I remember so vividly the fall of 1975, when I moved to the deep green Northwest to teach law at the University of Oregon. Chapin Clark, my dean, had assigned me to teach Public Land Law. It was a logical decision, for I had credentials. Although I'd never taught Public Land Law for a minute or written a syllable about it, I had the necessary intellectual drive: I loved to fish and hike in the national forests. "Don't worry," Chapin told me, about being new to the field. "Look, for all practical purposes this is a new area. Work hard and you'll be all right." Then he added: "My guess is that you're really going to have some fun with this. It looks to me as though the national forests are in for some big changes. And everything in the Pacific Northwest turns on timber."
Chapin had it exactly right, and it turned out to be one of my life's joys to teach and write about these fascinating events, to see them up close, more or less from the beginning. It was an extraordinarily dynamic time in the Pacific Northwest, near the beginning of an era when you could see history being made right in front of you, day by day, year by year. The Monongahela decision, enjoining clearcutting on national forest lands in West Virginia, came down in 1975 and within months a federal judge had applied it in Alaska. Everywhere the question was asked: how would the law and politics of clearcutting play out in the Pacific Northwest?
The struggle over clearcutting made front-page news regularly, and inevitably so. These were some of the most commercially valuable stands of timber on earth. Oregon was the nation's top timber-producing state. Region Six of the Forest Service, covering Oregon and Washington, put out between 4.5 and 5 billion board feet of timber every year, nearly half of the cut from the entire national forest system. If a public body were eligible for the Fortune 500, Region Six would be highly ranked. The Oregonian once compared the Regional Forester, officer in Portland, to the governorship of Oregon in terms of actual political power.
The ancient forests also called out to the deepest parts of our humanity. Rains and storms blew in off the Pacific, and the low coastal ranges and high Cascades welcomed and held the moisture, creating a land of ferns, moss, and great trees, of grubs, elk, and salmon, of
Tree Huggers
Victory, Defeat & Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign
Foreword by Charles F. Wilkinson
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mist, fog, and dripping, of secrecy, solitude, and mystery. These green cathedrals, as much as the ocean and broad rivers, defined the Pacific Northwest.
A great and complex public debate usually takes at least a generation before its resolution begins to take form. Almost always, the terms of the debate will change over such a long time, and that surely took place in the Northwest. Twenty years ago, in the mid-1970s, the furor in the national forests focused quite specifically on clearcutting and its effect on trees. The idea of biodiversity—the web of life in a living forest—had not yet become part of the public discourse. The Endangered Species Act would not be given teeth until the 1978 decision in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill and would not reach the Northwest forests until a decade after that. Battle raged over the Pacific salmon, but the issue was Indian fishing rights, not the very survival of the fast, silvery species. Although another animal had become the subject of scientific inquiry during the 1970s, to my knowledge not a single northern spotted owl contacted the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to sign up as a plaintiff in federal court litigation until the late 1980s.
After the passage of nearly a quarter of a century, we can begin to appreciate the full significance of these events. We finally are grasping the immensity of the post–World War II boom in the American West. To meet the region's explosion from 16 million to 57 million people, we savaged the lands and rivers and creatures that drew so many here, that made the place sacred. We can mark down the postwar era, along with the California Gold Rush, as one of the West's two most fundamentally defining eras. The fury in the national forests—every bit as much as the conflicts over the big dams, the power plants, and the build-up of the metropolises—lies at the center of it.
This is, then, an epic series of events that Kathie Durbin explores in her remarkable book, Tree Huggers. It is a compelling, arresting story that encompasses a broad landscape of people, events, and places—and a story that has accelerated in the past few years. Durbin, one of the country's finest environmental journalists, does it justice in every way.
Readers will applaud the authenticity of Tree Huggers. In a sense, the heart of this struggle has been the story of people trapped: activists defending their homelands against encroaching fronts of Caterpillar tractors and chainsaws; Forest Service employees caught in their agency's mythology and budget numbers; politicians who have lost their options to big-money campaign donations; people in the timber industry facing the inevitability of the Northwest's changing values and economy. Over the years, I've been fortunate to know most of the people of whom Durbin writes. Her accounts are unerring, both as to the public personalities of the participants and as to the motivations that drive them.
Durbin also rings true when she takes us into the woods, which are a main character in this book. It was the old forests that inspired
such deep passions and that drove so many people to become tree huggers and to act so fiercely for so long. Durbin's book is rooted where it should be, in the rich, wet forest floors.
This generation-long epic has brought considerable reform. The cut has come down. Harvesting practices better protect the life in the national forests. We have a far better understanding of the consequences of our actions. Nevertheless, much remains to be done, both on the public lands and on the private timber lands that are, after all, part of the same webbing. One of the world's most magnificent natural systems still hangs in the balance. The question left open in Tree Huggers is whether the impressive public resolve that has welled up in the Pacific Northwest since the early 1970s will finally implant itself deeply enough and soon enough to keep the forests both sanctuary to us and homeland for the intertwined lives that dwell within.
