A Timber Town Turns Against Clear-Cutting

The nearby sawmill has long since been demolished and you can dine on tofu with peanut sauce and a glass of Calaveras County red wine at a popular local restaurant.

But logging trucks still rumble down winding California 4. And it’s hard to find anybody in this mountain community--which caters to retirees, second-home owners and tourists--who thinks cutting down trees is a sin.

“This,” noted county Supervisor Merita Callaway, “is not a Sierra Club kind of town.”

So it’s with some surprise that little Arnold finds itself in a fight with the biggest private timberland owner in the state, Sierra Pacific Industries. The giant lumber company has begun logging a patchwork of about 50 clear-cut parcels above a local reservoir, and the town’s 4,000 year-round residents are in an uproar.

Arnold’s reaction is evidence of growing concern over Sierra Pacific’s plans to eventually clear-cut the majority of its timber holdings, which have swelled in the last decade to 1.5 million acres in California, or about 1% of the entire state.

As a logging technique, clear-cutting has long been a hot-button issue, attracting defenders and passionate detractors. Public opposition and subsequent policy changes have greatly reduced the practice--in which virtually every tree on a piece of property is chopped down--in federal forests. But Sierra Pacific is escalating clear-cutting on its lands, most of which lie in the Sierra Nevada.

In Nevada County and Calaveras County, environmental activists are responding with protests, blocking company trucks and locking themselves to logging equipment.

Less predictably, much of Arnold--where tourism and the quality of life are increasingly important--is also fuming. Meetings about the local cuts have drawn hundreds of distraught residents. Three members of the local quilting group have even sewn a clear-cut wall hanging to rally opposition.

The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors last month fired off a letter asking the governor to reexamine earlier state approval of the Arnold cuts. The county water district is worried that logging runoff will flow into the reservoir, White Pines Lake.

“No one likes the idea. Everyone is in shock it’s approved,” said Bob Chok, a bed-and-breakfast owner sipping an afternoon drink in the Lube Room Saloon, a cavernous, wood-beamed bar in which hangs everything from a traffic light to a mounted deer head.

A Forest Buying Binge

Sierra Pacific, a family-owned, politically well-connected company that prefers a low profile, shows no signs of backing off. Quite the opposite.

According to figures from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the number of acres clear-cut by the Redding-based company in the southern Sierra jumped from 500 in 1995 to 8,435 last year.

In the northern reaches of the state, the company’s clear-cuts went from about 1,000 acres in 1994 to nearly 15,000 acres last year.

The reasons are simple. Sierra Pacific has been on a buying binge for more than a decade, increasing its holdings to the point where it now rivals media mogul Ted Turner as the largest private landowner in the nation. At the same time, the company has decided that clear-cutting is the best way to produce wood for its 13 sawmills.

“We can grow two to three times more wood in the long term by clear-cutting,” Tom Nelson, Sierra Pacific’s timberlands director, said as he bounced in a pickup truck past the first of the Arnold cuts, which will average about 18 acres each and total nearly 900 acres.

Nelson defends the company’s embrace of clear-cutting, saying that much of the opposition is emotional and that the company needs to do a better job of explaining its methods to the public. By creating forest openings, he added, the company is to some extent mimicking what nature accomplishes with a fire.

Unpopular With the Public

Although foresters say properly conducted clear-cuts can be a perfectly legitimate logging practice, a good deal of the public detests them.

Consider Chinarose Flemming, a clerk at the Camp Connell General Store down the road from Arnold. Fresh clear-cuts are “hot, dry, dusty--just gross, just dirt,” she said emphatically.

“Tourism,” she said, “is what keeps this county alive. Without our trees we probably won’t have tourism.”

Even if they don’t mind the battlefield-like scars of a new clear-cut, others worry about herbicides getting into watersheds. Problems go downhill, D. Dolbeare observed as he used a screwdriver to start the ignition of the beat-up, exhaust-belching pickup he uses to haul firewood.

Sierra Pacific intensively manages its clear-cuts--tilling the soil, planting pine seedlings, applying herbicides to kill unwanted plants, pruning and thinning weaker trees. In 80 years, the acreage will be cleared again.

All that, environmentalists contend, means that the lumber company is essentially establishing tree farms up and down the Sierra, ultimately diminishing the ecological, wildlife and scenic values of an enormous acreage.

“It’s the extent and the cumulative effect,” said John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center and a former firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. “A tree plantation is not a forest. They’re not replacing the natural forest processes they’re wiping out.”

Such arguments have affected public policy. In 1992, the head of the Forest Service announced that clear-cutting would no longer be standard practice in the country’s national forests.

“There’s no doubt clear-cutting is an economical and efficient way of harvesting timber,” said Matt Mathes, a Forest Service spokesman in California. “But the public does not like clear-cutting, period. We cannot manage public land in a way that makes a broad section of the public very unhappy.”

In California’s national forests, the number of clear-cut acres plummeted from 12,400 in 1990 to 745 in 1999.

Environmental concerns have also reduced other types of logging in national forests, slashing the overall federal harvest.

That is a key reason Sierra Pacific owner Red Emmerson went on a buying spree. The company is the biggest purchaser of federal timber in the state, and that supply has been shrinking dramatically. When large chunks of California forest land were put up for sale by railroad and other forest product companies, Emmerson snapped them up.

Forbes magazine has described Emmerson as “comfortably a billionaire.” He and his two sons are frequent donors to politicians of both major parties at the state and national level. Sierra Pacific has a seat on the nine-member, governor-appointed California Board of Forestry, which regulates private timber cutting.

State forestry officials say clear-cuts on private land in California are subject to some of the most stringent rules in the nation.

The permissible size of private clear-cuts was roughly halved in the early 1990s. Depending on the type of equipment used, they are now typically restricted to 20 or 30 acres. Under certain circumstances, that can expand to 40 acres. Buffer zones between cuts cannot be logged for a period of time.

The state forestry department approved Sierra Pacific’s Arnold logging plan last year with a number of conditions intended to protect a nearby stream and the reservoir--which ironically stands on the old mill site.

“We don’t have any scientific knowledge presented to us that the watershed will be contaminated,” said Jim Laughlin, the ranking state forester for the Southern Sierra District, which approved the Arnold plan.

Mixed Opinion on Environmental Effects

Forestry experts say that, environmentally, clear-cuts can be good or bad, depending on how and where they are made. As for Sierra Pacific’s clear-cutting, UC Berkeley forestry professor Kevin O’Hara said that because the company’s holdings are intermixed with other private acreage and federal land on which there is no longer much clear-cutting, the cumulative effect is “probably not that significant.”

Many citizens of Arnold and environs disagree.

“This issue has crossed the political and philosophical spectrum,” said Supervisor Callaway, who represents the area.

There may not be much they can do, however. Louis Blumberg, the state forestry department’s deputy director for public affairs and legislation, said the department has advised Gov. Gray Davis--who has not yet responded to the supervisors’ letter--that there is no legal rationale for his office to intervene in the Arnold plan.

Still, Blumberg added, “We fully acknowledge Sierra Pacific has increased its plans to do more clear-cutting in the Sierra Nevada, and we are responding with more oversight and monitoring.”

The company can certainly count on more public attention.

“If there’s this visceral reaction here, just wait until we take our road show to San Francisco, Berkeley and Los Angeles,” said Warren Alford, a fourth-generation Arnold area resident and Sierra Club coordinator.