COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Compromise Kills Nature By Inches : The Oregon Forest Summit could trigger destructive environmental trade-offs.

The new, improved style of American environmentalism is predicated on the trade-off, as brokered by big groups such as the National Wildlife Federation, by foundations such as Rockefeller or Pew that give money to these groups, by business and by government.

The theory of the trade-off is that inside every seemingly irreconcilable antagonism there’s a dormant compromise awaiting the reviving kiss of the mediator. Downgrade the California gnatcatcher from “endangered” to “threatened,” throw in some uplifting talk about an ecosystemic approach and Lo! Gov. Pete Wilson declares that the lamb has lain down with the wolf, or in this case the gnatcatcher is in the safe embrace of the coastal developer.

This union from opposing ends of the Great Chain of Being, brokered by Wilson and blessed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, has been given the mediator’s ultimate accolade: It is a “win-win” solution. The developer gets his teeth into coastal habitat and the gnatcatcher gets a bit of chaparral at the far end of a golf course, now called “open space.” This is the kind of ecosystem a builder can live with. Whether the gnatcatcher can live with it is another matter entirely.

Sometime between tomorrow’s Forest Summit in Portland, Ore., and early June, the Clinton Administration will offer a mix of executive orders and legislation addressing forest and timber issues in the Pacific Northwest.

The timber giants have both a short and a long-term schedule: Restrict the agenda to forests west of the Cascades, extort every last ounce of anti-environmental currency from the entirely bogus owls-versus-jobs issue, demand the opening of tracts of national forest and the carving of roads to reach them. Above all, demand “sufficiency.”

Sufficiency and certainty are words embodying the eternal dream of the corporate ravager--that once the Forest Service has signed off on the prospective “harvest,” (another word that has been taken from us) the plan is immune to legal challenge.

In fact, the timber giants have already essentially abandoned or are preparing to abandon the Pacific Northwest, with its depleted forests and fractious environmental communities. For them, the new U.S. targets of opportunity lie in the Mississippi basin, on the west side of the Appalachians and in the South, where quicker-growing crops than redwood or Douglas fir can satisfy the demand for fiber, which, as the raw material for “structural construction products” is where the future lies.

On the other side of the fence are the defenders of the forests, who have their own schedule: Save the last of the ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest and ban log exports, whereby anywhere from a quarter to a half of all timber cut in the region ends up being shipped out across the Pacific, denying workers here the opportunity to earn the value added in making goods from the wood. The defenders also seek protection for ravaged forests east of the Cascades.

But outside this set of core demands there is predictable diversity, from the environmental Establishment through the spectrum to the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, Save America’s Forests or the Oregon Natural Resources Council. Here we enter the shadow of the trade-off, where the Establishment groups cut the deals.

The Clinton Administration has been displaying zeal to assuage all parties. Clinton has had kind words for “sufficiency.” Vice President Gore speaks of environmental stewardship in exalted terms. Babbitt says he looks forward to the Administration’s “lifting the edges of injunctions” in order to provide timber for rural mills in the Northwest.

The timber industry and its sympathetic legislators in Congress, starting with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, who killed off the Ancient Forest Act last year, have immense political clout. Timber money axed at least four forest defenders in Congress, so the Clinton folk are treading carefully, and trade-offs are on the table.

There are those who hope that the Portland summit will be followed by executive orders curtailing logging of old-growth trees west of the Cascades, designating critical watersheds and so forth. There are those who hope that there will be meaningful economic conversion assistance for timber workers and a serious attempt to consider the nation’s forest resources, ecosystems and bio-regions.

The rhythms of the trade-off are antipathetic to such long-term vision. Trade-offs means a preserve here against the lifting of an injunction there, saving the west side of the Cascades at the expense of everything east, a bit of “sufficiency,” some regulated pillage and, at the end of the day, the fragmentation of ecosystems in a fashion familiar to the beleaguered gnatcatcher, facing doom in its “win-win” scenario.