UPDATE : Surveying the Landscape of a Catastrophe : A tour of an environmental battlefield finds both the forest and the economy are victims.

The air is choppy, and we are flying over the forest at what might be called treetop level, except there are hardly any trees.

Well, wait, there are some. Patches of seedlings, clumps of old-growth in the canyon bottoms. But not the unbroken vistas of big, standing trees you might associate with rain-drenched Washington state and a place called the Olympic National Forest.

“Exactly, that’s the point,” said our pilot, Michael M. Stewart, president of LightHawk, a group that calls itself the “environmental air force.”

LightHawk is moving its headquarters to the Pacific Northwest this summer. Stewart and his team spend their days flying politicians, dignitaries and news reporters over the vast clear-cut timber tracts of the region, hoping to build national support to stop the harvesting of what remains of the ancient Douglas firs, hemlocks and cedars of the Northwest.

“A lot of people around the country are surprised to learn that they even allow cutting in the national forests,” Stewart said. “They’re shocked to see this.”

For miles and miles in all directions, the sight is indeed unsettling here on Washington’s western coast. Steep mountain canyons stripped of two-thirds or more of their standing timber, from ridgeline to ridgeline, almost as far as the eye can see. Left behind are thousands of acres of bare yellow-orange soil and hundreds of miles of switchbacked logging roads eroding into deep gullies, turning blue streams ocher and choking the life out of the salmon runs.

“Six months flying in Vietnam and I didn’t see a single place that is as bad as most of Washington state,” said Tim Hermach, executive director of the Native Forest Council.

Just look out the window, bounce, jostle, ohhhhhh.

Sure enough, the virgin forests of the Olympic National Forest are remnants of what they once were.

As we fly on, there is another sight. LightHawk does not talk about this so much. It is a small community. And then another. A dirty road with a log truck. Here a timber mill, there a timber mill. A school and a 7-Eleven. These are the logging communities of the Northwest. And they are also remnants of what they once were.

From the air, you cannot sense the destruction of these communities. Sometimes you cannot even see it from the roadway. But as the national forests shrink and as the pressure grows to restrain cutting the trees that remain, the soul of the timber towns turns as barren as the forest hillsides.

The giant timber industrialists of the region are selling their logs to Asia unmilled. This brings the highest profit but leaves millworkers here without jobs. In addition, environmentalists have slowed the cutting in the national forest in their crusade to protect the habitat of animals like the salmon and the spotted owl, and that costs jobs.

“It feels pretty damn helpless out here, I’ll tell you that,” Charlie Janz said in a later interview. He is a lifelong timber man and chairman of the pro-logging Oregon Lands Coalition. “We know this is a turning point for us.”

This summer, the Northwest is engulfed with the acute sensation of helplessness. And this compounds all the other anxieties of the decades-old environmental rhubarb.

Simply put, this region has lost control of its fate.

The long, exhausting stalemate between preservationists and timber interests has resulted in one decision after another being relinquished to the federal courts, to the Bush Administration and now to the Congress.

This spring, the Northwest has come to the uneasy and unpleasant realization: Virtually nothing having to do with the vast public forests of the region is left within the control of Northwesterners. Everything has been turned over to the federal government. The future of the Northwest is now firmly in the hands of the nation.

Each week it seems, someone in Washington, D.C, is sounding off with a decision about the future of the forests here. There is the “God Squad,” the Spotted Owl Recovery Plan, the alternative to the Spotted Owl Recovery Plan, two major bills in Congress, one important Supreme Court ruling and others possible.

All they can do these days in the Northwest is appeal to America to look and consider.

LightHawk wants the nation to see the costs and devastation of cutting the public forests. Science says too much has been cut too fast. The timber companies and labor organizations want Congress and the Administration to look beyond the science and the passions of preservation and consider the jobs and the established economy.

Everyone here wants the fight to end. But everyone is afraid to know how it does.