Loggers Protest Rules Blocking Timber Harvests

Taking a tactic from environmentalists, 400 timber workers, supported by dozens of honking logging trucks, massed outside the Humboldt County Courthouse on Tuesday to oppose state environmental regulations blocking additional logging in the region.

The rally, which delayed traffic on U.S. Highway 101 for more than 30 minutes, coincided with a county supervisors meeting where state forestry officials had been summoned to explain why they now reject most timber harvest plans submitted by local lumber companies.

The reason, the board was told, is that recent successful lawsuits by environmentalists require harvest plans to be submitted with voluminous environmental-impact information that lumber companies are not accustomed to producing.

The harvest plans “are asking for volumes of information they never asked for before,” explained Jerry Partain, director of the California Department of Forestry.

Demonstrators outside the building jeered the newly enforced requirements, contending that they are choking northwestern California’s biggest industry. Logging jobs are among the best paid in the region.

“I have a family to support,” said John Hamilton, a new father and logger for Pacific Lumber Co., the focus of most of the recent lawsuits. The environmentalists “are ruining us,” he said.

“There are only 100,000 people in this whole county, and logging makes everything work,” said Al Blauvelt, owner of a saw shop in Rio Dell, across the Eel River from Pacific Lumber’s two huge old-growth redwood sawmills south of here. “If logging goes, everything goes.”

Inside, Humboldt State University economics professor John H. Gobey told supervisors that Humboldt County had 8,570 timber jobs in 1968 but only about 5,000 today. However, he said he did not know how many were lost to automation and lower demand rather than environmental regulations. He did say the county may lose another 1,852 jobs if recently denied timber-harvest plans are not ultimately granted.

This part of California has a long history of establishing parks to preserve large stands of the huge redwoods. In exchange for the parks, loggers say, timber companies were promised permission to harvest from private and public lands. There has been growing unrest over court decisions that delay the logging.

The issue has been lingering since the founding of Redwood National Park, the nation’s costliest park, 48 miles north of here in 1978. The preservation issue resurfaced in 1986, when Houston financier Charles Hurwitz bought Pacific Lumber Co., a local company with a reputation for prudent forest management, and stepped up the harvesting of old-growth redwood to pay off loans used for the purchase.

Local conservationists fought this and won big last fall, when Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Frank Petersen chastised the state Department of Forestry for having “rubber-stamped” many of Pacific Lumber’s aggressive new harvest plans, sometimes before the plans were even completed.

He ordered state foresters to factor in the effects of intensive harvesting of redwoods and fir on wildlife and water quality. Partain said the industry has tried but has not been able to meet the technical demands. In the last month alone, he said he had to deny three timber-harvest plans because they lacked sufficient environmental data.

Meanwhile, an environmentalist group called Earth First! proposed creating a massive new wilderness area covering 98,000 acres of what is now timber, grazing and farm land in the lush Eel River watershed south of here.

That prompted local loggers to piggyback their demonstration on to the supervisors’ meeting. An hour before that hearing, hundreds of loggers, many sporting bright orange Pacific Lumber Co. hard hats, appeared in front of the courthouse with signs reading “No More Parks” and “We Want Our Jobs.”

“We tried to run a mill today,” said Pacific Lumber spokesman David Galitz,”but when the whistle blew, there wasn’t anybody there to work.”

Workers who failed to show up will not be disciplined, he said, although they will not be paid, either.

“We’ve stayed away from the company as much as possible,” said Don Peterson, a Pacific Lumber millwright from Fortuna and one of the organizers of the demonstration. “We’re just trying to stress we’re working people, and even though we don’t do this very often, there is opposition to Earth First!”

Earth First! member Darryl Cherney tried vainly to woo loggers.

“Hell, we’re not against logging,” he said to one Pacific Lumber employee. “We live in wood houses and use paper. We just object to the way” the logging is done.

Nearby, Pacific Lumber saw man Keith Smith just shook his head.

“The more land they want to take from us, the less we have to do,” he said. “They are threatening us, our families and our jobs.”