COLUMN ONE : Northwest Is at War With Itself : It’s a battle over nature’s resources, pitting jobs and money against scenic beauty and recreation. The symbols are disturbing. Clear-cut forests are hard to top for shock value.

Whatever is mine is mine, and whatever is yours is half mine.

Welcome to America’s Mideast, here in the Northwest. Here in the land of the angry and the scared, the right and the righteous.

Under the exaggerated shadow of what the nation has come to know as the cute but delicate spotted owl, in the wary gaze of wealthy Pacific Rim neighbor Japan, amid enchanted glades of soaring cedars and measured rhythms of still-liveable cities, the Pacific Northwest is at war with itself.

It’s a battle over jobs, money, recreation, scenic beauty, economic freedom and, if you listen to some of the predictions of conservationists, over whether humankind can avert an environmental catastrophe when it sees one coming. In some eyes, it’s also a fight about Japanese colonization of the Northwest, and a measure of America’s international environmental leadership.

One thing for sure, it’s a war in which all the competitors think they are losing.

It’s the war over nature’s resources. What to use? What to save? Today’s battleground is America’s great and ancient rain forest, that which remains. Tomorrow, it could be over the storied but troubled salmon. Across time, the results seemed destined to define the terms of life in the Northwest, for its people and for its landscape.

“There is no middle ground,” says Oregon Gov. Neil E. Goldschmidt, wearily. Even when he visits first-graders in school, he braces for argument. “We have failed to create a middle ground.”

Perhaps two-thirds of Oregonians, and maybe as many in Washington state, have chosen sides--they know which future is right --an astonishing degree of polarization. Many others find neutrality a difficult discipline.

Much of the country has heard the distant din of this battle--the cries to save the shy and endangered spotted owl. The people here, however, know the owl is but the spoils of a bigger fight.

Hardly a day goes by, big city or small, in which newspapers don’t feature some divisive development or fiery comment. Along some highways, residents proclaim their allegiance with Day-Glo signs in their yards or ribbons on their car aerials. Even some advertisers, such as Gary & Merle’s Tire Service here in Albany, want you to know about their all-season radials and also their views. So their newspaper ad begins: “Support Our Timber Industry.”

“This has cleaved the state like nothing else. It’s an elemental struggle, it brings up the essential duality of Oregon,” says fifth-generation Northwesterner Bob Applegate, a Portland public affairs executive.

Contrary to what you may have heard, the rarest things in these parts are not spotted owls but open minds.

To sample the deep emotions, and the potentially deeper national and global consequences, one needs a varied wardrobe and a vigorous constitution.

“This,” all sides say, “is something you have to come see.”

So, come hike the Pacific Crest Trail with the environmentalists.

In southern Oregon, in an area the locals call The Greensprings, the legendary high-country foot trail, designated a national scenic pathway, winds through scrub oak, into stands of ancient firs and cedars, over ridge tops with 100-mile vistas and across . . . to clear-cuts.

As in every war, the symbols are painful and disturbing. Clear-cuts are hard to top for shock value.

There is an old story environmentalists love to tell--how a plane load of reporters were flying to view the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount St. Helens a decade ago. The sight brought gasps of disbelief--it looked like ground zero at a nuclear explosion, it looked like the moon, or hell. Wow! “Wait a minute,” their guide is supposed to have said. “We’re not to the volcano damage yet, this is just a clear-cut.”

They are hot, barren and ugly. And this is where Andy Kerr, the salty conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, likes to begin. Grab a stump and listen. It’s a story that can get complicated quickly. But reduced to its simplest, the environmentalists see this:

Virtually all the Northwest’s old growth has been logged off of private lands and much of the state lands too. That leaves public timberlands managed by the federal government as the primary reserve of the huge old trees so valued today.

With the price of logs at an all-time high, driven up by demand for raw logs in Japan, the pressure on national forests and Bureau of Land Management timber is extraordinary. Why else in heaven’s name would the bureau allow cutting right to the edge of the famed Pacific Crest Trail just east of Ashland?

Timbermen, using their political muscle to keep the chain saws operating--to “keep the cut up,” as they say here--threaten to disrupt the integrity of the Northwest ecosystem, one of the world’s important atmospheric regulators.

Old forests store water, preserve a weak and fragile topsoil, nourish the atmosphere and maintain one of the richest and densest inventories of life forms on the planet.

The owl’s struggle to survive shows that the remaining forest is losing its integrity. Environmentalists believe any number of other forest animals are dying out--among them the small mammal, the fisher, and a sea bird known as the marbled murrelet. Salamanders and other creatures are endagered, too.

Kerr and others argue that 90% of the region’s old forests already has been logged. To replace just one acre will take 250 years. “That’s enough,” he says. “The timber industry likes to talk about the agricultural model, with their tree farms. We prefer the mining model. And they’ve mined enough. It’s time to leave the ancient forests alone.”

He adds, “What we really need is an endangered ecosystem act.”

Environmentalist and governmental forest management experts argue that replanting old forests with tree farms is OK for business, but not necessarily good for the ecology. Forest plantations in Europe show that yield from third-growth harvest drops sharply, probably because there are so few nutrients in forest soil. In the Northwest, millions of acres of second growth are maturing.

“If these tree farms don’t work, something needs to be left behind. We are at a junction in history. Either we change things significantly or we lose the opportunity to change them,” says Victor M. Sher, Seattle lawyer with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

The global consequences are both political and environmental.

“We, the richest nation in the world, are going to tell the dirt-poor people of Brazil and Indonesia and Zaire to be good environmentalists and not cut down their rain forests? Ha. We’re showing them how,” says Elliott A. Norse, ecologist and author of the book “Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

“In Amazonia, ancient forests are falling 1% a year. We’re cutting ours at 3% a year.”

So, come try on the the spiked caulk (pronounced cork) boots of the logger.

Here in the summer in Albany is one of the world’s largest timber carnivals. Here’s where the work of cutting and chopping and tree-climbing is turned into sporting competition--a big, fun summer picnic.

But there’s no escaping the anxiety. For the World Championship finals in this open-arms, historic old town, attendance was predicted at 20,000. Fewer than 3,000 show up. The mood is pensive, if not downright glum. Loggers know they are cornered.

Pull up a chair, and listen to the timbermen:

Environmentalists are exaggerating and insensitive to the personal pain they are causing. They are sanctimonious in claiming to love the outdoors more than the men who have worked there, father and son, all these years. Citified news reporters are too easily spooked by cries that the end is near.

“We get people from the East who are surprised to see any trees up here. They have a picture in their minds of about 50 acres of old-growth left with 100 chain saws waiting to cut it down,” said Charles Cox, who drives a log truck out of Springfield. “Then they see the trees and they say, wow, isn’t this beautiful, we got to save it. But much of what they are seeing isn’t old growth, it’s second growth.”

Some waterways are cleaner in these be-careful times, and some fish runs are improving. The science of timber management is advancing. The United States is doing better than most countries with its forests. But loggers don’t feel they get much credit for trying.

“It’s awfully hard not to get bitter,” says Mike McKay, a Eugene millworker and activist with the Yellow Ribbon Coalition, which seeks to right logging’s name and revive the industry.

It’s a herculean task. Even before the owl, the Northwest logger was in eclipse. Virtually every study, the government’s, the environmentalists’, the industry’s, shows decreasing demand for the men who cut, yard, truck and mill the wood. One way or the other, their load is going down.

Mechanization has made great strides in this old-fashioned roustabout business of lumberjacking. Exports of logs to Asia may be up, but that also means fewer mills producing finished lumber here.

All kinds of job-loss numbers are thrown about. William B. Conerly, vice president and economist of First Interstate Bank in Portland, offers a mid-range prediction. Stopping cutting on old-growth forests to protect the spotted owl will put 15,000 timber workers out of their jobs, spread over the next three to four years. That compares with employment gains of 50,000 in the state last year.

“The effect is to bring our growth rate down, but it does not bring us into a recession,” he says.

The root of the loggers’ lament isn’t just the declining curve of job opportunities. No, it’s the very self-image of these people who work in the woods. Machines reduce jobs but don’t take your pride; exporting logs to Japan means less work in domestic lumber mills but selling to the highest bidder is the American way. Those things just make you sad. Environmentalists believe what loggers do is wrong. And that makes you mad.

So everywhere you turn at the logging festival there are signs of protest against environmentalists and their damned owl.

There is more resentment to be passed around, too.

Japanese log importer Toshio Narita, general manager of the Meiko Unyu Co., appeared at the timber carnival and praised the quality of Oregon logs. As for proposed bans on exporting raw logs? “He doesn’t want the ban,” says his intrepreter. “He wants more logs.” Japanese millworkers need jobs, too, he adds.

His remarks leave some in the audience quietly seething.

“How can they have this guy come here when the Japanese are taking our logs and making Sony stereo cabinets and shipping them back to us--how could they have a guy like that here?” fumes Paul Mumford, who operates Sedlak’s, a logging outfitter in Corvallis.

In many quarters, shiploads of logs, bark and all, going to Japan are a symbolic flash point with almost as much emotional swag as clear-cutting.

Last year in an advisory referendum, Oregonians voted 9 to 1 against exporting logs from state lands. It was the biggest electoral landslide in Oregon history. In some timber counties the margin against exports was 96%, and some folks still wonder just who were those maverick 4% anyway?

If jobs are really the issue in the fight over timber lands, why ship one out of every four logs to the Far East, chiefly Japan? By law, logs from federally managed lands cannot be exported from Oregon and Washington, but that just increases the incentive to export all the logs that can be cut on private and state-owned lands, or to export timber that has been minimally milled.

A recent Forest Service study suggested that 75% of the jobs in jeopardy in the battle over the spotted owl could be saved by banning all log exports.

But it’s a nasty Gordian knot for politicians. Washington state, for instance, has no income tax. Forestry revenues help pay for schools. To a lesser extent that is true in Oregon. And ever wonder why road repair crews are so aggressive in Oregon? Why the state paves even logging roads? They are financed in part from timber sales.

With the Japanese paying 20% more for logs than domestic mills, the incentive to export is compelling.

Reducing exports may save jobs but almost surely result in lowered services or a need for more taxes--and no one believes there is a 90% majority for that.

So the Northwest finds itself boxed in, and sometimes its guilt shows through. At the port of Anacortes, Wash., local diners at a waterfront restaurant are offered a printed statement describing the view outside. That rusty cargo ship diners see is from Panama, taking 2.4 million board feet of Northwestern raw logs to Japan. The statement from the port officials tries to soften the scene: “During its brief stay here approximately 35 local persons will be employed in the loading operation.”

“The Japanese keep asking, when is the mood here going south?” says Gov. Goldschmidt.

He has championed Japanese business investment in Oregon, promising a better educated and more stable work force than in California and cheaper land prices. The result has been a mushrooming of Japanese electronics assembly plants here. And, as many happy Oregonians tell you, this means a more diverse economy, less dependence on timber.

Now, there are those with second thoughts.

What can you say about a place that exports raw materials and then provides an inexpensive locale for assembly-work jobs?

“Colony” is the loaded word that comes to mind.

Several Northwest Democrats have dared utter the description in the last couple of years. It has become part of Democrat Harry Lonsdale’s campaign to unseat 24-year veteran Republican Mark O. Hatfield in the U.S. Senate. No log exports, says Lonsdale.

“It’s criminal. We cut down 500- or 1,000-year-old trees, send them to Japan, where they make value-added products. That’s what Third World countries do, what colonies do. And we shouldn’t be a colony to anybody,” says Lonsdale.

Goldschmidt says that Oregonians chafe because, “The underlying tenor is that the Japanese play by a different set of rules.”

The forestry and resources fight does not end at the forests. One needs to walk down to the river, say, the biggest river in the Northwest. The fracas brewing here is over the wild chinook and sockeye and coho salmon of the Columbia River, the creatures that have come to be the very symbol of the region.

Environmentalists, having challenged business-as-usual forest management by seeking protections for the endangered owl, now are taking aim at the day-to-day management of the Northwest’s mightiest river and its watersheds by seeking protection for its once bountiful natural salmon. Earlier this year, a group called Oregon Trout filed a petition asking government endangered species designation for five native salmon runs on the Columbia system.

Dozens of dams on this river and its tributaries produce more than $3 billion a year in low-cost electrical power on which the region depends. It is a major shipping waterway for the region and provides vast irrigation. But the dams and turbines, even with their special bypasses for fish, have proved an obstacle for young fish trying to return to the ocean, and upstream logging has spoiled spawning beds. Where there were once countless millions of these fish in seasonal spawning migrations, they now can be counted in the few thousands or sometimes just hundreds. Hatchery salmon supplement the total, but many fishery biologists warn that these strains are genetically narrow, inferior and vulnerable.

The national Marine Fisheries Service is taking the first preliminary look at the petitions--the first step in deciding whether these wild fish runs need government protection. This was raised as an issue back in the late 1970s and since then more than $100 million has been spent trying to enhance the local fishery and stave off more drastic moves.

Regional experts are only beginning to try to fathom the economic consequences of what might have to be done next on the Columbia and its watersheds to save the native fish. Re-engineering of dams, increased water releases during salmon runs and upstream logging restrictions are among possible solutions--but all could be costly and bitterly contested.

You cannot leave the resource battle without visiting the high-rises of Portland and Seattle and the other offices that are home to the timber industry executives. For others, this battle over the trees and water may have new urgency. For the beleaguered wood products industry, it’s the same old saw.

“The root issue remains as it has for 20 years, how much federal forest land will be managed to include timber production and how much will be preserved,” says the Northwest Forest Resource Council.

Many industry officials believe to the bone that the health of the forests is not in danger nearly as much as their own livelihood.

There are widely differing points of view, depending on whether you are a landowner and export your own logs, or a smaller operator who depends on the right to cut on national forests, or hold some other niche in the cycle. But there are some beliefs that are shared. Listen:

Sure there have been maddening occurances in the woods. Some old-line companies have been bought out by highly leveraged outsiders, which then had to liquidate forests to pay the debt. But don’t overlook the big and long-range timber players, who have been here for years and are investing for years more. Don’t call them cut and run.

There are 7.25 million acres of old growth left in the Northwest. Of that, 4.2 million is already set aside for preservation in national parks, protected wilderness areas and along sensitive watersheds. How much is enough?

Clear-cuts are not as dead as environmentalists would portray. Within a year after a cut, the ground is nurturing new trees, albeit often with the help of herbicides to kill competing shrubs. Don’t look at the site as destroyed, just harvested. Imagine wheat fields on an 80-year rotation.

And, of course, tree farms work. Why else would we bet our futures on them? True, big trees will give way to smaller ones, but smaller trees grow more efficiently.

Really, when you think about it, wood and timber producers are environmentalists, too. At least that is the theme of the industry’s new public relations offensive.

“Willamette Celebrates Earth Day Every Day,” reads a full-page newspaper advertisement that Willamette Industries Inc. purchased recently in the Albany Democrat-Herald to catalogue both its economic importance to the region and also its environmental expenditures.

Some of the industry PR, however, has an old-fashioned bellicoseness to it--slightly crude or, at best, preaching to the already committed.

Recently, one timber products coalition brushed off the idea of new, less environmentally destructive techniques in forestry, saying environmentalists must also consent to opening up wilderness areas for logging.

The Southern Oregon Timber Industries Assn. passes out 16-page color brochures explaining that this is really a fight pitting “East Coast environmental groups against freckle-faced loggers.”

Another organization curiously decries the “eco-anxiety industry” for the six-figure salaries--$100,000 to $200,000--paid the nation’s handful of top environmentalists.

“The real problem with the radical environmentalists is that they’ve traded in their blue jeans for Italian-designer suits,” says Charles S. Cushman of the Multiple Land Use Alliance. His point was unclear. According to a Seattle Times survey this summer, several timber company executives, including George Weyerhaeuser, made more than $1 million in salary.

Still, political and economic leaders in the region believe the industry has been called to compromise repeatedly in this war, and has done so, even if complaining all the way. At the same time, these same leaders say environmentalists may be too smug in refusing compromise now that they feel the breezes blowing at their backs.

Perhaps that’s why so much hullabaloo befalls otherwise minor events, such as next month’s scheduled Breitenbush concert, an environmentalist music festival among old-growth national forest lands in central Oregon.

It seems a nesting pair of endangered owls was found near the concert site, and the U.S. Forest Service said the festival would not be allowed during the critical breeding period of summer.

The environmentalists agreed to move the concert about a mile away to avoid disturbing the owls, but they howled that the Forest Service action was unfair.

They noted that logging was allowed nearby in June (although with hand saws only) and that further cuts are planned in the area this autumn and next year. Why single out their annual event?

“It shows their real concern has never been the owl,” responds Valerie Johnson of the pro-logging Oregon Lands Coalition. “Their real goal is to set aside old-growth forests as playgrounds for themselves and their elite friends.”

Because virtually everyone in the country has a stake in the national forests, much of the day-to-day controversy involves timber management on public lands. But private ownership of Northwest trees is spread wide, and all varieties of companies have found themselves drawn into the war.

Times Mirror Co., for instance, owns about 900 acres, down from 265,000 acres a few years ago. Of that, a small parcel, about 57 acres is prime old-growth forest in an area known to contain endangered owls. Environmentalists had strongly protested a company plan that optioned logging rights to the tract.

That option expired, and with environmentalists watching every move, Times Mirror now says the trees will not be felled.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do with it. But we’re not going to cut it and we’re not going to sell it to someone who is going to cut it,” says Charles R. Redmond, executive vice president. Trading the land or perhaps even donating it for preservation are being considered.

So come finish the battle zone tour and journey into a national forest with a ranger.

Up in the high country of the Mt. Hood National Forest, just east of Portland, you can see across five mountain ridges. From up here, the patchwork of clear-cuts resembles the fairways and greens of some giant, far-off golf course spread over the mountains.

What does the vista mean to acting District Ranger Rob MacWhorter, a 10-year veteran forester?

“Honestly?” MacWhorter begins. Then he pauses. “Well, what this tells me is that we’ve over cut.”

It is a tribute to the Forest Service that dissent like this is permitted in the ranks. Over the years, the Forest Service has described itself as managing the timberlands for “multiple use,” but the bureaucratic imperative has always been “to get the cut out,” because the agency earns its budget selling trees. So, to talk about reducing the cut is to talk about reducing the budget. And in federal bureaucracies, that is a painful position.

But more and more, that’s the attitude of rank-and-file rangers of the Forest Service.

Jerry G. Allen is a 35-year veteran and serves as the Forest Service’s Northwest environmental affairs director. It’s not a matter of whether to reduce the timber harvest, but how much and how fast, Allen explains.

Each forest jurisdiction in the Northwest either has or is working on completing a long-term management plan. In total, they indicate something like a one-third drop in harvesting. And that is before extra set-asides to preserve spotted owl habitat.

“For a long time the decisions were easy. There was plenty of forest to go around,” says Allen. “Now the Forest Service is beginning to make the tough decisions: Who isn’t going to get what they want.”

To its mounting frustration, however, the Forest Service is being shoved onto the sidelines in making these tough calls. Politicians and judges increasingly are assuming that role.

Most recently, the White House indicated that it wants to see if it can soften the job loss associated with rapid timber harvest reductions proposed by government scientists to protect the owl.

This is a tricky political maneuver, and Democratic politicians such as Washington Gov. Booth Gardner warn President Bush not to ignore the judgments of experts “or this thing is going to blow up on you.”

A high-level Administration task force is supposed to propose a plan by Sept. 1 to save both the owl and jobs.

Congress is expected to plunge headlong into the fray, with the logging industry seeking a one- or two-year reprieve from new restrictions and environmentalists vowing to give not a single grove without a struggle.

Meanwhile, both the timbermen and the environmentalists argue the future of the great forests and the great forestry industry in an ever-growing barrage of lawsuits. In this two-state region so far in 1990, the Forest Service reports receiving an average of one administrative appeal each day and being sued about once each week.

“That’s the tragedy for us,” says Goldschmidt. “The one thing the world wants and which we do so well, we haven’t decided whether we want to pursue anymore.”

Times researchers Ann Rovin in Denver and Doug Conner in Los Angeles contributed to this story.