But if you aren't, you can leave.'"

There were few questions. Tuchmann seemed pleased with the meeting. But Hennessey, who had learned her political street smarts as press aide to Senator Bob Packwood, buttonholed him after the meeting. "I said, 'Don't be bullshitted by what you heard in there. There's a lot of resistance.'”

From that day on, Hennessey was the official bearer of bad news. Still, she and Tuchmann hit it off, and in December of 1993, when he was named to head the administration's new Portland-based Office of Forestry and Economic Development, set up to oversee the forest plan's implementation, she agreed to serve as his press aide.

Deputy Forest Service Chief George Leonard, who was to be sidelined by Lyons later that year, bitterly resented the exclusion of forest supervisors and district rangers from development of the plan they would have to implement on the ground. Option 9 was front-loaded with requirements for watershed studies and environmental impact statements that had to be completed before the agencies could sell timber. Many managers considered these requirements onerous and unnecessary.

"The agency has to believe the plan is feasible in order to get behind it," Leonard said. Experienced forest managers could have warned the administration that it might take as much as three years after the plan was adopted to get timber sales moving again.

Lyons tells the story of a forest supervisor who remarked to Thomas soon after he became chief that his staff couldn't wait to get done with all the studies Option 9 required "so they can get on with their business." Thomas's response, Lyons said, was: "This is our business."

Though a number of forest managers saw Option 9 as too prescriptive and some felt it left them with little discretion, most biologists believed the environmental studies were necessary and long overdue. "To my mind, it meant line officers were going to have to be extraordinarily thoughtful, creative, and innovative to accomplish the mission that it established," said Cindy Deacon-Williams, a longtime Forest Service fisheries biologist.

"It's easy to cut trees."

Elaine Zielinski, Oregon director of the BLM, served on an interagency team charged with implementing Option 9. An early challenge, she said, was reconciling the very different cultures of the land management agencies—the Forest Service and BLM—and the regulatory agencies—the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. "The Forest Service and BLM are very can-do organizations," she said. "There's a certain production ethic. At first there was a feeling that under Option 9 timber sales were just a by-product,

BLM, it was the Northwest Forest Plan, period. Zielinski said the plan won early acceptance from many BLM forest managers because it was built on some of the same principles—key watersheds and reserves to protect old growth and stream corridors—as the agency's own draft management plans for the 1990s. Local BLM managers had been heavily involved in developing those plans. "We changed internally during that process,” she said.

PULLING PUNCHES
Another goal of the administration's Northwest Forest Plan was to get federal agencies to work together more effectively on forest policy. In an effort to avoid new endangered species conflicts, the administration encouraged the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to get involved in the early design of timber sales so they could head off potential problems. Inevitably there was pressure on both agencies not to wield the Endangered Species Act to stop potentially harmful logging practices.

This became evident in January of 1994, when the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a rule for protecting owl habitat on heavily cutover private lands. Timberland owners in southern Oregon complained bitterly about the rule's impact on their ability to log their land.

Weyerhaeuser Company officials went straight to the White House. Lines on maps were quickly redrawn to exempt most Weyerhaeuser holdings in Douglas and Coos Counties from the owl rule. Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat whose district included the two timber-dependent counties, cried foul. "Cozy relationships between multinational corporations and the Department of Interior should not govern forest policy in the Northwest," he said. Assistant Interior Secretary George Frampton was dispatched to the Northwest to do damage control.

The pressure to avoid new threatened and endangered species listings was intense. The bull trout, which had once thrived in the clear, cold waters of pristine streams all across the Northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest, had become a victim of logging, road-building, livestock grazing, mining, irrigation, and dams—the gamut of human activities in the rural West. In February of 1994, federal scientists who had reviewed the trout's status reported that the fish were in imminent peril throughout their range. Yet in 1994 and again in 1995, the Fish and Wildlife Service, under pressure from political leaders in Idaho and Montana, declined to list the trout as a threatened species.

As during the Bush administration, the most controversial issues were being decided at the Interior Department level or at the White House. The difference was that in most cases the scientific findings no longer were suppressed. As David Klinger, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, put it, "We're still stating our case. It's just that our case may not prevail.”

timber began flowing from Northwest forests soon, Option 9 would be lost and the whole issue would end up in the lap of Congress. Roadless areas still open to logging under the plan would have to be entered as soon as possible, Thomas said, because the rest of the land Option 9 allocated to timber production had been so hammered by logging that it could not produce the timber yields the plan promised without serious environmental damage.

Efforts by environmentalists to undermine the plan were wearing thin, the new chief added. If those efforts continued, the administration would have no choice but to seek legislation to end the deadlock.

Thomas's halo slipped further in June of 1994, when an affidavit surfaced revealing that he had admitted ordering scientists to shred internal communications, including electronic mail messages, during preparation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The affidavit was made public by Andy Stahl, who had left the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to become executive director of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, the group founded by dissident Forest Service employee Jeff DeBonis Stahl said that by failing to preserve the record of discussion, Thomas had destroyed evidence of dissent over the plan's scientific underpinnings.

Thomas retorted that he was guilty only of "shredding the garbage." Documents left for garbage collectors might have been retrieved and leaked before the process was finished, he said, scaring timber communities and allowing manipulation of timber markets.

Disillusionment grew in September of 1994, when environmentalists obtained a memo revealing that Thomas had quietly changed the agency's appeals process, giving managers discretion to reject appeals of timber sales and other projects out of hand if they concluded the appeals were based on procedural violations not "fundamental" to final decisions.

What many environmentalists failed to understand was Thomas's deep loyalty to the agency that had been his home for nearly three decades—a loyalty that blinded him to its many faults. As chief, Thomas saw his job as defending the Forest Service from its critics. Moreover, observers who were familiar with the internal politics of the agency said Thomas's reform efforts often were undermined by entrenched timber beasts in the chief's office, in the regional offices, and on the national forests, who kept the lines of communication open to sympathetic members of Congress. Chief Jack wasn't always kept in the loop.

Veteran forest activist James Monteith, who had known Thomas since 1974, was not surprised by the chief's new hard line. He had advised his fellow forest activists in the December 1993 issue of the advocacy journal Forest Watch that they should not expect to have things their way with Thomas. Though each of the scientific panels on which he served had made improvements in the status quo, he said,

and his timber sale program plummet from 100 million board feet to zero. He said his crew now took as much pride in completing watershed studies as it had once taken in meeting timber targets.

The Siuslaw was also taking a look at its young forests. Thirty percent of the Siuslaw-200,000 acres—consisted of stands under 45 years of age that would take decades to reach maturity. Stewardship meant increasing structure and diversity in these plantations by planting maple and alder, cedar and hemlock. It meant turning a Douglas-fir plantation into a forest.

Low morale had been a problem at first, but that had passed, Furnish said. "Some people are really enthusiastic about the future. You have others who are really struggling. They don't like where we're headed. They yearn for the old days. There are some people who have chosen to leave the agency because they don't like this direction. We have made attitude adjustments to accommodate the new reality."

No one liked the red tape in Option 9, Furnish admitted. And he had received little direction from the top. "The chief's office has been largely insulated from what has been going on here," he said. In effect, he and his team had reinvented their agency from the bottom up.

and livestock grazing in areas where salmon spawned. Known as the PACFISH standards, these rules covering 15 national forests in four states east of the Cascades were nearly identical to the stream protection rules the administration had put in place on the westside forests with Option 9.

On both old growth and salmon, the administration needed to come up with permanent standards to avert new lawsuits and new injunctions. And it didn't have much time.

Assistant Agriculture Secretary Jim Lyons hoped ecosystem management would solve all the conflicts brewing in the Interior Northwest.   

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
Lyons determined not to make the same mistakes in Walla Walla that the administration had made on the west side. From the beginning, the eastside project unfolded in the glare of public scrutiny. The team's leaders held monthly public meetings, which were attended mainly by paid timber industry representatives, local government officials, and a few environmentalists.

Boise Cascade Corporation set up an office in the same brick building the ecosystem project had leased for its headquarters. The Boise-based timber giant, which depended on federal lands for 40 percent of its timber supply, hired the engineering firm CH2M-Hill to bird-dog every step of the process. It deployed two of its regional timberland managers to keep close tabs on it as well. The close scrutiny from timber company executives and their contractors made some scientists jittery and prompted them to restrict access after the first few months.

The 100 counties of the basin had a prominent place at the table, where they looked after the interests of ranchers, miners, and timber companies. Planners were also supposed to take into account the views of 19 tribal governments that held land within the basin.

For many unpaid eastside activists, taking part in this new process was a thankless chore. For some, the trip to Walla Walla was a journey of six or eight hours. Nonetheless, in the early months a dedicated contingent made the monthly drive, trying to keep tabs on what was from the beginning a bewilderingly complicated and highly bureaucratic process. In August of 1994, with foundation support, they formed the Columbia Bioregion Campaign, with a paid coordinator, to press for an ecologically responsible management strategy.

EAST TO THE ROCKIES
In July of 1994, the administration's salmon woes deepened when a federal court blocked all activities on two national forests in northeastern Oregon that might pose a risk to migrating Snake River salmon. Similar challenges loomed upstream on six national forests in Idaho, where Snake River chinook and sockeye salmon spawned. Furious ranchers, who faced a moratorium on livestock grazing on the two forests, demanded that something be done. Then, in August, the National Marine

forests burn," they said in a letter to Blackwood. "These fires are a normal ecological event if viewed from a historical perspective."

Blackwood punted. He said the matter was out of his hands. The •eastside ecosystem team, he said, "has no authority or expectation to jump into the middle of decisions on fire rehabilitation."

LOSING SIGHT OF THE PRIZE   
In fact, it soon became obvious that the ecosystem planning team would not be involved in any of the critical management decisions on issues that could profoundly affect the basin's long-term ecological health. Instead, politics would drive those decisions.

On one level, the project was a gigantic research-gathering effort. Hundreds of scientists were preparing a scientific assessment that would serve as the foundation for management of the Interior Basin. This mega-inventory of natural processes and of plant, animal, and human communities was to cover everything from the role of fire to the invasion of exotic species, from the tree-munching habits of insects to the habitat needs of grizzlies, from the plight of timber communities to the availability of medical care.

From this massive report the teams in Walla Walla and Boise were supposed to develop separate planning documents laying out various alternatives for managing the basin. But the Walla Walla team became mired in the task of collecting information and lost in its own byzantine bureaucracy, which also threatened to confuse and overwhelm all but the most dedicated citizens. The project's scale, and its leaders' failure to keep focused on specific goals and objectives, eventually caused some scientists to question its relevance.

For Cindy Deacon-Williams, a fisheries biologist who was helping to direct the work of the Boise team under Steve Mealey, the problem developing in Walla Walla became apparent almost immediately after she joined the team in the fall of 1994. She believed in President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan and hoped the new ecosystem project would expand on it. But she soon became convinced that the planners in Walla Walla had lost their way.

"The westside process was very strongly focused on solving very specific, clearly articulated problems," she said. "In the Interior Columbia Basin process it all went to mush real early. They lost sight of the fact that we were in fact trying to answer management policy questions." Instead of concentrating on gathering the information they needed to develop strategies for protecting fish and wildlife, she said, project leaders got carried away with the logistics of gathering data. "What we lost was our lodestar," she said. "We were no longer anchored on the purpose for the activity."

After a year on the project, Deacon-Williams came to the conclusion that she could have a greater effect on public land management in the Columbia Basin from the outside. When an offer came from the Pacific Rivers Council to establish a Boise office, she jumped ship.