Protecting Trees--and People’s Jobs : Once again Clinton tackles a big and complex issue and attempts to split the difference

Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency promising to undertake a comprehensive and deliberative overhaul of health care, welfare, deficit financing and environmental policy. The need to make tough choices and uncomfortable trade-offs in order to achieve meaningful policy reform too often dissuaded recent presidents, leading them instead to seek piecemeal changes or, worse, to ignore the big issues altogether.

The Administration’s plan, released this week, to end the seven-year war of wills over logging in the Pacific Northwest forests is, on balance, a solid first step toward sound policy reform. And it is an example as well of Clinton’s sincerity about tackling the big issues head-on.

The plan would reduce logging on federal lands by 75% from the peak harvests of the late 1980s, better protect Northwest streams and rivers and provide more than $1 billion to retrain 16,000 displaced loggers and help distressed timber towns.

Clinton’s proposal offers something to both loggers and environmentalists and, not surprisingly, also angers both constituencies. It evolved from proposals drawn up by officials in five agencies and the White House after the public Forest Summit in Oregon last April.

The strength of the President’s package is its recognition that a long-term solution in the Northwest forests, and indeed in other environmental disputes, requires moving beyond the “jobs versus trees” rhetoric.

The trade-offs have never been that simple. Clearly there have been and will continue to be jobs lost due to the enforcement of regulations designed to safeguard forests and wildlife such as the spotted owl. However, employment in the forests along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and Northern California has been declining for other reasons as well, including national economic trends and changes in international trade patterns. Even without new logging limits, employment will continue to decline. Indeed, by providing for sustainable timber harvests, albeit at lower levels than in past years, Clinton aims to stabilize timber employment while protecting wildlife.

For all that, however, Clinton’s failure to permanently protect old-growth forests on the 8.6 million acres of federal lands is troubling. His proposal would permit clear-cutting in some places and so-called thinning and salvage in other parts of the ancient forests. Yet those forests are home to species found nowhere else; the Administration should reconsider this part of the plan.

On the whole, the proposal demonstrates that Clinton can nimbly walk the fine line between economic growth and environmental protection.