Owl vs Man

By TED GUP

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

-- "Inversnaid," by Gerard Manley Hopkins; Poems (1876-89)

In Oregon's Umpqua National Forest, a lumberjack presses his snarling chain saw into the flesh of a Douglas fir that has held its place against wind and fire, rockslide and flood, for 200 years. The white pulpy fiber scatters in a plume beside him, and in 90 seconds, 4 ft. of searing steel have ripped through the thick bark, the thin film of living tissue and the growth rings spanning ages. With an excruciating groan, all 190 ft. of trunk and green spire crash to earth. When the cloud of detritus and needles settles, the ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest has retreated one more step. Tree by tree, acre by acre, it falls, and with it vanishes the habitat of innumerable creatures. None among these creatures is more vulnerable than the northern spotted owl, a bird so docile it will descend from the safety of its lofty bough to take a mouse from the hand of a man.

The futures of the owl and the ancient forest it inhabits have become entwined in a common struggle for survival. Man's appetite for timber threatens to consume much of the Pacific Northwest's remaining wilderness, an ecological frontier whose deep shadows and jagged profile are all that remain of the land as it was before the impact of man. But rescuing the owl and the timeless forest may mean barring the logging industry from many tracts of virgin timberland, and that would deliver a jarring economic blow to scores of timber-dependent communities across Washington, Oregon and Northern California. For generations, lumberjacks and millworkers there have relied on the seemingly endless bounty of the woodlands to sustain them and a way of life that is as rich a part of the American landscape as the forest itself. For many, all that may be coming to an end.

This week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to announce whether it will list the northern spotted owl as a threatened species. If the owl is listed, as many predict, the Government will be required by the Endangered Species Act to protect the bird. And if a preservation plan advocated by biologists is put into effect, it could be one of the most sweeping environmental actions ever undertaken. Federal and state agencies say the plan, fully carried out, would set aside an additional 3 million acres of forests. That would slash by more than one-third timber production on federal lands, which accounts for nearly 40% of the region's total harvest. The possible result: mill closings and cutbacks costing 30,000 jobs over the next decade. Real estate prices would tumble, and states and counties that depend on shares of the revenue from timber sales on federal land could see those funds plummet. Oregon would be hardest hit, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, wages and salaries, say state officials. By decade's end the plan could cost the U.S. Treasury $229 million in lost timber money each year.

All this to protect an owl that stands barely 2 ft. tall and weighs 22 oz. Granted, it is one of the most regal birds of the forest, with its chocolate- color plumage, dappled with white spots, and its enormous eyes, like onyx cabochons, scouring the forest for prey. A fine bird, yes, but it was never really the root cause of this great conflict.

More than a contest for survival between a species and an industry, the owl battle is an epic confrontation between fundamentally different philosophies about the place of man in nature. At issue: Are the forests -- and by extension, nature itself -- there for man to use and exploit, or are they to be revered and preserved? How much wilderness does America need? How much human discomfort can be justified in the name of conservation? In the Pacific Northwest the nation's reinvigorated environmental movement is about to collide head on with economic reality. What happens here will shape the outcome of similar conflicts between ecological and economic concerns for years to come. It will also enhance or diminish U.S. credibility overseas, as America tries to influence other nations to husband their natural resources and protect their endangered species. From Brazil to Japan, the decision will be carefully observed. The stakes are that high.

Environmentalists claim that talk of an economic doomsday is wildly exaggerated and is intended to whip up popular opposition to conservation efforts that threaten industry profits. The skeptics question figures coming from those federal agencies -- the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management -- that lease timber rights on public lands and have long been seen as being cozy with the logging industry. Privately, some agency officials concede that the dire economic forecasts were rushed and based on shaky assumptions. Still, they have bolstered industry's attack on the owl- preservation plan and fueled community fears. Already there are signs that those agencies, under directions from the White House, may try to scale down the plan urged by biologists. A joint Forest Service-BLM study indicates that the very fabric holding some communities together would unravel if the biologists' plan were fully implemented. "In severe cases of community dysfunction," says the report, "increased rates of domestic disputes, divorce, acts of violence, delinquency, vandalism, suicide, alcoholism and ( other social problems are to be expected."

In many ways, however, the owl dispute merely hastened an inevitable crisis facing the Pacific Northwest. For decades, the timber industry, driven by the nation's voracious housing needs, leveled private and public land for timber with little regard for long-term consequences. "We've been running an ecological deficit, and the bill has come in," says Jerry Franklin, a research scientist with the Forest Service. "There's going to be pain for owls, for people and for trees." The industry's reforestation practices have markedly improved over the past decade, but the reinvestment is too little too late.

The life cycle of the Pacific Northwest's primeval woodlands is measured not in decades but in centuries. No amount of saplings and science can make up for years of wanton harvesting, or replace a thousand-year-old fir. Only time can do that -- and time may be short for those mills that are specially designed to devour the old firs. The owners eye the forests hungrily, knowing they cannot wait for the millions of seedlings and young trees to mature. If the industry is allowed to keep cutting, some forestry experts say, the last ancient forests outside wilderness areas could fall within 30 years. Thus many mills may be forced to close no matter what. Owl or no owl, the timber industry faces a painful conversion from its dependence on giant old-growth trunks to smaller trees in reforested stands.

Already the old growth has all but vanished from private lands. Most of the remaining great trees are in areas under federal control, administered primarily by the Forest Service. Many Americans believe these lands are all included in the national parks, and that the U.S. Forest Service is a gentle custodian of the woodlands. Except in certain protected wilderness areas, that is not so. The Forest Service and BLM, which oversee the public lands, are empowered to sell timber rights to the highest bidder, and sell they have -- a staggering 5 billion board feet a year, sweeping away 70,000 acres of old- growth forest annually. What is grown in its stead is not forest but "fiber," as the timber industry refers to wood.

One can grasp the distinction by looking out from any one of a thousand promontories in the Northwest. Clear-cutting -- the indiscriminate leveling of every tree in an area -- has left the wilderness fragmented and scarred. Long after the last truck has pulled out, heavy with logs, and the debris has been torched, what remains is a blackened earth, pockmarked and studded with tombstone-like stumps. "It looks like Alamogordo, as if it's been nuked," concedes Dan Schindler, a Forest Service district ranger.

Though the timber industry has zealously replanted over the past two decades, the hallmark of old growth, biodiversity, has been lost. Gone are the broken-topped dead trees or "snags" favored by owl, osprey and pileated woodpecker. Gone the multilayered canopies and rich understory, the scattering of hemlock, incense cedar and sugar pine. Gone the centuries-old firs in their noble dotage. Increasingly, the forests have been transmogrified into tree farms of numbing uniformity, countless ankle-high seedlings and spindly saplings germinated from seeds selected for their productive capacity. The logging operations have tattered the seamless fabric of old growth that once covered the land. "There are more holes in the blanket than there is blanket," laments BLM biologist Frank Oliver. According to the National Audubon Society, each year enough old-growth trees are taken from the Pacific Northwest to fill a convoy of trucks 20,000 miles long.

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual," says Richard Brown of the National Wildlife Federation. Less than 10% of the ancient forest that once covered the Northwest remains. From Alaska to British Columbia to Oregon, forests that predate the 13 Colonies are being sacrificed for plywood, planks and pulp. The rapidity with which these primeval stands are being cut down has driven a handful of environmental extremists to sabotage timber-industry equipment, tie themselves to trees slated for harvesting and booby-trap trees with buried spikes that can mangle saws or injure unwary cutters.

All this bewilders timber-industry leaders, who say there are plenty of owls, plus abundant old-growth stands set aside in wilderness areas, that are safe from the saw. In Oregon about half the state's estimated 3 million acres of old growth cannot be logged because it is unsuitable or designated as wilderness. But that leaves 1.5 million acres of old growth that can be cut. Some of these areas contain no owls and are not likely to be protected.

How much ancient forest is enough? The question is not just one of aesthetics or recreational adequacy. No one knows how much forest is needed to sustain an intricate and little understood ecosystem upon which animals and plants, and, yes, man too, depend. What is known is that the old growth plays an integral role in regulating water levels and quality, cleaning the air, enhancing the productivity of fisheries and enriching the stability and character of the soil. "We're probably just on the edge in terms of our understanding," says Eric Forsman, a biologist with the Forest Service. "If we continue pell-mell down the path of eliminating these old forests, we'll never have the opportunity to learn because they won't be there to study." He and others have come to believe that where science ends, the mystery that is the ancient forest begins.

To understand what is at stake in human terms, it helps to visit a community that depends on timber for its existence. Take Oregon's Douglas County, which, like the fir, is named for the Scottish botanist David Douglas. Oregon produces more lumber than any other state, and Douglas County boasts that it is the timber capital of the world. It stretches from the Cascades in the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. There one can tune in to Timber Radio KTBR, feel the roads tremble beneath logging trucks and watch children use Lego sets to haul sticks out of imaginary forests. In the current struggle, Douglas County is ground zero, likely to take as direct an economic hit as any site in the region. "Something is going to happen in the next few months that will rip the rug right out from under us," says Lonnie Burson, who works in a sawmill and presides over the union, Local 2949, that represents 3,400 lumber- and millworkers.

The controversy is on everyone's mind there, and the owl gets much of the blame. A banner headline in the local paper declared: SAVING SPOTTED OWL SEEN AS THREAT TO SCHOOLS. Douglas County may lose more than $13 million a year in timber revenue that the Federal Government returns to the county to help pay for public administration, roads and schools. At the local Ford dealership, the only owls that are welcomed are those made out of ceramic, which stand on the roofline warding off swallows intent on building nests under the eaves. Cars and trucks are not selling. Too much uncertainty. Says salesman Bruce Goetsch: "We survived without the dinosaur. What's the big deal about the owl?"

At Bud's Pub in Roseburg, a spotted owl hangs in effigy over the bar. Shops offer T shirts saying I LOVE SPOTTED OWLS . . . FRIED. And in the cabin of logger Bill Haire's truck, beneath the mirror, swings a tiny owl with an arrow through its head. "I can still maintain some sense of humor," says Haire. His father Tom, 65, works with him in the forest, and his son Brian, 12, hopes one day to join them there. "If it comes down to my family or that bird," says Haire, "that bird's going to suffer. Where would we be right now if everything that lived on this earth still survived -- the saber-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth? Things adapt or they become extinct." That applies to his industry as well, says Haire. "If we don't adapt, we'll become extinct."

The crisis has forced many in Douglas County to reappraise a life-style more precious now that it is endangered. Those who work in the woods can make $35,000 to $45,000 a year. Millworkers generally make less. But the issue is more than money. They have also been forced to re-examine themselves and the ecological legacy they have been left. Douglas County has always been dependent on natural resources, though it has not always used them prudently. In the 19th century, furriers killed off many of the furbearing animals and, in so doing, their trade as well. Later, prospectors emptied the rivers of gold, and the mining camps were reclaimed by the forest. Millworkers and their families often ask union leader Burson what will become of them. "What do I tell them, 'It's going to be O.K.'?" asks Burson. "I can't. Who do I blame? Do I blame the industry for raping the lands in the East and raping the lands in the West 50 years ago and not replanting? Do I blame my father? Do I blame my grandfather? Do I blame myself for not reading the paper every single night and being critically involved in these issues? How do I answer these people?"

Mill town after mill town is buried beneath an avalanche of contradictory statistics tossed out by timber-industry officials and environmentalists. "To put it bluntly, we don't know what the hell is going on," says Burson. "We're being blackmailed and threatened from both sides. Industry is saying 'Support our side, or you'll lose your jobs.' Environmentalists are saying 'Support our side, or you won't have clean air to breathe.' People are scared to death."

Many who draw their living from timber concede that the owl is not their only problem. Jobs have been lost to automation too. A Forest Service study predicts that technological changes will displace 13% of the work force during the next 15 years. The recession of 1980-82 also took its toll. Export of logs overseas, particularly to Japan and China, has reduced the work available for local mills. And high production costs for lumber and plywood make the region vulnerable to competition from the South and Canada.

Burson knows the little owl draws attention away from these complex problems, some of which the industry brought upon itself. And he suspects industry is exploiting community fears for its own ends. "It's part of the corporate strategy to scare the hell out of us so we write letters and communicate with other people," says Burson. In a popular timber publication, industry lawyer Mark Rutzick wrote an article titled "You Have Enemies Who Want to Destroy You." The enemies: the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation.

The mill owners, self-made men of considerable influence in their communities, are stunned that their livelihoods are threatened because of a nocturnal bird so unobtrusive that few have ever seen it. "We came out here in the 1850s," says Milton Herbert, the owner of Herbert Lumber in Riddle, Ore. "We spend our lives trying to understand trees, to live with the environment, not against it. I hunt and fish. This is my home. I get real uptight when I think they gave my ancestors 160 acres for homesteading, and they're giving the owl 2,200 acres." He is perplexed by calls to preserve the ancient forest. "They're trying to stop time, and that's one thing we can't do," says Herbert. "Bugs, fire or man are going to harvest the trees; they don't live forever." That's the industry's view. Timber is a crop, simple as that. Rod Greene, logging manager with Sun Studs Inc. in Roseburg speaks of the old growth as "overripe," "wasteful" and "inefficient." Behind him, as far as the eye can see, in 55-ft.-stacks, rises the mill's inventory of tree trunks, more than 13,000 trees that once covered 300 acres or more. Gobbling up some 320 trees a day, the mill will consume the inventory in less than six weeks. Inside, computers align the logs by laser, then blades unwrap them like rolls of paper towel, spinning out a ribbon of veneer 8 ft. wide and four miles long every hour. Other machines carve out 3,000 "studs," or construction posts, every hour, 20 hours a day, seven days a week. In town after town, the scene is repeated. Nature cannot keep pace.

Fred Sohn, owner of Sun Studs, sees no difference between the reforested . stands and the ancient forest they replace. "I believe I as an individual can replicate the forest, redo it like a farmer growing a crop and do it better than nature," he says. "I can remake the old forest the same way nature did, only quicker." Talk like that riles environmentalists, who see the forest as more than just another fungible asset. Steve Erickson, whose father was in the timber industry and whose brother works in a mill, is writing a book about hiking trails. But Erickson finds it hard to share his vision of the forest. "It's like being in an artery in God's body," he says. Biologists and botanists speak in more scientific terms. They say the ancient forest is more than an aggregation of trees. To them the ancient forest's rotting trunks, decrepit firs and deep debris represent not waste, but vital nutrients in a vastly complex ecosystem.

Those who cut down the great firs may not see the forest that way, but many have no less reverence for it. The lumberjacks of Douglas County are not boisterous back-slapping rubes but pensive men who feel as much a part of this rugged landscape as the black-tailed deer and elk that retreat from the sound of their saws. A popular bumper sticker here declares, FOR A FORESTER, EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY. Rather than surrender the name "environmentalist" to their foes, they have labeled the opposition "preservationists." Many loggers never finished high school but followed their fathers and grandfathers into the woods. They rise in the dark at 3 or 4 in the morning, pull up their suspenders and adjust rough hide pads on their left shoulders. The pads cradle the saws and, like trivets, shield the men from the hot blades that would burn their flesh through their flannel shirts. Their pants legs are tattered so that if they are suddenly snagged, the material will tear rather than hold. They do not wear steel-tipped shoes for fear that if a massive limb falls on their feet, it may turn the metal down and sever their toes. Better that their toes be crushed than pinched off.

Few loggers or environmentalists have ever seen the elusive spotted owl. They know it as either a costly subject of litigation or a rare distillation of the forest spirit. But on the summit of a steep ravine in Douglas County, a pair of spotted owls assert themselves, as if to prove they are more than a mere abstraction. Nesting in the cavity of a broken-topped fir, they scan for prey and ponder the rare two-legged observer far below. Their gentle mewing ! gives way to a distinctive four-note hoot: "who-who, who-who." The male drops down for a closer look and settles on a limb 15 ft. from BLM biologist Oliver. "They have no fear of man," he says. In his hand, Oliver hides a mouse. The moment he exposes it, dangling it by its tail, the mouse disappears in a blur of wings and razor-sharp talons. The owl has carried it off and up to its mate, who snips off the mouse's head and ferries it skyward to the nest, where two snowy hatchlings devour it.

Oliver is enchanted by the owls' trusting ways, their grace and their attention to their young. He worries about their future, seemingly dependent as they are for both prey and nesting sites on old-growth forests. But Oliver and others have observed that it is not the age of the forest that appears to be critical to the habitat of the owl, but rather the structure and character of the forest. He and other biologists hope that one day they will be able to identify those key components and, by preserving them in reforested tracts, both widen the owls' habitat and open the way for a resumption of timbering on a selective basis. But the owl is not alone in the forest. As an "indicator species," its well-being is a measure of how other creatures and the ecosystem as a whole are faring. "The spotted owl is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg," says the Forest Service's Franklin. "There are probably dozens of other species just as threatened as the owl."

The dispute over the owl has festered more than 15 years, a period in which the ancient forests receded ever farther and the timbering continued largely unabated. Efforts to find a solution were thwarted by the power of the timber industry, the bungling and inertia of the federal bureaucracy and the stridency of an environmental movement as quick to alienate as to persuade. But the conflict should never have reached the current crisis point. Forest ranger Schindler believes the coming economic turmoil might have been averted if the Government had weaned industry from its dependence on old growth by gradually reducing the level of harvesting. Instead the industry has been allowed to enjoy record harvests in recent years.

U.S. Forest Service biologist Eric Forsman, who has studied the owl since 1968, believes it was the strategy of the federal agencies to stall for time by continually asking for more studies on the owl. "I've seen how the games are played," says Forsman. BLM in particular ignored repeated alarms. As < early as 1976, BLM biologist Mayo Call warned his superiors that unless swift action was taken to protect the owl, it might one day have to be put on the endangered-species list, curtailing timber harvests on federal lands.

And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged with protecting species, refused to call for the owl to be listed as endangered until a federal court in 1988 judged that refusal to be "arbitrary and capricious." Later the General Accounting Office discovered that Fish and Wildlife officials had rewritten portions of a major study, expunging critical references suggesting the owl was endangered. One biologist said he felt pressured to "sanitize the report." For years, economics and politics, not biology, have controlled the decisions of BLM, the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife.

The controversy offers the U.S. an opportunity to reassess the cost of past profligacy and salvage what remains of a treasured legacy of wildlife and ancient forest. Neither the owl nor the timbermen are served by further governmental inaction or sham solutions. What is gained by waiting until the last fir topples, the owl slips closer to extinction, or the mills finally retool or shut down because there are no more old-growth trees available? The lesson of the owl is not that environmental and economic concerns are incompatible, but that the longer society lacks the political courage to act, the harder it is to find a solution. After years of industry obstructionism and governmental acquiescence, the Forest Service is finally experimenting with requiring more selective harvesting of trees, rather than clear-cutting. But many environmentalists fear that such half measures will not preserve the forest ecosystem.

In a sense, everyone is to blame for the current dilemma. Says Jolene Unsoeld, a Congresswoman from Washington State: "It is the accumulated actions of all of us -- those of us who admire a beautiful wood-paneled wall, environmentalists who want their grandchildren to know the ancient forests, and those of us who come from generations of hardworking, hard-living loggers. We are all at fault, because all of us wanted the days of abundance to go on forever, but we didn't plan, and we didn't manage for that end."

Since most old-growth forests are on federal land, they belong not to an industry or a region but to the nation. The federal bureaucracies that manage them have too often operated under antiquated guidelines, framed when the forests seemed inexhaustible and man was oblivious to all but his own needs. Those agencies must reappraise their roles as custodians of the land and recognize the widest interests of the nation, not merely the most deeply vested. To place timber production above every other concern in this era of expanding environmental awareness is an abrogation of the public trust.

These are times of shifting societal values, from an appetite for natural resources to a concern for environmental quality, from the need for a strong defense to the reality of eased world tensions. Each shift brings dislocation and hardship. When revisions to the Clean Air Act pass Congress, the use of high-sulfur coal will be curbed, and thousands of West Virginia miners will lose their careers. And the scaling back of the defense budget could put thousands more on the unemployment line.

What is the Government's obligation to those workers and to the loggers of the Northwest? It would be impossibly costly for Congress to insure every citizen against the winds of change. But when scores of communities are imperiled, relief measures are necessary. In the case of the Northwest, the Federal Government should help retrain loggers and millworkers and provide towns with grants to spur economic diversification. Congress could also help sustain the Northwest's processing mills by passing legislation aimed at reducing raw-log exports.

There is no way to avoid hard choices. The U.S. will have to recognize that no society can have it all at all times -- unfettered harvesting of natural resources, full employment and a healthy and rich environment. The soft hoot of the owl, an ancient symbol of wisdom and foresight, beckons us to resolve both its future and our own.