Coalition’s Olive Branch Saves Economy, Forest

Ten years ago, Mike Jackson was lying under a logging truck, staring up at the four lumberjacks who had put him there after pummeling him in a local bar. A lawyer for environmental groups, Jackson had told them that their children would be thankful for a lawsuit he filed halting clear-cutting of the nearby forest.

Today, Jackson is a leader of a remarkable coalition of environmentalists and loggers that has achieved something that has eluded the federal government for a decade: a forest policy acceptable to environmentalists and people who work in the woods.

Known as the Quincy Library Group, for the place they meet in this northern Sierra hamlet, the obscure alliance has gained national prominence by staying together even as Republican-led efforts in Congress seek to allow more logging in the West.

When it became apparent that the congressional moves would allow Quincy-area loggers more access to the national forests than the plan agreed to by the library group, the pact held. The group’s timber industry representatives blocked a logging initiative in the midst of salmon habitat in the Lassen National Forest west of here.

For the timber companies, including one of the state’s largest, Sierra Pacific Industries, it meant walking away from 2.5-million board feet of timber, not a huge amount but enough to build 250 houses, generate an estimated $500,000 in profits and provide work for people in a region where 20% unemployment is not uncommon.

“We were under a lot of pressure to break with the group,” said Bill Howe, forest manager for Collins Pine, one of the timber companies that persuaded the U.S. Forest Service to keep logging off-limits around Deer Creek.

“Industry people were calling, saying, ‘Are you crazy, or what?’ But three years ago, we decided to speak with one voice,” Howe said. “It was a matter of principle.”

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman is scheduled to arrive in the area today to announce an expected $4.7-million grant to help carry out the Quincy group’s blueprint for conservation and logging in the three national forests surrounding the town.

“Here’s a group that’s not threatening each other or challenging the authority of the federal government,” said a spokesman for Glickman. “They are the kind of model of consensus-building that the [Clinton] Administration wants to encourage.”

The plan is based on the idea that Sierra Nevada forests can meet the needs of wildlife and human beings, providing the timber industry avoids the most sensitive habitat and shifts its focus from the dwindling supply of big, old trees to the more crowded stands of smaller trees.

The plan evolved from three years of painstaking negotiations by the 41-member Quincy group that had taken to meeting in the town library in hopes that the quiet atmosphere would discourage early inclinations to shout at one another.

“We were like the Israelis and the Palestinians,” said Howe.

The group produced a color-coded map of the nearby Plumas and Lassen forests, as well as the northern tip of the Tahoe National Forest. The area takes in about 2.4-million mountainous acres of ponderosa and Jeffrey pine, incense cedar and white fir.

Green areas of the map can be logged, but carefully. Red is off-limits to logging. Gray represents disputed areas that the group agreed to set aside for the time being. The map’s predominant color is green.

“The idea was to guarantee enough uncontested supply that the [timber] industry would invest in the plants and equipment needed to sustain our communities,” said Bill Coates, a Plumas County supervisor, a founder of the Quincy Library Group and a Republican.

In other words, designating a portion of the forest off-limits was worth it, Coates said, if it would bring an end to the protests, appeals and lawsuits that have led to a precipitous decline in logging in the Sierra since the 1980s.

For the three charter members of the Quincy group--Jackson, Coates and Tom Nelson of Sierra Pacific--collaboration grew out of the realization that they had more in common with one another than they first cared to admit.

“I would much rather live with the rednecks than the Brie eaters, even though I tend to represent the Brie eaters in court and agree with them on environmental issues,” said Jackson, who came to California from rural Oklahoma. “I want Quincy to survive because I want to live here.”

One threat to the community that Jackson and his neighbors could agree on immediately was fire.

As the largest trees were logged over the past half-century, a dense, brushy second growth took their place. Weakened by drought and insect infestation, Sierra forests, once open and park-like, have become almost impenetrable thickets of tinder.

While thinning the forests was a high priority of the Quincy Library Group, there was surprising broad agreement that clear-cutting, widely practiced during the early 1980s, was a bad idea.

Slopes around here still show the scars of past clear-cutting--broad bald patches where new growth has yet to take hold. And former loggers like Jim Wilcox say that clear-cutting never produced the bonanza for small local operators that it did for industry giants.

“They were big jobs that many of the people around here couldn’t bid on,” he said. “A lot of the logs that were clear-cut in the ‘80s wound up in mills in Oregon and other parts of California.”

Wilcox makes the point that the region’s economy will depend increasingly on a healthy, pleasing environment.

“The guy who comes up here on a fishing trip or a hiking trip is the same guy who may decide to move his business here if he likes what he sees.”

The economy is already changing. In surrounding Plumas County, employment in the timber industry has declined by 40% during the past decade while service sector employment has grown by the same amount. A steady trickle of retirees and urban transplants has boosted the county’s population from about 13,000 to 20,000 since 1970.

For the time being, Plumas County is an odd blend of rural defiance and ex-urban sophistication. “We have the militia and we have the Sierra Club,” said one Quincy Library Group member.

In Greenville, a down-at-the-heels logging town 20 miles from Quincy, the main street leads past abandoned sawmills to a commercial district disfigured by collapsed roofs, boarded-up windows and “closed” signs. Houses built for mill hands making $15 an hour are now occupied by transient welfare recipients.

Half an hour away in a picturesque valley, a sign of the times on a remodeled former feed store reads “Last Chance Tofu.” Nearby, thoroughbreds graze in the amber fall grass of a “hobby ranch,” the weekend retreat of a wealthy San Francisco family. Farther along, the weathered bunkhouse of an old cattle ranch has been converted into a bed-and-breakfast.

But growth is not expected to explode around here. “We don’t expect all our problems to be solved by tourists or transplants,” said Jackson. “We can’t discount the old economy any more than we should discourage the new one.”

Others in the Quincy library group are quick to point out that the old economy can’t survive much longer without more opportunities to log the forests.

Members of the group say it has been three years since the Forest Service, the official gatekeeper of the national forests, has approved any logging operations in the three adjacent forests.

“It’s great that we have gotten together and come up with a plan, but that still hasn’t put one damn log on the ground,” said Loretta Stringfellow, whose family has worked in the timber industry for four generations.

“Before the Quincy Library Group came along, we were a little logging community praying for some work in the woods before we disappeared. We’re still praying.”