A new forest grows after harvest and fire.
I watched the timber wars end in the American West in the 1990s.
A series of court decisions and a successful national campaign against the huge clearcuts seen across the West in the 1980s reduced the harvest of timber on public lands, closing mills and shifting the economy of the region.
Environmental laws passed in the 1970s, the high cost of road-building for logging and changing values about ecosystems had dramatically reduced the timber harvest on public lands. Still many foresters foolishly held on to their old goals and values, hoping to ride out what they saw as a passing fad of biodiversity protection and ecosystem management. Craig Savidge, Louisiana-Pacific Resource Manager in Sandpoint, Idaho told me in 1995 that he saw the timber harvest falling like a jetliner.
Most of his colleagues were sitting at the controls trying to keep the plane in the air, using all of their political pull and legal expertise. But Savidge and some of his colleagues were working on what they had to do when the timber jetliner crashed.
Rick Johnson had been a wilderness activist for the Idaho Conservation League in the mid-1980s. When the spotted owl fight heated up he went to work for the Sierra Club in Seattle, where he was part of the team that had by 1993 largely won their fight over old growth logging. He returned to the Idaho Conservation League in 1995 as its executive director.
Soon after he arrived a crowd of woodworkers from Boise Cascade plants that were shutting down on the Boise National Forest were bussed into Boise to hold a protest march outside of his office. Frank Carroll a former Forest Service spokesman and then a spokesman for Potlatch Corp., one of the largest timberland owners and harvesters, called Johnson out.
“You’re like the dog that has been chasing the bus and then suddenly you caught it,” Carroll said. “Now what are you gonna do?”
For Johnson the decision was whether to stay a relatively modest conservation group focusing on public land and especially wilderness or whether to become the leading voice of conservation in Idaho.
The larger task meant involvement in all environmental decisions, whether it be open space protection in Boise’s foothills; localizing the Clinton roadless rule, water and air quality protection; eventually even dark sky protection. It also meant working closely with everyone, not just those who they agreed with.
Today the “good neighbor” policy, started under Obama, allows state foresters to put up timber sales on public land after the environmental reviews are done. It has streamlined the process and allowed more timber sales, mostly thinning projects, to move forward.
Environmental groups and the timber industry work together on forest issues in both statewide and local panels. There are still groups that fight like the old days and local people who think more trees should be cut.
But the extremes on both sides no longer define the discussions.
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