Environmental Politics Buffets Forest Preserve

When loggers started buying up old-growth forests near this Humboldt County hamlet, about 80 local residents--that is, nearly everyone in town--huddled anxiously in the schoolhouse.

They had spent a decade restoring the Mattole River as a fishery, repairing salmon spawning areas ruined by earlier logging and building. They feared that more logging would wipe that out--and take with it not only the ancient trees themselves but also the animals that need them to survive.

Protests and lawsuits had been used by others to block logging in the area, but such tactics didn’t suit Whitethorn’s pioneer families, Catholic monastics and counterculturists. Instead, they embraced a suggestion from Sister Myriam Dardenne of the nearby Redwoods Monastery.

They decided to buy the forest.

$100,000 Raised

It obviously was a big task, but it seemed straightforward. Whitethorn’s civic leaders founded the nonprofit Sanctuary Forest Inc., and by March had gathered enough in loans and cash donations from redwood fanciers around the world to put a $100,000 down payment on 160 acres of undisturbed forest.

With continued fund raising, shrewd bargaining and a $4-million share from a statewide $776-million park bond authorized by voters in June, they aspired to expand the Sanctuary Forest to at least 614 acres southeast of town. Some even dreamed of another 3,400 acres protected by donated or low-cost “conservation easements” under which property owners agree not to cut down their trees.

Now, however, Whitethorn’s residents are seeing their modest dream buffeted by the tumult of environmental politics. They wonder if they can ever preserve much more than the 160 acres already secured; they worry that the remainder of the Sanctuary Forest may be felled before it can be protected.

At issue is the argument over how much of the Pacific Northwest’s dwindling amount of old-growth, or virgin, forests should be preserved as ecological reserves and how much should be cut and replanted to keep industry supplied.

The issue became very real near Whitethorn two weeks ago when environmentalists from elsewhere in Humboldt and Mendocino counties used court orders and sit-ins to halt old-growth logging near town. This, ironically, has encouraged loggers to look near the unprotected Sanctuary Forest to bank a winter log supply.

Sanctuary Forest organizers said their agency was formed, in part, to avoid such problems and try to find a compromise in the political tug-of-war between the region’s environmentalists and loggers.

“Our approach has been to pay fair market value for whatever it is we want to save,” said Sanctuary Forest Inc. Secretary Robert McKee, himself a logger and local builder. “After all, I’m as interested in preserving our (property) rights as I am in preserving the forest.”

“We’ve proven through this process that we are not Earth First! and we are not EPIC,” said Sanctuary Forest President Rondal Snodgrass, referring to political groups that tie up logging by using civil disobedience and lawsuits. “We are the middle ground, a kind of straight environmental group among the radicals.”

That was the idea when Sanctuary Forest Inc. was launched two years ago to solicit donations of cash and land to preserve a treasured grove of ancient redwoods and Douglas fir trees at the northern fringe of Mendocino County.

The plan was for the nonprofit group to buy and preserve the land until the state could sell $776 million in park bonds authorized by voters last June; $4 million of that money is designated for preserving old-growth forests near the Mattole River headwaters south of Whitethorn.

The procedure speeds up the acquisition process while also saving the state money and assuring landowners fair value for their property. It is employed by a long list of private “land trusts,” including the Nature Conservancy, Save the Redwoods League and the Trust for Public Lands.

Agreement to Sell

For example, the 160-acre parcel already secured by Whitethorn residents is scheduled to be approved for acquisition by the state at the Nov. 15 meeting of the state’s Wildlife and Conservation Board. Executive Officer W. John Schmidt said Sanctuary Forest Inc. has agreed to sell those 160 acres to the state for about 80% of its appraised value of $600,000.

If the board agrees to buy the land, Schmidt said, it will be turned over to the Department of Fish and Game for use as an ecological reserve.

For other parcels that make up the “initial acquisition” of the Sanctuary Forest, Whitethorn residents asked landowners to delay any harvest plans until after June, when voters decided on the park bonds. If the bonds were approved, the land would be bought.

However, they soon discovered that the process is not always so smooth.

Voters approved the bonds, as hoped, but at the end of the month, Eel River Sawmills’ no-harvest pact expired. It quickly submitted harvest plans to the state Forestry Department to build a road into the Sanctuary Forest and start logging there and in several nearby parcels that local residents also had hoped to preserve in some fashion.

The road plan has been approved; the logging plan is pending.

Such plans, required under the state Forest Practices Act, allow regulators to suggest methods to mitigate the environmental damage associated with timber harvesting. They also allow for public comments on logging operations, even on private property.

Attempts by environmentalists and government biologists to modify the plans were unsuccessful. In particular, rejection by the Forestry Department of the Department of Fish and Game objections illustrates the new tension between state agencies over the effects of logging on such environmentally sensitive species as the spotted owl.

Hired Own Appraiser

Sanctuary Forest supporters lacked the cash to purchase Eel River Sawmills’ property, but they did hire their own appraiser to accelerate the process with which the state could buy the land.

Schmidt said the private appraisal will allow the Wildlife and Conservation Board to make the purchase a priority; without it, he said, the acquisition would have had to wait for one of the board’s three overworked land agents to estimate the price.

“People ask us why we don’t just come right out and tell the owner to stop his plans because we want to buy it,” Schmidt said. “Well, for one thing, we have to, by law, work with willing sellers. . . . We don’t do any condemnations.

“For another, we have $3.5 million of the $4 million left; what happens if the appraisal comes in at $5 million? That landowner would have stopped (work) for nothing and he’d have a pretty good suit (against the state).

“We have a responsibility to protect the state as well as the forest.”

For its part, Eel River Sawmills “is willing to sell (the Sanctuary Forest parcel), and always has been,” said company lawyer David Henry Dun of Eureka. An adjoining parcel also sought for the forest preserve also is available, but only for trade, he added.

“We are pursuing a timber harvest plan because no (purchase) agreement has been reached with the state,” Dun said. “We want to be ready if one can’t be reached because harvest plans take a long time to be approved.”

No Cutting Plans

For the time being, he added, there is no plan to execute the road-building or logging plans on the Sanctuary Forest lands. “I know they have no current, immediate plan to harvest” those parcels, he said. But he added that the company still reserves its rights as outlined in the approved harvest plan.

Such reservations give Sanctuary Forest supporters pause.

Snodgrass said he had hoped that the harvest plans were meant merely to increase the value of the property before his group bought it. Now, after demonstrators blocked logging elsewhere in the area, he is not sure what to think.

“We’re concerned about the actual intent of Eel River,” said Snodgrass, a drug rehabilitation counselor. “That (land being reviewed for logging) is the life and death of our project.”