SPECIAL REPORT
THE GREATLIEWe are wasting our forests, but it is not due to logging and harvesting. We are ruining our natural wealth with political arrogance and indifference.
PHOTO © BRIAN PARKER, TOM STACK & ASSOCIATES
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The forests are not vanishing. The epicof vast untrodden wilderness cannot begone. The mystery is still there, the lostsense of curving river meadows and deepdark canyons cannot help but inspireimagination even from so great a height.
Yet the truth is surprising in its contra-diction. If we could fly back in time to the15th-century period of first European dis-coveries, our window view would seem lit-tle different—except to the trained eyeable to recognize that there were notmore trees in that presumed pristine time,but less. And that what we witness nowafter two most recent decades of mistruthis not a plan to recover the forests, but amisguided plot to murder them.
In the 21st century, we fly over a pro-ductive, ever renewable resource our ownpeople are forbidden to harvest, and witheach passing year we are losing moreand more of the skills it would take to doso. The forest from on high seems sobounteous, but it is actually choking onitself in the thick clutter of uncheckedgrowth. Clutched in impossible tangles,much of it suggests more of terror thantranquility. It is a fire waiting to happen.More in despair than peace is the deaddry evidence among the standing trees ofinsect infection killing at will.
We are wasting our forests, but it isnot due to logging and harvesting. Weare ruining our natural wealth with politi-cal arrogance and indifference too far outof reach to bring to earth.
“If the question is to thin or to burn,”said a Forest Service official to RANGE in2000 with a statement that stands today,“then the answer is burn.”
Later that year on our imaginary flightyou could have seen the smoke that cov-ered hundreds of square miles in the Bit-terroot fire of Montana and Idaho that stilllies largely in infested ruin.
American forests have never beenthreatened by overlogging more than theyare today by lies and mismanagement. n
LOOKING DOWN FROM 30,000 FEET BY TIM FINDLEYLooking down from 30,000 feet, the great forests of the Northwest begin to roll away behindyou from where the Rockies meet the plains. It is like crossing an infinite carpet of deeper anddeeper greens etched faintly by shaded highways and roads, open only now and then to theclearings of towns or farming valleys. So immense is it as you are carried at hundreds of milesan hour toward the Pacific that many seeing it for the first time have been made to wonder at
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Adecade ago, RANGE magazine ran acover story called “Something’s WrongIn Libby, Montana,” which discussed
the possible collapse of the forest-manage-ment culture in our rural public-land-depen-dent towns in the West. What has happenedsince that article was printed?
The numbers are sobering. According toPaul Ehringer & Associates of Eugene, Ore.,430 sawmills have closed in the West since1988. The job losses in the milling and log-ging industries exceed 50,000.
Where I live in Lincoln County, Mont.,(population 18,000) we’ve lost five sawmillsand over 1,500 timber jobs. If the collapse isdue to forest mismanagement, and/or theevening newscasts have been correct—“We’rerunning out of trees”—then the collapsewould be easier to stomach.
The real reason for the collapse of publictimberland management in the West is not alack of trees, but a lack of understanding. WillRogers was right when he said: “It ain’t whatyou don’t know that’s a problem. It’s whatyou know that ain’t so that’s a problem.”
When it comes to forest management, thepublic knows a lot that ain’t so, and that lackof understanding is saving our forests andforest communities to death.
Many of the trees we enjoy today shouldhave been killed by fires during the last 100years. But with the advent of Smokey the Bearin the early 1900s, we minimized the impactof fire in our ecosystems. We now know thiswas a mistake. We should let fires burn theforest a bit at a time. After nearly a century offire suppression, we now have a mammoth“fuel loading”problem.
Contrary to popular opinion, we do nothave too few trees. We have too many trees ofthe wrong size, of the wrong type, and in thewrong places. When today’s forests catch fire,they burn as never before because the fuelload of dead and down timber is, in manyplaces, over 500 percent of normal. The fireshave way too much fuel to burn. Each sum-mer, catastrophically hot forest fires engulfand consume vast watersheds of overstockedand overstressed trees.
None of this is news. The General
ASH&SMOKE
We do not have too few trees.We have too many trees,
of the wrong size, of the wrong type,and in the wrong places.
By Bruce Vincent
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This photo of the devastating aftermath of a 2001 wildfire in northern New Mexico shows just how thick the Southwest’s forests have become over the last half-century. Whether thinning would have prevented this is impossible to say, but the damage most certainly would have been less severe than this total loss. In someareas, stand density is now a hundred times greater than it was a century ago—an unintended consequence of the nation’s long-standing policy of excludingwildfire from forests the public values for its timber, recreation potential, wildlife habitat and watershed.
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Accounting Office identified the problem in1990. They reported that there were over 190million acres of forestland in the West wherethe biggest ecological threat is a single wild-fire. These unnaturally hot blazes race acrossthe landscape, burning homes, threateningcommunities, toasting wildlife and its habitat,pulverizing watersheds and boiling streamcourses.
There is a better way.We have the technol-ogy to do fuel-reduction projects that wouldlet us remove some of this fuel, take the cho-sen trees to wood-processing plants in ourcommunities, turn these “tubes of carbon”into consumable products for a consumingsociety, and then reintroduce fire into ourfuel-reduced ecosystem. Unfortunately, theenvironmental-conflict industry has spent the
last decade litigating to stop this human inter-vention and force our rural communities intoallowing nature to take its destructive course.
Thankfully, the policy discussion of forestmanagement has changed in the last severalyears. It changed when tens of thousands ofSouthern Californians stood on the roofs oftheir million-dollar homes with six-dollarhoses trying to fight the blazes roaring out oftheir million-dollar viewsheds. The policydiscussion changed because the residents ofArizona, Colorado, Oregon and Californiahave all witnessed the largest fires in their his-tories in the last five years and, as the old songgoes,“We’ve only just begun.”
With the reality of natural managementburning down to the edges of the SanBernardino Airport, President Bush’s Healthy
Forest Initiative passed both cham-bers of Congress and was signed intolaw in 2003. Unfortunately, attemptsto implement this commonsenselegislation have faced lawsuits fromthe professional litigants within theenvironmental-conflict industry.Very little positive action has hap-pened in the forest near communi-ties like those in northwest Montana.For many, such as those employed atthe Owens and Hurst Mill in Eureka,implementation was too late.
In our rural communities, theimpact of such closures is felt wellbeyond the sawmill fence. For everyone of the nearly 200 jobs lost in Jimand Carol Hurst’s manufacturingplant, another five jobs are lost in ourcounty. These jobs are in the servicesectors of oil and gas stations, gro-
cery stores, hardware stores and restaurants.In addition, the families employed at theplant leave with their children, and theschools then feel the double impact of a lossin students amid a collapsing tax base.
County Commissioner Marianne Rooseof Eureka says: “The impacts just keep rollingthrough our town. We have a new eight-mil-lion-dollar school, and we have no idea howwe’ll pay for it now.”
The sawmill and its workers also pro-vided financial support for the communi-ty’s civic and social network. Mrs. Roosewonders: “Who is going to contribute toour local churches? Who is going to con-tribute to the local Little League? Who isgoing to buy the children’s stock at ourannual fair 4-H sale? I bet it won’t be the
This lodgepole pine beetle was dug fromthe bark of a tree on northern Idaho’sNez Percé National Forest, scene of adevastating infestation that has yet torun its course. Once beneath the barklayer, beetle kill is almost assured.Beetles can detect tree stress brought onby the presence of more trees than agrowing site can support, especiallyduring prolonged drought.
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Mortality was near 100 percent in this lodgepole pine beetle infestation near Elk City in northern Idaho’s Nez PercéNational Forest, yet nothing was salvaged or replanted because environmental litigants blocked every Forest Serviceattempt to repair nature’s wrath. Streams in this watershed provide critical spawning habitat for salmon and steelhead.
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attorney for the Ecology Center.”In Libby, County Commissioner Rita
Windom points out that we have 140 gradu-ating seniors in 2006 from our high schooland 75 incoming kindergartners. We have lost1,200 students from our small system in thelast five years. “The family-wage jobs that wehave lost are now translating directly into lostfamilies,” Mrs. Windom says. “If you want tolive in an area and raise a family, you need afamily-wage job, and the sawmills and log-ging jobs have left or are leaving—and takingthe next generation with them.”
Will the timber culture ever return toLibby? I think so, but reality is a relentless dic-tator. The fact is that the Kootenai NationalForest has 2.5-million acres of trees. Eachyear, this forest grows 492-million board feetof wood while 300-million board feet of tim-ber dies due to windthrow, insects and dis-
ease. If we do not remove some of this fuel,we are simply stacking 300-million board feetof firewood in our forest, in our watersheds,around our communities and around ourhomes.
If professional litigants rather than pro-fessional managers continue to control ourforests, America will, in time, get to enjoy asummer show of natural management thatwill be anything but benign. This is notconjecture. It will happen. Just as leveebreeches in New Orleans were knownthreats to that city, the fuel buildup in ourwestern forests is awaiting a “category five”firestorm event.
If we have not learned what science istelling us before that time, then possibly fromthe ashes will arise some sanity that will notignore the realities of nature or the needs ofhumanity. Perhaps we will recognize the need
to provide for our domestic consumption ofwood fiber rather than importing 65 percentof our wood-fiber needs from other nationswith less environmental sensitivity than ourown. Perhaps we will see a new generation offorest stewards move back into our area withthe courage to invest in the multimillion-dol-lar machinery necessary to implement mod-ern forest-management theory with thesupport of society rather than its scorn.
Perhaps. But if society waits for the reali-ties of ash and smoke to dictate a positive steptoward sanity in forest management, then ourforest ecosystems and our forest social andeconomic systems will continue to pay a terri-ble price. n
Bruce Vincent, a third-generation logger, lives inLibby, Mont. He is executive director of Communi-ties for a Great Northwest.
This ponderosa pine thinning on private land in eastern Oregon is an excellent example of the kind of thinning work so desperately needed in federal forests in theinterior West. Such thinnings almost always prompt appeals and litigation by radical environmental groups, which is sad because these projects reduce the risk ofcatastrophic fire and disease, increase wildlife forage and prompt natural regeneration.
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My friend Jim Hurst auctioned hissawmill in August 2005. Jim’s decisionto pack it in after 25 years of beating
his head on the wall made big news in north-west Montana but, alas, not a peep from TheWall Street Journal or The New York Times.That’s too bad, because the loss of our family-owned mills also signals the loss of technolo-gies and skills vital to our efforts to protect theWest’s great national forests from the ravagesof increasingly fearsome wildfires.
I was in Jim’s office a few days before theauction. He told me he was at peace with hisdecision, but Jim has a good game face, so Isuspect the decision to terminate his remain-
ing 70 employees tore his guts out. They werelike family to him.
Jim’s outfit was the economic backbone oftiny Eureka, Mont., a sawmill town since theearly 1900s. I have a photo of my school-teacher great-aunt standing on the front stepsof the town’s one-room schoolhouse in 1909.Although the town has grown some sincethen, its rural charm is still very much intact.
Thanks to the nation’s housing boom,business has been good for the West’ssawmills for the past three years. But Jimfaced an insurmountable problem: he could-n’t buy enough logs to keep his mill running.This despite the fact that 10 times as many
trees as Jim’s mill needed die annually in thenearby Kootenai National Forest. From hisoffice window, Jim could see the dead anddying trees standing on hillsides just west ofthe mill. They might as well have been stand-ing on the moon, given the senseless environ-mental litigation that has engulfed the West’sfederal forests.
Thanks to Jim’s resourcefulness, his millsurvived its last five years on a steady diet offire- and bug-killed trees salvaged from Alber-ta provincial forests in Canada. Such salvagework is unthinkable in our national forests,forests that, news reports to the contrary,remain under the thumb of radical environ-mental groups whose hatred for capitalismseems boundless. Americans are thus invitedto believe that salvaging fire-killed timber is“like mugging a burn victim.” Never mindthat there is no peer-reviewed science thatsupports this ridiculous claim—or that manyof the West’s great forests, including Oregon’sfamed Tillamook Forest, are products of pastsalvage and reforestation projects.
Jim shared his good fortune with hisemployees. Each received an average $30,000in severance and profit sharing: a tip of thehat from him to a crew who set a productionrecord the day after he told them he wasthrowing in the towel. Such is the profession-alism—and talent—found among the West’smill workers. A few Oregon mills tried torecruit them, but most don’t want to leaveEureka. I haven’t the faintest idea how they’llmake a living, but in the 40-odd years I’vespent observing forests and people who livein them, I’ve learned never to underestimatethe power of roots.
Although he’s still a young man filled withcreative energy and enthusiasm, I suspect thegovernment has seen the last of Jim Hurst.Three years ago, I called nearly 100 sawmillowners scattered across the West and askedthem if they would invest $40 million in anew small-log sawmill on the government’spromise of a timber supply sufficient toamortize the investment. The verdict was aunanimous “No.”
The never-reported truth is that the fami-ly-owned sawmills that survived the decade-long collapse of the federal timber-saleprogram no longer have much interest indoing business with a government they nolonger trust. Most now get their timber fromlands they’ve purchased in recent years, otherprivate lands, tribal forests or state lands.Some even import logs from other countries,including Canada, New Zealand and Chile.
You would think that environmentalists
DEATH OFA SAWMILLEnvironmentalists wreck small businesses—and do ecological damage while they’re at it. By Jim Petersen
The now long-gone Owens & Hurst mill was ideally suited to processing small logs like those in thisphotograph. A perpetual supply of timber this size grows and dies annually on the nearby KootenaiNational Forest, but thanks to radical environmental litigants almost none of it is available for harvest.It simply dies and falls down—or burns in increasingly frequent and ferocious wildfires. When it was stilloperating, the mill often got logs this size by the pickup load from nearby private landowners. Now they’velost their market for their thinnings—and have no profitable way to maintain the health and productivityof their forests.
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who campaigned against harvesting in theWest’s national forests for 30-some yearswould be dancing in the streets. And, in fact,some of them are. But many aren’t. Railingagainst giant faceless corporations is easy, butfacing the news cameras after small family-owned mills fold has turned out to be verydifficult. Everyone loves the underdog, andacross much of the West there is a gnawingsense that environmentalists have hurt a lot ofunderdogs in their lust for power.
Environmentalists also face a problemthey never anticipated. Recent polling revealssome 80 percent of Americans approve of thekind of methodical thinning that would haveproduced small-diameter logs in perpetuityfor Jim’s sawmill. We Americans seem to likethinning in overly dense forests because theend result is visually pleasing, and because ithelps reduce the risk of horrific wildfire.That’s a bonus for wildlife and for millions ofyear-round recreation enthusiasts who wor-ship clean air and water.
Many westerners wonder why the govern-ment isn’t doing more thinning in at-riskforests which are at the epicenter of our Inter-net-linked New West lifestyle. I don’t. Untilthe public takes back the enormous power ithas given radical environmentalists and theirlawyers, the Jim Hursts of the world will con-tinue to exit the stage, taking their hard-earned capital, their well-developed globalmarkets and their technological genius withthem.
Fifteen years ago, not long after the releaseof “Playing God in Yellowstone,” his seminalwork on environmentalism’s philosophicalunderpinnings, I asked philosopher and envi-ronmentalist Alston Chase what he thoughtabout this situation. Here is his answer:
“Environmentalism increasingly reflectsurban perspectives. As people move to cities,they become infatuated with fantasies aboutland untouched by humans. This demo-graphic shift is revealed through ongoingdebates about endangered species, grazing,water rights, private property, mining andlogging. And it is partly a healthy trend. Butthis urbanization of environmental valuesalso signals the loss of a rural way of life andthe disappearance of hands-on experiencewith nature. So the irony: As popular concernfor preservation increases, public understand-ing about how to achieve it declines.” n
Award-winning journalist Jim Petersen isfounder of the nonprofit Evergreen Foundationand the publisher of Evergreen magazine inBigfork, Mont. <www.evergreenmagazine.org>
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“First and foremost, you can never forget for a moment what is the objectof our forest policy. That object is not to preserve forests because they arebeautiful, though that is good in itself; nor because they are refuges for thewild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the UnitedStates, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policyof homemaking in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You, yourselves, have got to keep this practical object beforeyour minds; to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to thewealth, progress or safety of the country is of no interest to the governmentand should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as themeans of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation.”
TEDDY ROOSEVELT, SPEAKING TO THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1903
Buyers from seven states flocked to the Owens & Hurst equipment auction in Eureka, Mont., August 16-17, 2005. Most everything sold in two days, including the mill’s nearly new debarker, which was purchasedby Stoltze Lumber Company at nearby Columbia Falls. O&H co-owner, Jim Hurst, sold what little federaltimber he still had under contract to Stoltze, the last family-owned sawmill in the area.
In its heyday, the Owens & Hurst Lumber Company employed more than 200 Eureka-areamillworkers. In its latter years, most of the mill’s logs came from fire salvage operations in Alberta’sprovincial forests. In the distance, you can see the Kootenai National Forest, where more timber diesannually than grows or is harvested. The company tried many times to buy timber from the KNF, butthe forest’s timber sales were appealed or are in litigation.
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Ilook out my office window at a site similarto a bombed-out munitions factory inWorld War II Germany and I have to ask
myself, “What went wrong?” Seeing a onceproductive and efficient mill destroyed by thecutting torches of dismantlers is a gruesomesight witnessed far too often in rural commu-nities adjacent to our national forests.
Rural America is falling prey to what I calla subtle form of eco-terrorism. These covertoperations are perpetrated by a wide array ofenvironmental groups in conjunction withtheir attorneys, do-gooder bureaucrats, liberaljudges, a biased media, and urbanites whobuy into the propaganda spewed forth by allthe above. This menagerie of nonproducers iseroding the cultures and customs of ruralAmerica by taking away our ability to make aliving and enjoy our surroundings. They dotheir damage primarily by using the courts tostop or delay worthwhile projects such as tim-ber sales, oil and gas development, miningand grazing.
This form of eco-terrorism doesn’t mani-fest itself in burned-out ski facilities,destroyed tree plantations, torched SUV deal-
erships or vandalized logging equipment. It’ssubtle, but nevertheless just as painful. Itaffects main-street rural America by erodingour lifestyles and taking away our ability tocontrol our own destinies. It capitalizes onour independent values andour ability to handle adversityby ourselves without helpfrom others. This admirabletrait is in a significant waydestroying us.
We go about our dailytasks, heads down and buttsup, and our rural world con-tinues to deteriorate. We can do our work inoblivion and allow this to happen, or we canmake a stab at changing the direction we’reheading. To me, rural Americans are the mostunappreciated and underrepresented seg-ment of our society. If this is true, then we’reeither indifferent or lackadaisical for not usingthe power we possess to effect positive andsignificant change.
After years of promoting rallies and letter-writing campaigns, testifying at senate hear-ings and generally raising hell, I have come to
the realization that if we are to improve ourlot, it is going to have to be at the polls onelection day. Rural America has the votes toswing any presidential election in a directionfavorable to what we deem important. As avoting bloc we can impact most senatorialraces as well.
There are rural areas in every state andcandidates should not ignore us. They shouldseek us out. While reducing crime in urbanareas is important, reducing poverty in ruralAmerica is just as important. It’s high timedecision makers come to us for our inputinstead of caving in to a rural economic-development group holding a hand out for afederal grant.
In our case, what went wrong is the factthat we had no control over our owndestiny and no help from Washington.Environmental groups, many fundedby green trusts and foundations, tor-pedoed the timber program on theKootenai National Forest. Our case isnot unique. It illustrates what happenswhen outsiders make decisions and weare powerless to intervene. Rural
dwellers who own private property shouldalso beware, as government takings “for thegood of the nation” will most likely acceler-ate in the coming years. And don’t forgetwho covets our water. The effects of theEndangered Species Act will continue tojeopardize ranching, farming, timber andextractive industries. The environmentalistshang their hats on that rack while ranches,farms, mines, and mills hang a foreclosuresign on the same rack. And we let it happenover and over and over.
Personally, I don’t care who represents mein Washington as long as he or she has ruralAmerica’s interests at heart and is willing tofight for us. Rural Americans want what’s bestfor this country—security, a livable wage,social justice, a clean environment, highmoral standards, equal representation inCongress, and a president who can hear us.What we don’t need are federal laws, man-dates, and executive orders that take decisionmaking away from us.
Rural America must organize or faceoblivion. How it’ll be done and who does itremains to be seen. One thing I know is thatthere is no room for extremists, self-promot-ers or large egos. Reasonable people withstrength in numbers can effect positivechange for rural Americans. That’s the rackI’m willing to hang my hat on. n
Jim Hurst lives in Eureka, Mont.
NOTES FROM ANOLD STUMP JUMPERRural America is falling prey to a subtle form of eco-terrorism. By Jim Hurst
Desolation—both literal and figurative—characterizes this photograph taken in the winter of 2005following the Owens & Hurst auction. Most of these buildings have now been sold for salvage. Littleremains on the site other than the office. Jim Hurst has yet to decide what he will do with the acreage. Most of his former employees are reportedly still living in the Eureka area. Each got around $30,000 inshared profits from Jim when he closed the plant.
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It is a crippling and ultimately fatal blow swung by propagandaon the American lumber industry. Twenty years ago, Canadianlumber represented about 10 percent of the American market.Today, most of the basic framing material like two-by-fours usedin American construction comes from the north and at least 35 to40 percent of all lumber sold in the United States is of Canadianorigin.
In Yakima, Wash., last May, the last mill in a once timber-dri-ven region closed down, putting at least 200 people out of work.Local residents expressed concern that there will be no place forthe unemployed to find new work. Already, they said, the com-munity has been overrun by mostly Latino undocumented work-ers seeking jobs in the fruit orchards. It has presented a problemwith the emergence of street gangs, two of which had recentlyengaged in a running gun battle through Yakima streets.
All over the Northwest, and all over the Southwest as well,mills have been forced to close—at least 300 of them in the last
15 years. What remaining independent loggers there are havebeen forced to transport even salvaged logs farther and fartherto a handful of mills still able to operate. The result is ultimatelyhigher prices to the consumer. But in the former mill towns theimpact is more immediate, as collateral businesses like shops andgrocery stores have also been forced to close. Several schoolshave shut down as parents moved on looking for new work.
The spotted owl, contrary to environmentalists’ claims, hasbeen found to nest in second-growth forests and is still not con-sidered endangered.
What is clearly endangered, however, is what former foresterJack Mahon calls the “culture” of workers with the skill and will-ingness to work as woodsmen.
The trees have not been helped. The owl didn’t need anyhelp. The families and the children of displaced workers didn’tget any help. Is there some question left on the motive, or per-haps just the intelligence, of the environmentalists?— Tim Findley
Just since the politically inspired environmental movement found trendy support for its cam-paign to “save” the spotted owl, timber harvesting on U.S. national forestland has beenreduced by more than 85 percent.
Last January, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Ser-vice published a call for proposals fordevelopment of a recovery plan for the
northern spotted owl. It’s about time. The owlwas added to the nation’s burgeoning list ofthreatened and endangered species nearly 16years ago. That it took so long helps explainwhy only 10 of 1,264 species listed under the32-year-old federal Endangered Species Act(ESA) have ever recovered.
If my gut sense is correct, the owl won’t benumber 11. It is already doomed across muchof its range, and the reason is well-knownamong field biologists who have been observ-ing the bird for 20 years. More aggressivebarred owls are pushing them out of their 21-million-acre home range, or killing them, orboth.
Barred owls (not to be confused withcommon barn owls) migrated west fromtheir native East Coast environs a century ormore ago. No one knows why, and until theystarted killing already threatened spottedowls, no one cared. Now they do. Just howlong it will take the barred owls to finish off
their brethren isn’t known, but the situationhas become so precarious that a federal biolo-gist recently opined that shooting barred owlsmight be the only way to save spotted owls.
How and why the government failed somiserably in its costlyattempt to protect spottedowls is a sordid tale thatillustrates what happenswhen science is politicized. Itbegins with the fact thatprotecting owls was neverthe objective. Saving old-growth forests from chain-saws was. The owl wassimply a surrogate—astand-in for forests that donot themselves qualify forESA protection. But if a linkcould be establishedbetween harvesting in old-growth forests and decliningspotted owl numbers, the bird might wellqualify for listing—a line of thinking that in1988 led Andy Stahl, then a resource analyst
with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, tofamously declare, “Thank goodness the spot-ted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it had-n’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s theperfect species for use as a surrogate.”
Indeed it was. But to back their play, theSierra Club, the Audubon Society and theirfriends in the Clinton administration neededa good story for the judge. They found it inthree obscure reports: a 1976 master’s thesiswritten by wildlife-biology major Eric Fors-man at Oregon State University; Mr. Fors-man’s 1980 doctoral dissertation; and a 1984report written by Forsman and two otherbiologists. All three reports suggested a strong
link between declining owlpopulations and harvestingin old-growth forests.Unfortunately, this hypothe-sis has never been tested. Sodespite 16 years of research,no link between old-growthharvesting and declining owlpopulations has ever beenestablished.
We know little about therelationship between har-vesting and owl populations.One such study—privatelyfunded—infers an inverserelationship between har-vesting and owls. In other
words, in areas where some harvesting hasoccurred owl numbers are increasing a bit, orat least holding their own, while numbers are
OWL BE DAMNEDHow and why the government failed so miserably in its costly attempt to protect spotted owls is a sordid tale that illustrates what happens when science is politicized. By Jim Petersen
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Saving spotted owls (above) maymean killing barred owls (p. 50).
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declining in areas where no harvesting hasoccurred.
This news will come as no surprise toOregon, Washington and California timber-land owners who are legally required to pro-vide habitat for owls. Their lands, which areactively managed, are home to the highestreproductive rates ever recorded for spottedowls.Why is this?
One possible answer is that the anecdotalevidence on which the listing decision wasbased is incomplete. No one denies the pres-ence of owls in old-growth forests, but whatabout the owls that are prospering in man-aged forests and in forests where little oldgrowth remains? Could it be that spottedowls are more resourceful than we think?
We don’t know. And the reason we don’tknow is that 16 years ago some federal scien-tists chose to politicize their hypothesis ratherthan test it rigorously. They flatly rejected cri-tiques from biometricians, who questionedthe statistical validity of evidence on whichthe listing decision was based, and declaredwith by-god certainty that once the old-
growth harvest stopped, owl populationswould begin to recover.
Some biologists believe that spotted owlsstill have a fighting chance for survival east ofthe Cascades in Oregon and Washington. Butthere is a problem here: white fir is pushingnative Douglas fir out of these forests in thesame way barred owls are pushing spottedowls out of their home range. Minus a long-term thinning program opposed by many ofthe same environmental groups that pushedthe owl’s threatened species listing, the birdswill probably vanish from these forests too.
No doubt one or more environmentalgroups will use the government’s call forrecovery plans to demand that even morehabitat be set aside for spotted owls. Whenthat demand is made, Congress must beforcefully reminded of a recent U.S. ForestService estimate that an additional 1.1 millionacres of federal forestland in the PacificNorthwest have grown into old-growth statussince the owl’s listing—and that despite thisgrowth, spotted owl numbers continue todecline.
Senators especially must be reminded byvoters of these facts, because they have yet toendorse changes in the Endangered SpeciesAct ratified by the House of Representativeslast fall. Among other things, the House ver-sion mandates immediate development andimplementation of recovery plans for all listedspecies. To avoid repeats of the spotted owlfiasco, it will be necessary for the scientistsinvolved to peer-review listing proposals rep-resenting all sides of inevitably controversialquestions.
It should not take 16 years to write arecovery plan. The fact that it did ought toprompt some very pointed questions by con-cerned citizens everywhere about what wenton behind locked doors in Portland, Oregon’sU.S. Bank Tower. The building was nick-named the “Tower of Power” by the govern-ment scientists who gathered there in thespring of 1990—beyond public and congres-sional scrutiny—to sift through the pieces oftheir story. Congress should ask for theirnotes, but shouldn’t expect much to berevealed. I’m told they were shredded daily. n
Old-growth sitka spruce, Olympic National Forest, Washington. INSET: Barred owl, the spotted owl’s nemesis.
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People don’t like what big wildfires do toforests. And in forest restoration, theysee a proactive, therapeutic, nondestruc-
tive alternative. But in order to succeed,restoration must be pursued with the sameintensity and effort that took us to the moon.That means paying close attention to at leastsix key aspects of restoration that are oftenignored or downplayed.
First, forest restoration will fail if the workis not done on physical scales that are ecologi-cally and economically meaningful. Smallpilot projects that are designed to show thepublic what is possible and to encourage col-laboration, usually along well-traveled routesnear communities, do nothing to reduce thelandscape-scale risk of catastrophic wildfire.Remember, some 70 million acres of federalforestland in the West need treatment, about40 million acres sooner rather than later.
Similarly, we have to work well beyondthe wildland-urban interface. If we don’t, werisk the loss of millions of acres of forest habi-tat critical to the recovery of threatened andendangered species—and we risk the loss ofour municipal watersheds. Water has replacedtimber as the primary raw material the publicneeds from its forests. But far too little isbeing done to protect these watersheds.
Second, there is not enough gold in FortKnox to pay for all the restoration work thatlies ahead. The work has to pay for itself,which means it has to be done on physicalscales large enough to accommodate the capi-tal and operating costs of some quite sophisti-cated thinning and processing technologies.Mechanical harvesters cost about $1 millionnew. High-speed, small-log sawmills cost $25million. In-woods chippers sell for about ahalf million. Trucks are extra. And smallpower plants built to convert woody biomassto energy cost a minimum of $1 million permegawatt to construct.
Field research conducted in the northernRockies and in New Mexico proves forestrestoration can pay its own way—and per-haps even earn a modest profit—if the gov-ernment widens its management horizon toinclude all plant and animal species, not justlate-succession species.
We all seem to agree on the benefits ofmaximizing biological diversity, yet we arepreoccupied with protecting old-growthforests, which provide precious little foragefor animals. Why not protect the whole forest,which in turn could support a much widervariety of plant and animal life? Why not paymore attention to structural and age-classdiversity? Imagine living in a town struck by agreat plague, and learning that the city fathershad decided to make their limited supply oflifesaving vaccine available only to the oldestand sickest people in town. Can a communitysurvive without the very young, without ado-lescents, without young families, without anable-bodied workforce? I don’t think so. Aforest can’t either.
Third, before it tries to rein-vent the wheel, the governmentshould enlist the help of thewood-processing industry thatis still here. Across the West,more than a thousand localsawmilling, logging and truck-ing businesses were wiped outby the collapse of the federaltimber-sale program. Facedwith the need to spend millionsof dollars on new sawing tech-nology, some owners chose notto make the transition to smalllogs. But many more did makethe investment in anticipationof the government’s shift fromold-growth liquidation to thin-ning and harvesting regimesthat favored late-successionspecies. But the shift nevercame, and so many of thesemills are gone too.
Using federal or privategrant monies to fund start-upbusinesses is fine, but it will beyears before these inexperi-enced businesses can make theirown way without subsidy. Wedon’t have time to wait for themto succeed or fail on their ownmerits. But existing businesses,with years of experience andknowledge, provide the govern-ment with an unparalleled
opportunity to succeed immediately, whileforest restoration is still very much in thepublic spotlight.
There is still sufficient processing andmarketing capacity to begin the rescue worktomorrow in western Montana, northernIdaho, South Dakota’s Black Hills, easternWashington, southern and eastern Oregonand Northern California. These mills, whichare mostly family owned, lie within some ofthe sickest forests in the entire national forestsystem. If existing infrastructure can’t be putto work here tomorrow, it doesn’t say muchfor the future or for the credibility of the restof the process.
Fourth, replicate success. Of all the for-est restoration projects I’ve seen, the mostsuccessful by far is the Clearwater Steward-ship Project near Seeley Lake, Mont. Thereare six reasons for its extraordinary success,and not surprisingly all the reasons are peo-ple: a competent and enlightened districtranger; a very supportive forest supervisor;
NO MILLNO MARKETNO FORESTLack of use causes landscape-scale riskof catastrophic fire. By Jim Petersen
Foreign cargo ships loading U.S. timber for export in 1991. Now weare importing Canadian and other foreign timber, even though ourown national forests are growing billions of board feet of timbereach year. Instead of being used, it’s taken by bugs or fire.
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a family-ownedmilling businesswilling to invest itscapital in the ven-ture; a very support-ive community;conservation groupsthat see the value inthe project; and afirst-rate monitoringcommittee hand-picked by the dis-trict ranger. Thesehuman resourcesare available all overthe West. It is thegovernment’s job to nurture political andinvestment climates in which they can blos-som. Begin by learning from and buildingon Seeley Lake’s stellar success.
Fifth, the government needs a prospectus,just like any other suitor looking for invest-ment capital: a series of reports that quantifyand qualify the restoration work to be doneover the next few decades on a forest-by-for-est basis. No such documents exist. I tried forthree years—unsuccessfully—to find fundingfor a comprehensive biomass study for Mon-tana. The last such report was completed in
1988. It is too old to beof any value to anyoneconsidering a powerplant or high-speedsawmill. You cannotfund such sophisticat-ed operations on 16-year-old information.No lender will talk toyou.
Sixth, it is long pasttime for our govern-ment to get seriousabout managing risksin forests. There is noevidence in science or
history to support the claim that forestrestoration will only make things worse thanthey already are. The court-sanctioneddestruction of public and private assets to ful-fill the misguided ambitions of a few iswrong. Nowhere else in our society is such acallous disregard for humanity’s needs toler-ated: not in crime prevention, nationaldefense, homeland security or health care.Why are we tolerating it in forests so vital toall of us?
Last, I want to beat the drum for the onlyplace in the entire government where you can
get answers to questions concerning small-wood processing, utilization or marketing:the Forest Service’s Forest Products Laborato-ry at Madison, Wis. Evergreen magazinedevoted a special issue to the lab’s impressivescientists, engineers and marketing specialists.We called it,“Giant Minds, Giant Ideas.”
Even if the federal government neveragain sells a stick of timber to a private enter-prise, it will still be necessary to actively man-age the public’s forests—to thin and harvesttrees periodically in ways that replicatenature’s rhythms, thereby controlling the lim-its of natural disturbance, the crippling influ-ences of insect and disease infestations andthe devastating impacts of unnatural wild-fires.
In these endeavors, we would do well toheed the wisdom of an old Tennessee foresterfriend. He said: “When we leave forests tonature, as so many seem to want to do, we getwhatever nature serves up, which can be pret-ty devastating at times. But with forestry wehave options, and a degree of predictabilitynot found in nature.” n
Jim Petersen is working on a book coveringthe post-World War II history of the West’sindependent sawmill owners.
He saw Bill Clinton and Al Gore campaigning in the Northwestwithempty promises to forest workers and their families concernedabout their jobs and income. He was a witness as Interior Secre-tary Bruce Babbitt simply absorbed the Forest Service fromthe Department of Agriculture and without virtue of law orpolicy placed his own man, Michael Dombeck, at the headof a department he meant to use to close the forests down.
Mahon loved the Forest Service; he considered it hishome. But he saw Dombeck and Babbitt, with Clinton’s cover,“create havoc in those western communities that have alwaysdepended upon the national forestlands for their recreation, jobs,and tax base.”
Writing from a sometimes-lonely place in his own home nearHelena, Mont., with only a small local paper toprint his words,Mahon appealed again and again for people to understand that“Dombeck’s programs are contrived in the name of protectingwildlife and fish when in actuality the goal is to close down the for-est.”
Few listened, even as Mahon revealed the infiltration of the For-est Service byenvironmentalists with a goal of “reinventing” thefederal department. Babbitt wanted ranchers who grazed livestockon federally managed land punished; Dombeck wanted source
control of water in the West. The people didn’t really matter. Nologgers would be necessary in a utopian wilderness sold to theClinton gang, and no visitors would be welcome either as
Dombeck set out to close the roads.“The Forest Service,” Mahon forecast in 1999, “has
become a rogue agency bent on locking us out of ournational forests.”
Mahon today finds the wounds so deep that they areunlikely to heal without a major reassessment of Interior and ForestService policies. As a forester, he knows it is not trees that are lack-ing, but the human integrity tomanage them as a renewableresource. It will require courage not shown in the Bush administra-tion, he says, to confront the entrenched environmentalists, butAmerica needs toknowthe truth.
Writing to professor Donald W. Floyd at the State University ofNew York in 2004, Mahon offered this: “Two great injustices dur-ing the last 20 years have been the character assassination ofprofessional foresters and the logging industry by the elitist envi-ronmentalists and the brainwashed public. Tragically, the ForestService, the Society of American Foresters, and the forestry pro-fessors in academia have watched this happen with no word ofprotest and no strong public vote of confidence.”—Tim Findley
FFor more than 20 years since Jack Mahon left his 15-year job with the Forest Service,he has risked his reputation and his jobs as an independent forester to appeal forsome sanity in U.S. federal policy.
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Mule deer feeds in burn area in Grand TetonNational Park. Note new growth, fall 1988.
The Camp 32 wildfire that burnedapproximately 800 acres on Aug. 7,2005, illustrates the fuel problem exist-
ing across the lower-elevation ponderosa pineecosystems across the western United States.
The fire started in the lower elevationsof the Pinkham Creek drainage in theKootenai National Forest, in close proximityto residences and private land. Residents inthe immediate vicinity were evacuated, andthose north of the fire were put on evacua-tion notice. While no homes were lost, onegarage and a small shed did burn. If itweren’t for a fuel-treatment project that wasimplemented by the Rexford Ranger Dis-
trict personnel, theresult would havebeen infinitely moreserious.
The RexfordDistrict had imple-mented fuel-treat-ment projects onnational forestlands
within the urban interface for over twodecades in anticipation of events such as theCamp 32 fire. The ecosystems have changedsubstantially due to the influx of people mov-ing into these areas. The threat of severe fire isenhanced.
Before man started suppressing fires inthe early 1900s, many of the dry ponderosapine stands burned naturally with lightground fires every five to 20 years. This keptthe ground fuels and stand densities lowand effectively pruned the lower limbs oflarger trees. Since man has stopped most ofthe fires for nearly a century, ground fuelshave built up and dense stands have devel-
oped which are just fuel for the fire. Sinceman created the problem, we also needhuman intervention to resolve it. Naturewill not fix this problem.
The objective of fuel-treatment projectsis to manage a stand so that if a fire enters it,the fire will stay on the ground and notdevelop into a crown fire. The use of pre-scribed fire, while often helpful, can’t do italone. We have to cut trees prior to the pre-scribed fire. In many cases, this means log-ging. By logging the dense understory, thesestands can be thinned to a level at whichcrown fires will have a hard time sustainingthemselves, even if a single tree were totorch out. The leftover debris from the log-ging can either be piled and burned or thearea can be burned with a prescribed lightground fire.
This is exactly the type of treatment thatwas done prior to the Camp 32 fire. A timbersale thinned the treated area in 2001. The plancalled for leaving all the larger trees on-site.Much of the material to be removed was of
CAMP 32Fire and fuel treatment works. By Ron Hvizdak, USFS Ret.
TREATED AREA
UNTREATED AREA
GROUND FIRELOWER PINKHAM RD
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commercial value, thus the use of a timbersale made perfect sense. Rather than usingtaxpayers’ dollars to do the work, much of itwas funded by the sale of material that need-ed to be removed. Once the logging was com-pleted, the rest of the unwanted material wascut and piled, with the piles being burned inthe fall of 2002. In the spring of 2003, theRexford District conducted a prescribed burnover the entire fuel-treatment area, thus com-pleting the job.
When the Camp 32 fire started, it quick-ly developed into a crown fire in untreatedstands of timber that couldn’t be stopped.
While some action could be taken along theflanks of the fire, safety concerns prohibitedany action at its leading edge. When the fireentered the area where the fuels had beentreated, it dropped from a crown fire to amuch slower burning ground fire. Thismade it safer for suppression crews to attackthe head of the fire and also helped reducethe costs of the overall suppression efforts.The 800 burned acres cost taxpayers nearly$2 million to suppress. Had fuel treatmentand stand management not already beendone, these numbers could easily have beendoubled or tripled—or worse. n
Ron Hvizdak is a retired fire managementofficer, Rexford District, Kootenai NationalForest. “This fuel-treatment project, as well asalmost all our fuel-treatment projects, waschallenged by several environmental groupsthat don’t think we should be managingnational forestlands. Getting these projectsthrough the system has cost the taxpayers a lotof money because of these challenges. But themoney, lives, and property saved by the fueltreatment that was done make it all worth-while. Much more work is needed, and in factthe untreated area that burned with extremecrown fire was slated for treatment as well.”Ironically, and nearly tragically, it too waschallenged by environmental groups.
Without a doubt, wood is the mostrenewable material used to buildand maintain our civilization.
Forestry is the most sustainable of all the pri-mary industries. This should give wood a lotof green eco-points in the environmentalmovement’s ledger.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be thecase. Greenpeace has gone before the United
Nations Inter-Governmental Panel onForests, calling on countries to reduce theamount of wood they use and to adopt “envi-ronmentally appropriate substitutes” instead.No list of substitutes is provided. The SierraClub is calling for “zero cut” and an end to allcommercial forestry on federal public lands inthe United States. The Rainforest Action Net-work wants a 75-percent reduction in wood
use in North America by the year 2015. Ithink it is fair to summarize this approach as“cut fewer trees, use less wood.”
It is my firm belief, as a lifelong environ-mentalist and ecologist, that this is an anti-environmental policy. Putting aside, for amoment, the importance of forestry for oureconomy and communities, on purely envi-ronmental grounds the policy of use lesswood is anti-environmental.
Why is this the case?Twenty-five percent of all the wood used
in the world is for building things such ashouses and furniture. Every available substi-tute is nonrenewable and requires a great dealmore energy consumption to produce. Thatis because wood is produced in a factorycalled the forest by renewable solar energy.Wood is essentially the material embodimentof solar energy. Nonrenewable building mate-rials such as steel, cement, and plastic must beproduced in real factories such as steel mills,cement works, and oil refineries. This usually
TREES ARETHE ANSWERA world without forests is as unthinkable as a day without wood.By Patrick Moore, Ph.D.
LEFT: Clear-cut logging, Whatcom County, Wash.ABOVE: New growth on clear-cut, southern Oregon.
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requires large inputs of fossil fuelsinevitably resulting in high carbon-dioxide emissions. So, for 70 percent ofthe wood used each year for energy andbuilding, switching to substitutes nearlyalways results in increased carbon-dioxide emissions, contrary to climate-change policy.
Fifteen percent of the wood har-vested is used to manufacture pulp andpaper mainly for printing, packaging,and sanitary purposes. Fully half of thiswood is derived from the wastes fromsawmills, which produce the solidwood products for building. Most ofthe remaining supply is from tree plan-tations, many of which are establishedon land that was previously cleared foragriculture. So even if we did stop usingwood to make pulp and paper, it wouldnot have the effect of “saving” manyforests.
I have spent the last 15 years tryingto understand the relationship betweenforestry and the environment, to sepa-rate fact from fiction, myth from reality.Since 1991 I have chaired the Sustain-able Forestry Committee of the ForestAlliance of British Columbia. The gen-eral public is being given the impression, bysupposedly reputable sources such as TheNew York Times and National Geographic, thatforestry is a major cause of species extinctionwhen there is actually no evidence to supportthat position.
Forestry seldom, if ever, causesspecies to become extinct. We tend tothink that forests need our help torecover after destruction, whether byfire or logging. This is not the case.Forests have been recovering by them-selves, without any assistance, fromfires, volcanoes, landslides, floods andice ages, ever since forests began morethan 350 million years ago.
Consider the fact that 10,000 yearsago all of Canada and Russia were cov-ered by a huge sheet of ice, under whichnothing lived, certainly not trees. Today,Canada and Russia account for 30 per-cent of all the forests on earth, grown backfrom bare rock. Go to Alaska where the glaci-ers are retreating due to the present warmingtrend, and you will see that from the momentthe rocks are laid bare to the sun, it is only 80years until a thriving new ecosystem is grow-ing there, including young trees.
Fire has always been the main cause offorest destruction, or “disturbance” as ecolo-
gists like to call it in order to use a more neu-tral term. But fire is natural, we are told, anddoes not destroy the forest ecosystem like log-ging, which is unnatural. Nature never comeswith logging trucks and takes the trees away.All kinds of rhetoric are used to give the
impression that logging is somehow funda-mentally different from other forms of forestdisturbance. There is no truth to this. It is truethat logging is different from fire, but fire isalso very different from a volcano, which inturn is very different from an ice age. In fact,no two fires are ever the same. These are dif-ferences of degree, however, not kind. Forestsare just as capable of recovering from destruc-
tion by logging as they are from any otherform of disturbance. All that is necessaryfor renewal is that the disturbance isended: the fire is out, the volcano stopserupting, the ice retreats, or the loggers goback down the road and allow the forestto begin growing back, which it will beginto do almost immediately.
In the context of my experience Isay: “Give me an acre of land anywhereon earth, tell me to grow something therewith which I can make paper, whichwould also be best for biodiversity, and Iwill plant trees every single time, withoutexception.” It is a fact that even the sim-plest monoculture pine plantation is bet-ter for wildlife, birds, and insects than anyannual farm crop. It is ridiculous for envi-ronmental groups that say their mainconcern is biodiversity conservation to beadvocating the establishment of massivemonocultures of annual exotic farmcrops where we could be growing trees.
I believe that trees are the answerto many questions about our future onearth. These include: How can we bestadvance to a more sustainable economybased on renewable fuels and materials?How can we improve literacy and sanita-
tion in developing countries while reversingdeforestation and protecting wildlife at thesame time? How can we reduce the amountof greenhouse gases emitted to the atmos-phere, carbon dioxide in particular? How canwe increase the amount of land that will sup-
port a greater diversity of species? Howcan we help prevent soil erosion and pro-vide clean air and water? How can wemake this world more beautiful andgreen?
The answer is: by growing more treesand using more wood as a substitute fornonrenewable fossil fuels and materialssuch as steel, concrete, and plastic, and aspaper products for printing, packaging,and sanitation.
The fact is a world without forests is asunthinkable as a day without wood. Andit’s time that politicians, environmental-ists, foresters, teachers, journalists, and the
general public got that balance right. Becausewe must get it right if we are going to achievesustainability in the 21st century.
May the forest be with you. n
Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeaceand chairman and chief scientist of GreenspiritStrategies Ltd. He holds a Ph.D. in ecology anda B.S. in forest biology.
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ABOVE: Little remains in the devastating aftermath of the500,000-acre Biscuit Fire on southern Oregon’s SiskiyouNational Forest. Less than one percent of the commercialtimber killed by the 2002 fire has been salvaged. The rest hasbeen tied up in litigation or declared off-limits to salvage.BELOW: Planted Douglas fir seedlings, Port Gamble, Wash.
L16 • RANGE MAGAZINE • 2006
The news blasted all over the local andregional papers in April 2005. It evenmade it into USA Today. The Owens and
Hurst sawmill is closing. For good. In fourmonths. Appropriate people expressedappropriate dismay—U.S. senators and rep-resentatives, state and local leaders. The Mon-tana Wilderness Association and the Ecology
Center pointed the finger at anyone butthemselves. The Forest Service did the nowage-old hand-wringing.
No one can fault Jim Hurst for this deci-sion. Anyone who knows what is happeningto our public forests is left marveling at howlong he avoided having to make it. Anyonewho knows what is happening to our publicforests knows that the last several years ofoperation at the plant were last-gasp effortsby Hurst to keep employing people so hecould walk down the main street of his never-say-die town with his head up.
IN THE BEGINNINGIn May of 1988 a meeting was held in Eureka,Mont., to discuss the critical role of publicinvolvement in the forest-planning process.The meeting was attended by 1,150 of thetown’s posted population of 1,152. Theyshowed up in force because a man theyrespected, Jim Hurst, had spread the wordthat they needed to attend.
This meeting spawned the idea for theGreat Northwest Log Haul. Ten days later,304 loaded logging trucks were on thenational news bringing our country the firstmajor news story on what was to becomethe continuing plight of timber communi-ties throughout the Northwest. This event
would not have occurredif it were not for JimHurst’s willingness tocommit his physical, emo-tional, managerial and
financial resources to it.In the 17 years following the Great North-
west Log Haul, Jim never wavered in his sup-port of timber families. He helped formCommunities for a Great Northwest to helpbring new voices into the dialogue over ourforests. They collaborated in helping to findsolutions to our problems. He and his com-
pany joined with localgovernments and grass-roots groups in lawsuitsthat helped to set nation-al precedence for proof-of-harm claims con-cerning federal-landmanagement decisions.
GOING NATIONALDuring the last severalyears, Jim’s tireless pas-
sion and unquestioned credibility extendedoutside Montana and outside timber issues. Itwas Jim who helped collect 10,000 shovels andpaid for them to be trucked to thousands oftimber, ranching, mining, farming and recre-ationist families in Jarbidge, Nev., in an effortto fight the Forest Service and drive home thecommon-ground issue of access to resources(RANGE, Winter ’01). His efforts caught theattention of news media nationwide.
Knowing of the sawmill’s daily struggle toaccess raw logs, in May of 2001, Jim Hurst’sfriends decided to bring 100-inch logs to theworkers at his sawmill. The Eureka Log Haulonce again caught the attention of the nation-al media—this time because of the positive,simple theme of “giving back to those whohave given so much.”
It was an incredible sight. Small logs fromprivate landowners were delivered to the iso-lated community of Eureka in vehicles withlicense plates from South Dakota, Nevada,Oregon, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington andOhio. These logs arrived in vehicles with min-ing, ranching, farming, banking, gasoline,school-district and law-enforcement logos ontheir sides. The logs were loaded in pickups,on logging trucks, in station wagons, on topof Toyotas, strapped to motorcycles, and
chained to the landing gears of airplanes. Allarrived with one simple message for a man,his mill workers, and a timber town that ruralAmerica has raised to heroic stature. Thatmessage was a heartfelt thank you. In 2002Jim was named National Timber IndustryActivist of the Year.
LEGACY RUNS ON, SAWMILL WON’TThe battle to save the Owens and Hurstsawmill ended in August 2005. The 2.5-mil-lion-acre Kootenai National Forest grows 492million board feet per year but the 30 millionboard feet of small, dead or green timberneeded for Jim Hurst to keep employing hisEureka friends couldn’t be found. The analy-sis paralysis that has abdicated managementof our forests to professional litigants in courtclaimed another victim. Hurst’s was the lastmodern stud mill in Lincoln County.
The families of Eureka witnessed the dis-mantling of the Owens and Hurst sawmill.The trees unavailable to the mill will indeedbe managed over time—by fire. We will all beleft to wonder why.
Most of us do not believe that forest man-agement is gone for good. But the businessand cultural infrastructure necessary toaccomplish the task of management doesn’tjust materialize; it takes generations to devel-op. Those who have spent their careers in theconstantly changing business of the practicalapplication of academic forest managementtheory (logging) and the entrepreneurialapplication of wood technology productionprocesses (sawmilling) are being trumped bylawyers and bureaucratic constipation. Whenwe’ve tired of spending billions of tax dollarsfighting fire, we’ll be faced with spending bil-lions trying to resurrect the rapidly disappear-ing knowledge base of how to do envi-ronmentally sensitive forest management onthe ground, and billions more encouragingthe capital investments necessary to processthe materials removed from the forest.
IT’S NOT OVERThe Hurst family’s leadership offered duringtheir years of operation in Eureka helpednumerous other businesses flourish with theOwens and Hurst sawmill as an economiccenterpiece. When the mill closed, Jim Hursttold the press that the environmental-conflictindustry had not heard the last of him. It’s notover yet. n
A LEADER’S LEGACYThe outcome of environmental conflict. By Bruce Vincent
“The Great Lie” is a special report published by RANGE magazine.With special thanks to Jim Petersen, Evergreen magazine; Bruce Vincent, Vincent Logging;
Jim Hurst, Owens & Hurst; Patrick Moore; Tom Stack & Associates; and the U.S. Forest Service.
© 2006 RANGE MAGAZINE, P.O. Box 639, Carson City, NV 89702
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