Politicians Try to Defuse Northwest Logging Fight

In an effort closely watched in California and Washington, eight top Oregon politicians have proposed a temporary cease-fire in the jobs-versus-nature fight that has been blamed for crippling the Pacific Northwest logging industry.

The four-point bipartisan proposal attempts to expand timber harvests and cut layoffs over the next 15 months by asking environmental groups to exchange their court-ordered environmental protections for less-restrictive industry pledges to improve its harvesting practices.

Oregon’s seven-member congressional delegation, along with Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, unanimously agreed to make the proposal while moderating a daylong summit meeting Saturday between loggers and environmentalists.

Both sides have been told to respond to the proposal by noon Tuesday, in time to increase timber harvest levels in a 1990 budget bill scheduled for an important committee vote Wednesday in Washington.

Timber interests were cautiously optimistic about the compromise, but environmentalists were skeptical about agreeing to the harvest of specific volumes of timber in exchange for vague industry promises to protect vanishing old-growth timber and the increasingly rare northern spotted owl.

However, Democratic Rep. Les AuCoin said the proposal is essential to “get the pistol away from the temple of the environmentalists as well as industry” as the controversy over the spotted owl ratchets higher with every mill closure.

Such an agreement is essential, said Republican Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, to give Congress enough “breathing room” to draft and enact fundamental reforms of the nation’s environmental laws to accommodate both loggers and nature.

Environmentalists and loggers at the hearing here Saturday agreed that changes in the law are essential, but Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio said Congress is not likely to act soon.

“There will not be major changes in the law in the very short order,” he said during the session in the tightly secured Salem City Council chamber. “There may be great willingness among this delegation to tackle this problem, but we have to work within a Congress that is not very willing to wade into our dispute.”

Federal timber policy traditionally has been left up to legislators from those Western states with most of the federal forests, particularly Oregon, California and Washington. Those three states, in that order, are the nation’s top timber producers.

Pressure has grown on members of Congress from those states to do something about timber sales postponed by recent court orders won by environmentalists. The environmental groups seek to protect potentially threatened animal species living almost exclusively in the region’s valuable “old-growth” or virgin Douglas fir, redwood and spruce forests.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service--in its most controversial study since delaying construction of Tennessee’s Tellico Dam to protect the tiny snail darter fish in the late 1970s--said in April that decades of habitat loss at the hands of the timber industry may qualify the northern spotted owl for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Hearings in Three States

In August, the service is scheduled to conduct the first round of public hearings on whether to declare the northern spotted owl to be threatened with extinction. Hearings on the owl--of which 3,000 to 4,500 are thought to exist--will be held in all three affected states.

Listing the mottled brown, medium-sized bird--a subspecies related to similar raptors in Southern California, the southern Rocky Mountains and northern Mexico--would require large habitat protection zones that could cut by half the volume of timber available for harvest from the federal forests in Oregon, Northern California and Washington.

Federal timber is vital to Pacific Northwest loggers for the rest of this century. Over-cutting of private timber lands to fuel the housing booms of the 1950s and ‘60s has crimped private log supplies until replanted trees reach a harvestable size in another 20 years.

Timber companies had planned to fill this so-called “log gap” with virgin publicly owned forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. However, government forests are required by law to meet a variety of needs in addition to timber production, including recreation and wildlife protection.

Evidence of Threat

Recent evidence that harvesting the most valuable parts of federal forests could threaten the northern spotted owl and other species with extinction has led to the current standoff between the industry and environmentalists.

Industry officials say restrictions on federal timber sales are to blame for a rash of sawmill closures and job losses throughout the Northwest--an unusual development at a time of robust home construction and a particularly devastating blow to the heavily timber-dependent economies of southwestern Oregon and Northern California.

Environmentalists counter that the closures and layoffs are a natural result of past over-harvesting of private forests, as well as the export of raw, unmilled logs to Asia and the computer automation of modern sawmills.

This disagreement has led to bitter debates and rancorous demonstrations by both sides in big cities and small mill towns from San Francisco to Sweet Home, Ore.

The extent of disagreement among the players in this drama is indicated by their respective projections of layoffs that will result from current legal restrictions on logging. The Northwest Forest Council, an industry group, says 54,000 jobs will be lost in the coming year in Oregon alone; the U.S. Forest Service projects 11,000 Oregon layoffs; the state of Oregon itself anticipates 5,300; environmentalists say that a few small market adjustments could avoid layoffs entirely.

Avoiding Disaster

The bird must by law be protected from the threat of extinction--if it actually is so threatened, which has been theorized but not yet demonstrated--but politicians on both sides of the issue are trying to find a way to do so without disastrous consequences.

Push too far one way and they could cripple the timber industry as it works to compete with cheap Canadian imports and low-cost Southern supplies; push too far the other way and they could generate a backlash strong enough to gut the endangered species law.

The Oregon politicians had hoped to find a way out of this dilemma by inviting the warring factions to sit down with one another and negotiate directly, rather than battle through lawyers in the courts. But an agreement was not produced.

On Saturday, at the end of the eight-hour session, the two sides still could not agree on any of the fundamental facts: the number of owls remaining, the type of trees needed for them to survive or the reason for the apparent decline in their number. There was no agreement on how much old-growth timber exists, how quickly it is being cut, how important it is--or even what constitutes “old growth.”

Despite the lack of agreement on those areas, environmentalists and loggers did both call for a revamp of federal timber regulations.

Exports Issue

Tom Giesen, president of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, suggested abandonment of the practice of cutting the oldest trees first on federal land, adoption of federal tax incentives to encourage more private timber growers and extending a ban on log exports from federal lands to include private lands for an emergency five-year period.

Raw-log exports rose sharply as the Japanese yen grew stronger against the dollar. The Japanese prefer to import raw logs rather than finished lumber because American mills until recently did not mill boards to metric sizes nor to the finish quality needed by Japan’s open-beam architecture. The high prices paid by Japan have added to the log shortage now hurting Northwest mills.

“We must stop log exports,” Giesen said. “We cannot give Oregon’s logs to subsidize Japanese jobs.”

Industry spokesman James Geisinger had different priorities for Congress. He recommended stripping courts of the ability to enforce strict compliance with environmental laws; mandating more production on federal land; setting up timber-production zones to make up for wilderness areas where logging is not allowed; and stopping federal forest-planning process--and freezing in old high-volume timber cut levels--until the spotted owl question is resolved.

“Our industry cannot survive without an adequate land base dedicated to growing timber,” Geisinger said. “We cannot eliminate the land base (to set aside land for wildlife) and assume it will be business as usual in our towns and communities and in our economy.”