Loggers Say Fight to Save Owl Endangers Jobs : Environment: 13,000 rally against a plan that would place up to 40% of Northwest timberland off limits to the industry.

Loggers put down their chain saws Friday, piled into trucks and set out from hamlets like Sweet Home and Myrtle Creek to tell their city-dwelling cousins that the fight to save a rare species of owl is endangering the livelihood of people who depend on timber.

As many as 13,000 tree fallers, truck drivers, mill workers and their families overflowed Pioneer Square in the center of Portland for a boisterous noontime demonstration.

Logging trucks, vans and pick-ups, all with yellow ribbons trailing, rolled up Interstate 5 to Portland all morning. An estimated 350 small and large businesses throughout rural Oregon closed for the day so workers could attend, shutting down most commerce in several small towns in a show of support for rural Oregon’s No. 1 industry.

Claiming tens of thousands of timber jobs are at stake, organizers from a group called the Oregon Lands Coalition called the rally to protest a proposal made earlier this month that would ban logging on as much as 40% of the available timberland in the Pacific Northwest in order to save the rare northern spotted owl.

“I have reached the limit of my patience,” proclaimed Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), one of several politicians who vowed at the rally to fight efforts to preserve additional timberland.

“You have got to make a stand,” said Phil Britt, 37, a tree faller from Carlton, Ore., who joined the crowd packing the square. Fearing that he could lose his job and his small town would “dry up and blow away,” Britt gave up a day’s wage to demonstrate. “You can’t sit back and think it won’t happen here, because it just might,” he said.

Across the square, a contingent from Zipo Logs, a mill in Eugene, Ore., bemoaned the prospect of closing down if the virgin forest land that is the spotted owl’s habitat is declared off limits.

“We could always go to work for McDonald’s,” mill worker John Wilhelm said.

“Who’s going to be around to buy hamburgers?” Doug Updegrave shot back, his pregnant wife, Christy, standing nearby.

“That’s all I know--mill work. I can’t afford to go back to school,” she said.

Several loggers and mill workers in the crowd talked about how their fathers and grandfathers were loggers before them. Many said they fear they will be forced to leave their small towns for big cities if more timberland is closed to chain saws. The thought of big city traffic and raising kids in a place where they wouldn’t know their neighbors did not sit well.

“It’s getting to where you can’t even cut a tree,” complained Guy Walker, a third-generation logger from Lyons, Ore., who brought his 7-year-old daughter Bridie. If work gets much harder to find, he said, he might be forced to consider a new trade.

“I like working in the woods,” he said. “The freedom. You don’t have anybody standing over your shoulder. Just being outside.”

Organizers of the event said that even though Portland’s economy benefits from logging, many residents side with the old growth forests--the kind most valued by loggers because of their density--against lumber interests. But they hoped to convince people in Portland, home to half the state’s population, that owls and people can co-exist.

The fight is uphill.

“Rightly or wrongly, people up here think this is God’s acre,” Chris Tobkin, executive assistant to Portland Mayor J.E. Bud Clark, noted after the rally. “They don’t like anyone who might do it damage, whether it be a California developer or a timber company executive.”

In rural Oregon, mills have been shutting down for years as old growth stands are depleted as a resource by timber fallers and are protected by environmentalists. But in the past year, the spotted owl has emerged as the symbol of a fight over the remaining old growth stands that is as bitter as any in years.

Loggers say nothing less than their right to live and work as they choose is at stake. Environmentalists, trying to save what’s left of the forests, contend the owl needs them to survive.

Last week, the fight escalated when a panel of government scientists issued a report concluding that continued logging of the old growth stands was threatening the spotted owl with extinction. The report called for a ban on up to 40% of the available timberland in the Pacific Northwest in order to protect the subspecies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requested the report to help it decide by June 23 whether to classify the bird as a threatened species.

The report’s release prompted the Oregon Lands Coalition to organize Friday’s rally. In the burg of Sweet Home, convincing people to join in was easy. The town of about 7,000 people 100 miles south of Portland had six mills a few years back. Now it has three.

“We want the owl to survive. We don’t want the last tree in Oregon cut,” said John Kunzman, part of a third-generation timber family and one of the main organizers. “But how far is this going to go before people count, too.”

The town has tried to diversify. But Mayor Dave Holley noted that a plant that makes metal detectors and one that processes organic baby food do not make up for the 350 timber jobs that have disappeared in the past few years.

So with a feeling of some desperation, the citizenry started massing at dawn. Perhaps 3,000 went to Portland. Some chain stores stayed open, but everything else, from the Busy Bee Drive-in to Arlie Elliott’s real estate company, was closed tight. In all, more than 100 businesses closed.

Barb Walker, who has poured coffee at the Spring Restaurant in the heart of Sweet Home for the past 27 years, filled a few last cups before closing for the day about 7:30 a.m. No one had to ask her to close. When word spread about the rally, she said: “It was a matter of honor” that the Spring would shut down, too.

“It’s loyalty,” Walker said, estimating that 97% of her customers work in the woods or mills. “You just can’t turn your back on the people who supported you.”