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player ready...President Clinton will get an earful about the complex biodiversity of ancient forests and how hard it is to find a job in the small towns of the Pacific Northwest when he travels to Portland, Ore., on Friday for a one-day “forest conference.”
Clinton has labeled the session a fact-finding mission similar to his economic summit in Little Rock, Ark., in December. He will hear emotional pleas from struggling families and worried biologists to find a means of saving both the logger and the Northern spotted owl.
Nearly 20,000 loggers and millworkers have lost their jobs in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, and lawsuits filed on behalf of the endangered spotted owl have halted almost all logging in the region’s oldest forests. Meantime, younger, raw timber is piled up on the Northwest’s docks waiting to be shipped to Japan, while the price of 2-by-4s soars in the U.S.
The Clinton administration hopes to fashion a compromise plan by next fall to present to Congress and U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer. It will designate where logging can continue without harming old-growth habitat, and may include federal assistance to help alleviate the loss of jobs.
The conference will give Vice President Al Gore and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt a forum to expound on their vision of balanced, long-term management of entire ecosystems instead of reacting only after animal species are on the verge of extinction.
But administration officials say the immediate need is to break the political and legal deadlock that has crippled a large sector of the Northwest’s economy. Officials believe the spotted owl and other threatened species can be protected without completely shutting down the area’s timber industry.
“We really need to get the timber flowing into the mills during this calendar year,” Babbitt said last week. “That’s the bottom line by which we’ll measure progress.”
At stake, along with thousands of jobs, is up to 6 million acres of ancient cedar, fir and spruce trees in publicly owned forests in the Pacific Northwest. The towering trees are the last remaining habitat of the spotted owl and other endangered species.
For years, the U.S. Forest Service allowed extensive logging on the land. But two years ago, following lawsuits filed by environmentalists, Dwyer halted almost all logging in virgin forests when he ruled the agency had failed to ensure the protection of the spotted owl and its neighbors, as required by federal law.
Environmentalists say the timber industry already has harvested 90 percent of the area’s virgin forests. The question now is which remaining forests must be preserved, and even environmentalists admit the judge’s decision stopped logging that may not threaten the owl.
Last Thursday, the administration hinted at what’s in store when it announced a compromise to protect a threatened species of bird called a California gnatcatcher, while still allowing offices and houses to be built within the bird’s habitat in Los Angeles’s wealthy southern suburbs.
Clinton’s early approach “indicates to me that the administration is trying to get a balance here,” said Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.). “Whatever happens to the owl out there under the Endangered Species Act is going to set a precedent for the whole nation.”
Administration and congressional leaders insist that no deal has been worked out ahead of time. But that hasn’t stopped lobbyists for the timber industry, environmental groups and unions from posturing and maneuvering in hopes of affecting the final package.
Labor groups will resist attempts to replace mill and logging jobs with lower-paying jobs in other occupations. Timber industry officials say one of their main concerns is returning some certainty to the supply of timber, so they can plan their operations.
The industry would also like protection against environmentalists’ lawsuits that stop timber cutting.
Environmentalists demand that any talk of lumber supply include discussion of the raw logs currently bypassing U.S. mills on their way to Japan’s custom-designed housing market.
They also question “below-cost” timber sales-the Forest Service’s practice of selling rights to public timber for less than the tax money it costs to provide access to the wood.
The debate may spill over into the forests of eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana, where logging is on the increase. Biologists are concerned about its impact on declining salmon populations in the region’s rivers.
Central to the solution, administration officials say, is a unified policy among federal agencies. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service, which encouraged logging, was often at odds with the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which demanded protection of the habitat.
“The federal agencies fought each other to a standstill,” Babbitt said. “We’ve got to have a single plan.”
Clinton, who faced similar dilemmas as governor of timber-rich Arkansas, predicted it will be difficult to satisfy everyone in the Northwest’s dispute.
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“It may be like my economic program-it’ll make everybody mad,” Clinton said last week at a White House news conference.
“But I will try to be fair to the people whose livelihoods depend on this, and fair to the environment that we are all obligated to maintain. . . . The paralysis now gripping the lives of the people out there is totally unacceptable.”