Mill Towns Subsist on Logs from Afar
Environmentalists Keep Them from Taking Dead Trees out of Forest
By William Wade Keye*
It used to be about protecting spotted owls, saving old-growth forests or putting an end to clear-cutting. That was 1990. Those battles are over, although the zealous victors of the timber wars will never admit it.
Now the demand is for absolute purity. To many environmentalists in 2001, nothing less than "zero cut" is acceptable - no commercial timber harvesting from America's vast network of publicly owned national forests. Not one stick. Not even thinning, selection logging or the removal of dead or dying trees. If the forest burns down due to a lack of management, so be it.
Nowhere is the reality of today's forestry scene more apparent - or painfully visible - than in the Bigfoot country of northwestern California. In a region blessed with some of the planet's most fertile and sustainable temperate forest ecosystems, struggling sawmill communities are subsisting on raw logs imported from hundreds - sometimes even thousands - of miles away.
In fact, despite our abundant forests, the Golden State no longer produces most of the wood that we consume. With timber harvest levels slashed by 51 percent in the past decade, 70 percent of our wood fiber is now brought in from other states and nations. This is a situation without precedent in California history.
Like shipping pineapples to Hawaii, there is a surreal quality to the sight of barges full of Canadian logs gently steaming into Eureka's Humboldt Bay. Meanwhile, in the nearby Six Rivers National Forest, massive quantities of fire-killed timber are rotting on the stump, instead of being promptly salvaged and put to good uses.
It's a volume of wood that, if recovered, could have supplied raw material to operate several sawmills for many months - enough lumber to build 50,000 American homes. But the once proud United States Forest Service, weakened by overlapping laws, legal rulings and endless red tape, is no longer capable of taking care of its land management responsibilities. And it shows.
Charis Stockwell of Willow Creek remembers the Megram Fire. "It was scary.
From our house the fire was only four to six air miles away - which meant it could be here in a day if the winds had picked up again. The smoke was so thick that you could look out the window and not see 20 feet from the front porch."
Megram, ignited in August 1999 by lightning strikes in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, eventually blew west onto the Six Rivers forest, racing toward the rural communities of Willow Creek and Hoopa. They were spared, but not before flames had consumed 190 square miles of national forest land. Extensive stands of timber burned at such high temperatures that few, if any, trees survived. Lost with them were thousands of acres of nesting and roosting habitat for the northern spotted owl.
Much of the worst devastation on the Six Rivers corresponds to areas previously ravaged by a ferocious 1995 wind storm. The resulting "blowdown" created an extreme buildup of flammable woody debris - an obvious setup for a wildfire catastrophe.
Forest Service managers attempted to reduce the fuel accumulations using a combination of salvage logging and controlled burning. To the dismay of local residents such as Stockwell, they were met with a blast of opposition by several non-profit environmental organizations.
Labeling the fuel treatments as simply a ploy to justify logging, opponents were largely successful in their efforts: As of Sept. 27, 1999, only 600 acres of Six Rivers forest blowdown - out of an estimated total of 35,000 such acres - had received comprehensive fuel treatments. That day the Megram Fire jumped containment lines on Trinity Mountain and finished the job, on nature's terms.
Born and raised in Willow Creek, Stockwell, 39, is a different breed of forest activist. Instead of trying to obstruct federal managers, she is intent on turning up the heat on those that are. She blames "zero cut" forces for the worst ravages of the Megram fire, and for blocking current Forest Service recovery plans.
Beyond this, Stockwell says that non-profit pressure groups have ushered in an era of poverty for the people in her rural area. "It makes me sad to see the town I grew up in become a welfare community. Where that burn got into the blowdown, it's moonscape. There's not going to be a tree in there in my lifetime. But when you go into the areas they treated, it's beautiful. Somehow burning up the forest is better than logging it?"
Lou Woltering is frustrated. He is forest supervisor of the Six Rivers National Forest, a public official trying to do the right thing on the people's land. And getting nowhere.
Woltering and his staff fear that in the mountains above the Trinity River, recent history is going to repeat itself. Instead of heavy blowdown, there are now vast expanses of fire-blasted trees. Left undisturbed, these black skeletons will eventually collapse, creating yet another huge buildup of flammable debris.
The next conflagration - expected in five to 15 years - could be even more destructive than Megram, potentially threatening river communities below. One of those is Charis Stockwell's town of Willow Creek.
The Six Rivers is again trying to implement what are considered to be urgently needed fuel treatments. Strategic openings, tied to the existing road system, are planned within some of the most severely burned areas. They will provide firefighters with safe zones from which to combat future blazes. As with the blowdown, only dead trees are being targeted: merchantable logs will be sold and the remaining slash burned.
The desired treatments - 860 acres - are modest, representing only 2 percent of the burned area on the Six Rivers. Even if these and other expected fire recovery proposals are fully implemented, almost all of the dead timber from the Megram Fire - logs that could overflow the cargo holds of a thousand ocean-going barges - will remain totally untouched.
But these days, even to undertake a 2 percent cleanup of a catastrophic burn, the Forest Service must first run the gauntlet of securing an approved Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Woltering's agency is again facing resistance by dedicated adversaries who see logging as hopelessly tainted with greed, and greed with ecological destruction.
Two years after the fire, the Megram EIS is now tied up in federal court. Woltering is not pleased about the delays, but there is nothing that he or his staff can do about it: "It's frustrating, particularly because the people who did the work on this (EIS) - there isn't a hair on their body that wants to do damage out there. These are extremely high quality, dedicated, very experienced professionals ... the frustration is to see all this good work be set aside."
Jerry Boberg, Six Rivers' Fish and Watershed Program leader, echoes the familiar theme: "It's extremely frustrating, when you are working as hard as you can making something positive out of a difficult situation. It's not like there isn't a whole slew of professionals that don't agonize over this."
It wasn't always this way in Bigfoot country. For decades, national forest management formed the backbone of Northern California's mountain communities, providing employment and a sense of rural empowerment.
Unlike national parks set aside for total preservation, national forests such as the Six Rivers were created by Congress to provide the American people with a perpetual candy store of natural resources and amenities including timber, water, minerals, grazing, recreation and wildlife. National forests were to be managed like large communal gardens: roaded, logged, thinned and planted.
If a large fire like Megram had occurred a generation ago, logging to salvage the valuable timber would have begun within months. "Before the smoke cleared, we'd be out there marking timber and doing the [timber sale] appraisal," says a veteran agency forester.
Forest Service stewardship, though, became increasingly controversial in the final decades of the 20th century. Public attitudes were changing, but national forest management lagged behind, locked into heavy reliance on clear-cutting and the conversion of native forest ecosystems into more simplified tree farms. The timber program finally spun completely off the tracks in 1990, with the listing of the northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
At the time, federal harvests - at 11 billion board feet (BBF) annually - represented fully 25 percent of America's softwood lumber supply. Within a decade, those levels were slashed by a stunning 80 percent, to 2.2 BBF in 1999.
Rural northwest communities - such as Stockwell's - virtually collapsed, by the score. Anti-forestry activists, flush with the momentum of success, continued to press the revolution to its logical conclusion, which is zero cut.
Still, reducing America's timber supply has had absolutely no effect on our voracious appetite for wood. Since the owl's listing, U.S. lumber consumption has increased by 16 percent. Most of that demand and its environmental impacts have been transferred to lands outside the United States.
Knowingly or not, American consumers have turned to foreign suppliers to make up for the loss of national forest timber. Softwood imports - mostly from Canada, but also from nations as far away as New Zealand and Chile - have risen by 7 BBF, 58 percent above 1990 levels.
Environmental absolutists worked hard to assume control over America's national forests, and they aren't about to back down now. Standing in opposition to Woltering's proposed Megram fuel treatments are seven battle-hardened nonprofit organizations, including the Sierra Club. Once again they are winning.
By default, the "no action" alternative of the EIS is being implemented. Decay is rapidly spoiling the market value of the dead trees. Revenue from their sale to local sawmills is needed to complete the desired treatments. Killing such a project simply requires working to ensure that the environmental review process is as prolonged and complicated as possible - dragged out until the disputed timber is sufficiently worthless.
A Megram EIS opponent reported in its most recent tax-exempt filing, "As a result of a novel computer monitoring database developed by our executive director, FCC [Forest Conservation Council] was able to comment on 124 separate timber sales and appeal 90 sales totaling more than 468 million board feet of timber ... these efforts bring us closer to the goal of zero trees cut for private profit on public lands...."
However, this year, the Forest Service played a new card. Trying to escape the zealots' choke hold, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth declared that an emergency situation existed on the Six Rivers: Adjacent communities would be at significant risk unless fuel treatments were accomplished. When the Megram EIS (already almost two years in preparation) was finally completed, the necessary work could begin immediately.
If Bosworth's move had been successful, a lengthy EIS administrative appeal would have been suspended. But opponents took the chief to court, questioning the legality of Bosworth's declaration as well as the adequacy of the EIS. On July 12, the gavel came down. San Francisco federal court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel sided with environmentalists and voided Bosworth's order. The ruling effectively killed any chances for fuel treatments during this field season, if not for good.
The Website for the Center for Biological Diversity soon boasted that it and allied groups had won an order "blocking a massive timber sale within a roadless area" and declaring, "Though the timber sale would harm northern goshawks, Pacific fishers, salmon and steelhead trout, the Forest Service did not take any steps to protect them."
On the telephone from Eureka, Lou Woltering is asked about the focused opposition the Forest Service faces, and chooses his words carefully. "Unfortunately I think the public at large is being misled by some individuals and organizations putting out what I feel are half-truths or misinformation to meet their agenda."
Charis Stockwell is not as diplomatic. "My experience is that these transplants are coming here with money. They're coming here and saying, 'We have, and we want what you have, too.' It's not right for people who don't know what they are talking about to come into an area and force the people that are living there into subsistence living."
*William Wade Keye is chairman of the Northern California Society of American Foresters.
By the same author: "Environmentalists vs. Forestry: Stopping Attempts to Clean Up Flammable Timber Leads to Wildfires", October 2003.