Clinton’s Embattled Chief of Forest Service to Quit

Under a cross-fire from environmentalists, timber interests and U.S. Forest Service employees, the chief steward of federal forest lands Thursday announced that he is quitting.

Jack Ward Thomas, the first wildlife biologist to head the Forest Service, said that he would end a tenure that had become symbolic to some of the increasing intractability of conflicts over wild lands at a time of unflagging population pressure.

“I’m 62 with 40 years’ service,” said Thomas, who will become a professor of conservation studies at the University of Montana. “I’m going to do something else.”

Thomas was chosen by President Clinton in December 1993 after he devised a plan intended to cut a swath through the contentious disputes that had racked environmentalists and the timber industry for years over how many trees in the Northwest should be cut each year and in which forests. That plan allowed a resumption of logging in the ancient stands of the Pacific Northwest, where loggers had been banned by a court order seeking to protect the spotted owl.

The plan was trumpeted by Clinton as he sought a middle ground that would provide logging jobs in the economically pressed hinterlands of Oregon and Washington state without angering the environmentalists who helped deliver the Pacific Northwest to him in the 1992 elections and on whom he is counting for support again this year.

But by all accounts, Thomas was ill-suited for the politics of the nation’s capital and left few satisfied among his constituents: employees of the Forest Service, which supplies 10% of the nation’s lumber each year from the national forests, logging companies supplying trees for construction and paper, and environmentalists.

As a longtime employee of the agency that sees as its chief missions both protecting forests and cutting their trees to produce government revenue, he sought to prove himself a friend to the industry as well as to preservationists.

But, said Tim Hermach, founder and executive director of the Native Forest Council in Oregon, “he is too brown for much of the environmental movement and he is too green for the timber industry.”

At a time of seemingly unsolvable disputes between the two conflicting forces, “he felt compelled to cut the baby in half,” Hermach said in a telephone interview. “That was politics, not science. He is a good man getting sucked into the political sewer.”

Thomas was praised by timber industry interests as well, though they often disagreed with him. “He’s a man you can work with,” said Don Zea, a California Forestry Assn. vice president.

The pressure on Thomas was increasingly visible. Only last month, while demonstrators encircled him at the University of Colorado, Thomas warned that “this squabbling is on the verge of bringing down the agency. . . . There is no solution to these problems through demonization.”

Thomas suffered personal hardship during his tenure as well. His wife died just as he took the post. And his health was hurt by the pressure, people close to him said.

Thomas’ departure returns to the political debate the question of logging in some of the nation’s oldest and most environmentally sensitive forests in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and other states. Environmentalists hope that it will prompt a reevaluation of the nation’s logging policies if Clinton is reelected.

The president signed legislation in 1995 allowing renewed timber cutting in the so-called “old-growth” forests, with barely any environmental restrictions or avenues for appeal. Under sharp criticism from the environmental community, he said that he had made a mistake and would like to see the legislative rider allowing the logging to be revised.

Jim Jontz, director of the Western Ancient Forests Campaign, one of the groups seeking to undo the legislation, said that Thomas’ departure “reflect’s Jack’s frustration and the problems the administration has with the Forest Service.”

Once in the job, Thomas found that “the timber shop ran the show,” Jontz said. “Jack was out there defending the agency in all its excess, and nothing the White House could do seemed to change that.”

Eventually, even such conservatives as House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) took issue with the management of the agency--even though it was Kasich’s allies who pushed the timber-cutting legislation through the Congress. Kasich, among others, began to question whether the agency was getting the most value and best prices for the timber it was selling.