TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062590/0625332.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 27.5 KB | 551 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 56

COVER STORY

Owl vs Man



In the Northwest's battle over logging, jobs are at stake, but
so are irreplaceable ancient forests

By TED GUP


    What would the world be, once bereft     Of wet and of
wildness? Let them be left,     O let them be left, wildness
and wet;    Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

    -- "Inversnaid," by Gerard Manley Hopkins; Poems (1876-89)



    In Oregon's Umpqua National Forest, a lumberjack presses his
snarling chain saw into the flesh of a Douglas fir that has
held its place against wind and fire, rockslide and flood, for
200 years. The white pulpy fiber scatters in a plume beside
him, and in 90 seconds, 4 ft. of searing steel have ripped
through the thick bark, the thin film of living tissue and the
growth rings spanning ages. With an excruciating groan, all 190
ft. of trunk and green spire crash to earth. When the cloud of
detritus and needles settles, the ancient forest of the Pacific
Northwest has retreated one more step. Tree by tree, acre by
acre, it falls, and with it vanishes the habitat of innumerable
creatures. None among these creatures is more vulnerable than
the northern spotted owl, a bird so docile it will descend from
the safety of its lofty bough to take a mouse from the hand
of a man.

    The futures of the owl and the ancient forest it inhabits
have become entwined in a common struggle for survival. Man's
appetite for timber threatens to consume much of the Pacific
Northwest's remaining wilderness, an ecological frontier whose
deep shadows and jagged profile are all that remain of the land
as it was before the impact of man. But rescuing the owl and
the timeless forest may mean barring the logging industry from
many tracts of virgin timberland, and that would deliver a
jarring economic blow to scores of timber-dependent communities
across Washington, Oregon and Northern California. For
generations, lumberjacks and millworkers there have relied on
the seemingly endless bounty of the woodlands to sustain them
and a way of life that is as rich a part of the American
landscape as the forest itself. For many, all that may be
coming to an end.

    This week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to
announce whether it will list the northern spotted owl as a
threatened species. If the owl is listed, as many predict, the
Government will be required by the Endangered Species Act to
protect the bird. And if a preservation plan advocated by
biologists is put into effect, it could be one of the most
sweeping environmental actions ever undertaken. Federal and
state agencies say the plan, fully carried out, would set aside
an additional 3 million acres of forests. That would slash by
more than one-third timber production on federal lands, which
accounts for nearly 40% of the region's total harvest. The
possible result: mill closings and cutbacks costing 30,000 jobs
over the next decade. Real estate prices would tumble, and
states and counties that depend on shares of the revenue from
timber sales on federal land could see those funds plummet.
Oregon would be hardest hit, losing hundreds of millions of
dollars in revenue, wages and salaries, say state officials.
By decade's end the plan could cost the U.S. Treasury $229
million in lost timber money each year.

    All this to protect an owl that stands barely 2 ft. tall and
weighs 22 oz. Granted, it is one of the most regal birds of the
forest, with its chocolate-color plumage, dappled with white
spots, and its enormous eyes, like onyx cabochons, scouring the
forest for prey. A fine bird, yes, but it was never really the
root cause of this great conflict.

    More than a contest for survival between a species and an
industry, the owl battle is an epic confrontation between
fundamentally different philosophies about the place of man in
nature. At issue: Are the forests -- and by extension, nature
itself -- there for man to use and exploit, or are they to be
revered and preserved? How much wilderness does America need?
How much human discomfort can be justified in the name of
conservation? In the Pacific Northwest the nation's
reinvigorated environmental movement is about to collide head
on with economic reality. What happens here will shape the
outcome of similar conflicts between ecological and economic
concerns for years to come. It will also enhance or diminish
U.S. credibility overseas, as America tries to influence other
nations to husband their natural resources and protect their
endangered species. From Brazil to Japan, the decision will be
carefully observed. The stakes are that high.

    Environmentalists claim that talk of an economic doomsday
is wildly exaggerated and is intended to whip up popular
opposition to conservation efforts that threaten industry
profits. The skeptics question figures coming from those
federal agencies -- the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management -- that lease timber rights on public lands and have
long been seen as being cozy with the logging industry.
Privately, some agency officials concede that the dire economic
forecasts were rushed and based on shaky assumptions. Still,
they have bolstered industry's attack on the owl-preservation
plan and fueled community fears. Already there are signs that
those agencies, under directions from the White House, may try
to scale down the plan urged by biologists. A joint Forest
Service-BLM study indicates that the very fabric holding some
communities together would unravel if the biologists' plan were
fully implemented. "In severe cases of community dysfunction,"
says the report, "increased rates of domestic disputes,
divorce, acts of violence, delinquency, vandalism, suicide,
alcoholism and other social problems are to be expected."

    In many ways, however, the owl dispute merely hastened an
inevitable crisis facing the Pacific Northwest. For decades,
the timber industry, driven by the nation's voracious housing
needs, leveled private and public land for timber with little
regard for long-term consequences. "We've been running an
ecological deficit, and the bill has come in," says Jerry
Franklin, a research scientist with the Forest Service.
"There's going to be pain for owls, for people and for trees."
The industry's reforestation practices have markedly improved
over the past decade, but the reinvestment is too little too
late.

    The life cycle of the Pacific Northwest's primeval woodlands
is measured not in decades but in centuries. No amount of
saplings and science can make up for years of wanton
harvesting, or replace a thousand-year-old fir. Only time can
do that -- and time may be short for those mills that are
specially designed to devour the old firs. The owners eye the
forests hungrily, knowing they cannot wait for the millions of
seedlings and young trees to mature. If the industry is
allowed to keep cutting, some forestry experts say, the last
ancient forests outside wilderness areas could fall within 30
years. Thus many mills may be forced to close no matter what.
Owl or no owl, the timber industry faces a painful conversion
from its dependence on giant old-growth trunks to smaller trees
in reforested stands.

    Already the old growth has all but vanished from private
lands. Most of the remaining great trees are in areas under
federal control, administered primarily by the Forest Service.
Many Americans believe these lands are all included in the
national parks, and that the U.S. Forest Service is a gentle
custodian of the woodlands. Except in certain protected
wilderness areas, that is not so. The Forest Service and BLM,
which oversee the public lands, are empowered to sell timber
rights to the highest bidder, and sell they have -- a
staggering 5 billion board feet a year, sweeping away 70,000
acres of old-growth forest annually. What is grown in its stead
is not forest but "fiber," as the timber industry refers to
wood.

    One can grasp the distinction by looking out from any one
of a thousand promontories in the Northwest. Clear-cutting --
the indiscriminate leveling of every tree in an area -- has
left the wilderness fragmented and scarred. Long after the last
truck has pulled out, heavy with logs, and the debris has been
torched, what remains is a blackened earth, pockmarked and
studded with tombstone-like stumps. "It looks like Alamogordo,
as if it's been nuked," concedes Dan Schindler, a Forest
Service district ranger.

    Though the timber industry has zealously replanted over the
past two decades, the hallmark of old growth, biodiversity, has
been lost. Gone are the broken-topped dead trees or "snags"
favored by owl, osprey and pileated woodpecker. Gone the
multilayered canopies and rich understory, the scattering of
hemlock, incense cedar and sugar pine. Gone the centuries-old
firs in their noble dotage. Increasingly, the forests have been
transmogrified into tree farms of numbing uniformity, countless
ankle-high seedlings and spindly saplings germinated from seeds
selected for their productive capacity. The logging operations
have tattered the seamless fabric of old growth that once
covered the land. "There are more holes in the blanket than
there is blanket," laments BLM biologist Frank Oliver.
According to the National Audubon Society, each year enough
old-growth trees are taken from the Pacific Northwest to fill
a convoy of trucks 20,000 miles long.

    "The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance,
arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are
not those who call for forest protection, but those who call
for business as usual," says Richard Brown of the National
Wildlife Federation. Less than 10% of the ancient forest that
once covered the Northwest remains. From Alaska to British
Columbia to Oregon, forests that predate the 13 Colonies are
being sacrificed for plywood, planks and pulp. The rapidity
with which these primeval stands are being cut down has driven
a handful of environmental extremists to sabotage
timber-industry equipment, tie themselves to trees slated for
harvesting and booby-trap trees with buried spikes that can
mangle saws or injure unwary cutters.

    All this bewilders timber-industry leaders, who say there
are plenty of owls, plus abundant old-growth stands set aside
in wilderness areas, that are safe from the saw. In Oregon
about half the state's estimated 3 million acres of old growth
cannot be logged because it is unsuitable or designated as
wilderness. But that leaves 1.5 million acres of old growth
that can be cut. Some of these areas contain no owls and are
not likely to be protected.

    How much ancient forest is enough? The question is not just
one of aesthetics or recreational adequacy. No one knows how
much forest is needed to sustain an intricate and little
understood ecosystem upon which animals and plants, and, yes,
man too, depend. What is known is that the old growth plays an
integral role in regulating water levels and quality, cleaning
the air, enhancing the productivity of fisheries and enriching
the stability and character of the soil. "We're probably just
on the edge in terms of our understanding," says Eric Forsman,
a biologist with the Forest Service. "If we continue pell-mell
down the path of eliminating these old forests, we'll never
have the opportunity to learn because they won't be there to
study." He and others have come to believe that where science
ends, the mystery that is the ancient forest begins.

    To understand what is at stake in human terms, it helps to
visit a community that depends on timber for its existence.
Take Oregon's Douglas County, which, like the fir, is named for
the Scottish botanist David Douglas. Oregon produces more
lumber than any other state, and Douglas County boasts that it
is the timber capital of the world. It stretches from the
Cascades in the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. There
one can tune in to Timber Radio KTBR, feel the roads tremble
beneath logging trucks and watch children use Lego sets to haul
sticks out of imaginary forests. In the current struggle,
Douglas County is ground zero, likely to take as direct an
economic hit as any site in the region. "Something is going to
happen in the next few months that will rip the rug right out
from under us," says Lonnie Burson, who works in a sawmill and
presides over the union, Local 2949, that represents 3,400
lumber- and millworkers.

    The controversy is on everyone's mind there, and the owl
gets much of the blame. A banner headline in the local paper
declared: SAVING SPOTTED OWL SEEN AS THREAT TO SCHOOLS. Douglas
County may lose more than $13 million a year in timber revenue
that the Federal Government returns to the county to help pay
for public administration, roads and schools. At the local Ford
dealership, the only owls that are welcomed are those made out
of ceramic, which stand on the roofline warding off swallows
intent on building nests under the eaves. Cars and trucks are
not selling. Too much uncertainty. Says salesman Bruce Goetsch:
"We survived without the dinosaur. What's the big deal about
the owl?"

    At Bud's Pub in Roseburg, a spotted owl hangs in effigy over
the bar. Shops offer T-shirts saying I LOVE SPOTTED OWLS . .
. FRIED. And in the cabin of logger Bill Haire's truck, beneath
the mirror, swings a tiny owl with an arrow through its head.
"I can still maintain some sense of humor," says Haire. His
father Tom, 65, works with him in the forest, and his son
Brian, 12, hopes one day to join them there. "If it comes down
to my family or that bird," says Haire, "that bird's going to
suffer. Where would we be right now if everything that lived
on this earth still survived -- the saber-toothed tiger, the
woolly mammoth? Things adapt or they become extinct." That
applies to his industry as well, says Haire. "If we don't
adapt, we'll become extinct."

    The crisis has forced many in Douglas County to reappraise
a life-style more precious now that it is endangered. Those who
work in the woods can make $35,000 to $45,000 a year.
Millworkers generally make less. But the issue is more than
money. They have also been forced to re-examine themselves and
the ecological legacy they have been left. Douglas County has
always been dependent on natural resources, though it has not
always used them prudently. In the 19th century, furriers
killed off many of the furbearing animals and, in so doing,
their trade as well. Later, prospectors emptied the rivers of
gold, and the mining camps were reclaimed by the forest.
Millworkers and their families often ask union leader Burson
what will become of them. "What do I tell them, `It's going to
be O.K.'?" asks Burson. "I can't. Who do I blame? Do I blame
the industry for raping the lands in the East and raping the
lands in the West 50 years ago and not replanting? Do I blame
my father? Do I blame my grandfather? Do I blame myself for not
reading the paper every single night and being critically
involved in these issues? How do I answer these people?"

    Mill town after mill town is buried beneath an avalanche of
contradictory statistics tossed out by timber-industry
officials and environmentalists. "To put it bluntly, we don't
know what the hell is going on," says Burson. "We're being
blackmailed and threatened from both sides. Industry is saying
`Support our side, or you'll lose your jobs.'  Environmentalists
are saying `Support our side, or you won't have clean air to
breathe.' People are scared to death."

    Many who draw their living from timber concede that the owl
is not their only problem. Jobs have been lost to automation
too. A Forest Service study predicts that technological changes
will displace 13% of the work force during the next 15 years.
The recession of 1980-82 also took its toll. Export of logs
overseas, particularly to Japan and China, has reduced the work
available for local mills. And high production costs for lumber
and plywood make the region vulnerable to competition from the
South and Canada.

    Burson knows the little owl draws attention away from these
complex problems, some of which the industry brought upon
itself. And he suspects industry is exploiting community fears
for its own ends. "It's part of the corporate strategy to scare
the hell out of us so we write letters and communicate with
other people," says Burson. In a popular timber publication,
industry lawyer Mark Rutzick wrote an article titled "You Have
Enemies Who Want to Destroy You." The enemies: the National
Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation.

    The mill owners, self-made men of considerable influence in
their communities, are stunned that their livelihoods are
threatened because of a nocturnal bird so unobtrusive that few
have ever seen it. "We came out here in the 1850s," says Milton
Herbert, the owner of Herbert Lumber in Riddle, Ore. "We spend
our lives trying to understand trees, to live with the
environment, not against it. I hunt and fish. This is my home.
I get real uptight when I think they gave my ancestors 160
acres for homesteading, and they're giving the owl 2,200 acres."
He is perplexed by calls to preserve the ancient forest.
"They're trying to stop time, and that's one thing we can't
do," says Herbert. "Bugs, fire or man are going to harvest the
trees; they don't live forever." That's the industry's view.
Timber is a crop, simple as that. Rod Greene, logging manager
with Sun Studs Inc. in Roseburg speaks of the old growth as
"overripe," "wasteful" and "inefficient." Behind him, as far
as the eye can see, in 55-ft.-stacks, rises the mill's
inventory of tree trunks, more than 13,000 trees that once
covered 300 acres or more. Gobbling up some 320 trees a day, the
mill will consume the inventory in less than six weeks.
Inside, computers align the logs by laser, then blades unwrap
them like rolls of paper towel, spinning out a ribbon of veneer
8 ft. wide and four miles long every hour. Other machines carve
out 3,000 "studs," or construction posts, every hour, 20 hours
a day, seven days a week. In town after town, the scene is
repeated. Nature cannot keep pace.

    Fred Sohn, owner of Sun Studs, sees no difference between
the reforested stands and the ancient forest they replace. "I
believe I as an individual can replicate the forest, redo it
like a farmer growing a crop and do it better than nature," he
says. "I can remake the old forest the same way nature did,
only quicker." Talk like that riles environmentalists, who see
the forest as more than just another fungible asset. Steve
Erickson, whose father was in the timber industry and whose
brother works in a mill, is writing a book about hiking trails.
But Erickson finds it hard to share his vision of the forest.
"It's like being in an artery in God's body," he says.
Biologists and botanists speak in more scientific terms. They
say the ancient forest is more than an aggregation of trees.
To them the ancient forest's rotting trunks, decrepit firs and
deep debris represent not waste, but vital nutrients in a
vastly complex ecosystem.

    Those who cut down the great firs may not see the forest
that way, but many have no less reverence for it. The
lumberjacks of Douglas County are not boisterous back-slapping
rubes but pensive men who feel as much a part of this rugged
landscape as the black-tailed deer and elk that retreat from
the sound of their saws. A popular bumper sticker here
declares, FOR A FORESTER, EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY. Rather than
surrender the name "environmentalist" to their foes, they have
labeled the opposition "preservationists." Many loggers never
finished high school but followed their fathers and grandfathers
into the woods. They rise in the dark at 3 or 4 in the
morning, pull up their suspenders and adjust rough hide pads
on their left shoulders. The pads cradle the saws and, like
trivets, shield the men from the hot blades that would burn
their flesh through their flannel shirts. Their pants legs are
tattered so that if they are suddenly snagged, the material
will tear rather than hold. They do not wear steel-tipped shoes
for fear that if a massive limb falls on their feet, it may
turn the metal down and sever their toes. Better that their toes
be crushed than pinched off.

    Few loggers or environmentalists have ever seen the elusive
spotted owl. They know it as either a costly subject of
litigation or a rare distillation of the forest spirit. But on
the summit of a steep ravine in Douglas County, a pair of
spotted owls assert themselves, as if to prove they are more
than a mere abstraction. Nesting in the cavity of a
broken-topped fir, they scan for prey and ponder the rare
two-legged observer far below. Their gentle mewing gives way
to a distinctive four-note hoot: "who-who, who-who." The male
drops down for a closer look and settles on a limb 15 ft. from
BLM biologist Oliver. "They have no fear of man," he says. In
his hand, Oliver hides a mouse. The moment he exposes it,
dangling it by its tail, the mouse disappears in a blur of
wings and razor-sharp talons. The owl has carried it off and
up to its mate, who snips off the mouse's head and ferries it
skyward to the nest, where two snowy hatchlings devour it.

    Oliver is enchanted by the owls' trusting ways, their grace
and their attention to their young. He worries about their
future, seemingly dependent as they are for both prey and
nesting sites on old-growth forests. But Oliver and others have
observed that it is not the age of the forest that appears to
be critical to the habitat of the owl, but rather the structure
and character of the forest. He and other biologists hope that
one day they will be able to identify those key components and,
by preserving them in reforested tracts, both widen the owls'
habitat and open the way for a resumption of timbering on a
selective basis. But the owl is not alone in the forest. As an
"indicator species," its well-being is a measure of how other
creatures and the ecosystem as a whole are faring. "The
spotted owl is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg,"
says the Forest Service's Franklin. "There are probably dozens
of other species just as threatened as the owl."

    The dispute over the owl has festered more than 15 years,
a period in which the ancient forests receded ever farther and
the timbering continued largely unabated. Efforts to find a
solution were thwarted by the power of the timber industry, the
bungling and inertia of the federal bureaucracy and the
stridency of an environmental movement as quick to alienate as
to persuade. But the conflict should never have reached the
current crisis point. Forest ranger Schindler believes the
coming economic turmoil might have been averted if the
Government had weaned industry from its dependence on old
growth by gradually reducing the level of harvesting. Instead
the industry has been allowed to enjoy record harvests in
recent years.

    U.S. Forest Service biologist Eric Forsman, who has studied
the owl since 1968, believes it was the strategy of the federal
agencies to stall for time by continually asking for more
studies on the owl. "I've seen how the games are played," says
Forsman. BLM in particular ignored repeated alarms. As early
as 1976, BLM biologist Mayo Call warned his superiors that
unless swift action was taken to protect the owl, it might one
day have to be put on the endangered-species list, curtailing
timber harvests on federal lands.

    And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged
with protecting species, refused to call for the owl to be
listed as endangered until a federal court in 1988 judged that
refusal to be "arbitrary and capricious." Later the General
Accounting Office discovered that Fish and Wildlife officials
had rewritten portions of a major study, expunging critical
references suggesting the owl was endangered. One biologist
said he felt pressured to "sanitize the report." For years,
economics and politics, not biology, have controlled the
decisions of BLM, the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife.

    The controversy offers the U.S. an opportunity to reassess
the cost of past profligacy and salvage what remains of a
treasured legacy of wildlife and ancient forest. Neither the
owl nor the timbermen are served by further governmental
inaction or sham solutions. What is gained by waiting until the
last fir topples, the owl slips closer to extinction, or the
mills finally retool or shut down because there are no more
old-growth trees available? The lesson of the owl is not that
environmental and economic concerns are incompatible, but that
the longer society lacks the political courage to act, the
harder it is to find a solution. After years of industry
obstructionism and governmental acquiescence, the Forest
Service is finally experimenting with requiring more selective
harvesting of trees, rather than clear-cutting. But many
environmentalists fear that such half measures will not
preserve the forest ecosystem.

    In a sense, everyone is to blame for the current dilemma.
Says Jolene Unsoeld, a Congresswoman from Washington State: "It
is the accumulated actions of all of us -- those of us who
admire a beautiful wood-paneled wall, environmentalists who
want their grandchildren to know the ancient forests, and those
of us who come from generations of hardworking, hard-living
loggers. We are all at fault, because all of us wanted the days
of abundance to go on forever, but we didn't plan, and we
didn't manage for that end."

    Since most old-growth forests are on federal land, they
belong not to an industry or a region but to the nation. The
federal bureaucracies that manage them have too often operated
under antiquated guidelines, framed when the forests seemed
inexhaustible and man was oblivious to all but his own needs.
Those agencies must reappraise their roles as custodians of the
land and recognize the widest interests of the nation, not
merely the most deeply vested. To place timber production above
every other concern in this era of expanding environmental
awareness is an abrogation of the public trust.

    These are times of shifting societal values, from an
appetite for natural resources to a concern for environmental
quality, from the need for a strong defense to the reality of
eased world tensions. Each shift brings dislocation and
hardship. When revisions to the Clean Air Act pass Congress,
the use of high-sulfur coal will be curbed, and thousands of
West Virginia miners will lose their careers. And the scaling
back of the defense budget could put thousands more on the
unemployment line.

    What is the Government's obligation to those workers and to
the loggers of the Northwest? It would be impossibly costly for
Congress to insure every citizen against the winds of change.
But when scores of communities are imperiled, relief measures
are necessary. In the case of the Northwest, the Federal
Government should help retrain loggers and millworkers and
provide towns with grants to spur economic diversification.
Congress could also help sustain the Northwest's processing
mills by passing legislation aimed at reducing raw-log exports.

    There is no way to avoid hard choices. The U.S. will have
to recognize that no society can have it all at all times --
unfettered harvesting of natural resources, full employment and
a healthy and rich environment. The soft hoot of the owl, an
ancient symbol of wisdom and foresight, beckons us to resolve
both its future and our own.