Munich in the Redwoods : Clinton & Co. has arm-twisted environmental leaders into surrender of our ancient forests.

The full disaster that President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt represent for America’s ancient forests is now becoming clear. It has taken a Democratic Administration to arm-twist the major environmental groups into signing the articles of surrender.

Our story starts in the aftermath of the Forest Summit on April 2. Experts mustered in Portland to formulate a White House plan. They worked under fierce constraints. Babbitt had already promised northwestern timber towns that the Administration would work for the speedy release of at least 2 billion board feet. (The average annual cut through the 1980s in the Northwest was 4 billion board feet.)

But the plan would also have to satisfy William Dwyer, the federal judge who enjoined timber sales in the spotted owl habitat in federal forests until the Forest Service comes up with a logging plan in compliance with the law.

Eight options were set forth by the teams in Portland and even the most voracious of them would generate less than a billion board feet per year. The Babbitt schedule could not be met by legal means.

Then, under frantic prodding from Babbitt and the White House, a ninth option was thrown together, which duly became the Clinton plan.

Politically driven and formulated in haste, Option 9 is deeply flawed. As the conservationist Jeff St. Clair, editor of the Portland-based “Forest Watch” puts it: “The plan represents a significant defeat for environmentalists: No permanent and inviolate reserves; no prohibition on clear-cutting in roadless watersheds; 40% of the remaining unprotected old growth is subject to commercial harvest; no ban on raw log exports; fewer restrictions on private lands; more intensive cutting in the forest matrix (i.e. the land between the reserves), and increased cutting on forests east of the Cascades.”

The supposed annual cut under Option 9 across the next decade would be 1.2 billion board feet, but St. Clair and others reckon that the plan actually permits an annual yield twice that. There are 5 million acres of unprotected old-growth forest west of the Cascades and Option 9 schedules 2.3 million of these acres for logging.

At first the environmental leadership was openly hostile. National Audubon’s vice president, Brock Evans, said the plan was political science, not biological science.

Babbitt and the White House began to play hardball. They hinted that the Administration might urge Congress to develop “sufficiency” legislation, making Clinton’s plan immune to legal challenge.

The environmental leadership began to buckle. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, called Clinton’s plan a sound option. Evans changed trains and declared Option 9 “a shaky victory.”

On July 22 in Portland, lawyers from the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund met with the 12 plaintiffs in the suit against the Forest Service that caused Dwyer to enjoin logging on spotted-owl terrain. In the confidential meeting, as several participants described it, lawyers advised the plaintiffs--among them the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, some Audubon chapters and the Oregon Natural Resources Council--not to fight the Clinton plan. The quid pro quo: With this good-faith gesture, environmentalists would head off the threat of “sufficiency” legislation.

Hardball worked. In an Aug. 3 press release, the White House jubilantly claimed that under a pact struck with the environmental leadership, more than 2 billion board feet could be released to the timber companies this fall.

Down at the environmental grass roots, this capitulation by their leaders has provoked angry questions: Why support a devastating plan? Why bow to the White House’s “sufficiency” blackmail when pro-timber company legislators already vow to make enormous prospective cuts on public lands in Montana, Idaho and Alaska immune to legal challenge anyway? Fight on favorable ground--with the famed forests of the Pacific Northwest, there’s at least a chord of national sympathy to be plucked.

There’s always been a tension between the grass-roots and the mainstream environmental movement’s leaders, always more eager for a compromise than a fight. This latest surrender may yet provoke a mutiny. By the end of the first week in August, despite enormous pressure, the Oregon Natural Resources Council was still holding out, still reserving its right to challenge the plan.

The grass-root holdouts are truly the realists. This Administration is no friend of the forests. At least 60% of even the first “goodwill” cuts will involve stands over 200 years old. This past weekend, one of the authors of Option 9 declared that as part of the White House’s hardball strategy, Clinton has on his desk an executive order that aims straight at the Endangered Species Act.