Differing Values Cut Through Timber Debate

The two men stand on opposite sides of the tree, with the etched yellow tape between them measuring a world of difference.

“Fifty-seven inches,” announces Phil Nanas of the Native Forest Council--an environmental group protesting logging in the Umpqua National Forest--as he stretches the tape measure around the trunk of a doomed Douglas fir.

“There’s some tape sagging on the other side there. Call it 55 inches and make it honest,” counters Jim Leoni, the U.S. Forest Service’s environmental coordinator.

“OK, 56 1/2,” says Nanas, and the question of whether this fir is 400 years old, or merely 375, is momentarily put to rest.

Then Leoni starts another argument--”How many board feet we got there?”--and starts making a calculation: “You’re looking at a tree there that’s worth $4,000, maybe $5,000.”

“I think this is irreplaceable value,” Nanas interrupts. “You don’t see trees like this. The wildlife habitat, the moisture it holds, the history. . . .” But Leoni is already clambering back down to the road. The point at which these minds will meet is not measured on Nanas’ tape.

These trees high in the last roadless area of the Umpqua, some of them 800 to 1,000 years old, are yellow-flagged for harvest under the salvage-logging rider authorized by Congress last year. The rider, promoted by Western Republicans and signed into law by President Clinton, was intended to restart the stalled lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest and contribute to the health of the region’s national forests by making burned and diseased timber available for harvest.

This forest was not burned, nor was it diseased. It is a classic, healthy, old-growth forest, some of its trees older than the 13th century Chartres Cathedral and the Magna Carta of 1215. It is prime potential habitat for the endangered spotted owl and a key watershed needed to preserve the last of the cutthroat trout and coho salmon in the Umpqua River.

Late last month, Roseburg Forest Products began cutting 300 acres in two tracts of the Umpqua under an attachment to the salvage rider that opens a yearlong window on sales of about 650 million board feet of healthy federal timber--sales that until now were held up by environmental disputes.

Under this provision, chain saws have moved into federal forest lands throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana--many in areas previously considered too environmentally delicate to release for harvest. If the provision is carried out as planned, timber companies before Sept. 30 will harvest three times the amount of old timber they have extracted in each of the last three years.

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Nowhere has the issue been as emotional as here in the Umpqua, the site of an old-growth sale dubbed “the worst of the worst” by the environmental community.

Protesters have moved onto the logging roads, chaining themselves to old wrecked cars and defying Forest Service agents in a bid to stop the harvesting.

On the other side is the timber town of Roseburg, where the toll of closed lumber mills--a total of nine closures in Douglas County since 1990--has been devastating. Social service workers tell stories of rising suicides, alcoholism and domestic abuse among laid-off lumber workers, for whom the cutthroat trout is a distinct irrelevance.

Roseburg is literally one of the products of the trees around it. The library, the YMCA and the local community college were all built with timber money; in the lobby of the library is a mural of a clear-cut with a Roseburg Forest Products timber truck pulling out of it.

The philosophical collision course came to a fine point one recent day near the entrance to the two tracts being cut, when protester Francis Eatherington--who was one of those arrested--was confronted by a logger wielding a chain saw.

“I said something like, ‘Think about your children,’ ” Eatherington said. “I remember him turning and pointing his running saw right at me and taking a few steps toward me. I thought: ‘He wouldn’t dare. He wouldn’t dare.’ But just in case, I split.”

“This is our home. These are our neighbors. We teach their kids. We mow their lawns,” forest ecologist Ken Carloni said of the dispute that has fractured the community. “What’s it worth to get that timber? And what’s the point? How much money does a person need?”

Caught between the community and the environmentalists is the Forest Service, whose budget depends on revenue from federal timber sales. The agency has a legal obligation to proceed with the Umpqua sale, despite the fact that its own biologists believe that building 2 1/2 miles of new roads up to the stands and harvesting the old-growth trees there could be environmentally devastating.

And while negotiations have proceeded in Washington to try to find alternative trees to cut, the saws have been running in the Umpqua. Even Forest Service employees, who normally plan and promote federal timber sales, have been unsettled.

“This is sort of like a slow train wreck. It’s happening and happening and happening,” said Umpqua National Forest Supervisor Don Ostby.

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“If the only alternative I have is to harvest these sales, we will do that in the best way we can. But there must be a better way. I’m coming up on 30 years of land stewardship. This is the first time I’ve come up to the point of having to do something that bothers me.”

On March 29, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced an unprecedented plan to allow Roseburg Forest Products to cut its allocation of old-growth timber in another, less environmentally sensitive, location. But the negotiations to find an alternative site could take many days or weeks, and in the meantime the cutting on the two old-growth stands continues.

“The dominant trees in that stand are 500 to 600 years old. And outside of whatever connection we have to ancient things, that’s important to our psyche . . . trees that have survived fires, ice storms, 500-year events. They’re the most highly adapted organisms on that piece of ground. We have a real issue of genetic legacy there,” said Carloni, who has led the protests.

“It’s not just the spotted owl anymore. We’re talking entire runs of salmonoid fish,” Carloni said. “People keep talking about extinction as a natural process, but we’re witnessing a rate of extinctions not seen since the comet hit us at the end of the Cretaceous Period. We’re losing species at the same rate as the precipitous extinctions that opened and closed geologic eras.”

The debate is complicated because there is plenty of old-growth land in the Umpqua--52% of its 1.02 million acres are classified as old growth, in large part because it was one of the last of the national forests to begin logging after World War II. Only 2,005 acres, about 0.2%, are slated for harvest under currently scheduled timber sales.

“There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of these same [old-growth] trees already that have been set aside. And from our point of view, there’s enough so that if people wanted to go and commune with the trees, they’re there. And they’re going to be there for a long time,” said Harold Huffman, vice president of Huffman-Wright, which operates a mill in nearby Canyonville, Ore.

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“The issue of how this relates to the environment is very difficult for us to comprehend,” added Robert E. Ragon, executive vice president of Sun Studs Inc., a Roseburg timber company that also is harvesting in Umpqua. “This area used to sell in the range of 4.5 billion to 5 billion board feet of timber every year. The volume released in these contracts represents about 10% to 15% of that.”

Like flagging mill towns all over the Northwest, Roseburg has had to begin looking for imported logs from as far away as South America, Mexico and Canada to keep its mills running. Even then, most of the mills have cut back shifts, and many have closed entirely. Last month, the paper mill at Gardiner shut down, sending 330 employees packing.

Since 1990, C. D. Lumber Co. in Riddle, Ore., has laid off 150 people, 100 of them in the last year. “Our family has been in the lumber business in Oregon since 1890. I’m fourth generation. And everyone at our company is nervous. They’re scared,” said owner E. P. Johnson.

“There’s a family down where I live where the father got laid off and he’s working at a McDonald’s now,” said Jeannie Weakley, a mill worker for Roseburg Forest Products. “Their 16-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son are out picking up pop and beer bottles on the highway. When I see those kids, my heart just goes out to them.”

“We’re all grown-ups. We’ve all got to decide what we’re going to do on this Earth, and we’ve got to figure out a way to supply people with the products they need to exist,” said Lonnie Burson, assistant business representative of the local mill workers union, which has lost 1,000 members since 1989.

“These guys [protesters] can go and tie themselves to cars, but if they would just sit down and say, ‘Wait a minute, what’s our duty to human beings today?’ . . . There’s not a stick of lumber we’ve ever produced that hasn’t been used by a human being, and it’s renewable, for God’s sake.”

Even Leoni, the Forest Service environmental coordinator, has a hard time sometimes figuring out what everybody is getting so upset about.

“The whole underlying problem is there are too many people on the face of the Earth. And until somebody volunteers to get off, we’re going to be right where we are,” said Leoni, standing on a back road of the Umpqua one recent afternoon.

“There’s so many subspecies out there they want us to protect, and there’s only one person in a thousand who can tell the difference. Some fish come up the river in the spring, and some of them come up in the fall. They’re the same [trout], but one of them’s endangered, and something is genetically different about it. What is that? How important is that to a country, a world?” Leoni said. “How important is it to have a fish that comes up the river in March instead of May? I don’t know. These are questions, not answers.”

Striding several feet behind Leoni was Portland State University biologist Trygve Steen. “These forests have the greatest-density ecomass of any place on Earth,” he said. The giant trees slated for harvest in the coming weeks, he said, represent nesting sites and future undergrowth support for countless species whose relationship to human survivability is only beginning to be understood.

“These trees are living museums,” said Victor Rozek of the Native Forest Council in nearby Eugene, Ore. “I find myself wondering whenever one of these trees goes down, what was going through the mind of the guy who cut it? Was it sadness? Or elation? Or was it just a job? Did he just go home, pop a beer and watch ‘Roseanne’?”