Like so much else these days, wrong-doing depends on publicity. Villainy becomes scandal only if someone notices it, which depends on location, category and luck. Somehow, starvation, murder and tyrrany in Somalia got more attention than they did in the Sudan.
The area which some call the Inland Empire is closer than Africa, but it is tucked into a little-noticed corner of America. Were it near New York, Washington, Chicago or Los Angeles the harm done there during the past decade-plus might have been on front pages all over the country.
But it’s eastern Washington, the Idaho Panhandle and a sliver of western Montana, a big but sparsely populated chunk of the country, pleasant to visit but easy to ignore.
Besides, there was no sex involved. Biology, yes, but no sex. If only one of the outrages had involved movie stars and kinkiness, network camera crews might have flocked to the wooded mountains. As it happens, these malefactors were only stealing our trees, messing up our streams, destroying our hillsides and violating several federal statutes in the process.
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Excuses for ignorance vanished late last year when the Spokesman-Review in Spokane did what a newspaper ought to do. It provided in-depth, quality journalism about its region.
From Nov. 21 through Nov. 28, the Spokesman-Review, a moderately conservative newspaper, published several thoroughly reported, well-documented accounts by reporters Jim Lynch, J. Todd Foster and Julie Titone about how excessive logging, mismanagement, ignorance and mendacity have eroded hillsides, destroyed streams, depleted fisheries, endangered wildlife and even altered the climate in some places.
In Idaho’s Panhandle National Forest, for instance, logging has damaged almost half the streams. Clearcuts have removed so much of the forest canopy that warm, coastal winds melt the snow with un-natural speed. The melted snow becomes a torrent, eroding the hillsides and pouring silt onto trout spawning beds.
Nearly every January, those warmer winds sweep across the snowpack, melting enough of it to cause flooding at the confluence of the North Fork and the Little North Fork (of the Coeur d’Alene) Rivers near Enaville, Idaho. When local residents complain, Corps of Engineers officials tell them that “reacting to floods is cheaper than preventing them.”
In northeastern Washington, the Colville National Forest has been so over-logged and mismanaged that much of it can’t even support the growth of good timber any more. “Once home to imposing and resilient ponderosa pines, the Colville is now better known for its bug-infested firs, many of which are no bigger aound than a logger’s bicep,” the newspaper said.
So what do the logging companies and the Forst Service propose for the Colville now? More clearcuts. More clearcuts are set for Idaho’s roadless areas, too.
Well, everybody makes mistakes. But as the Spokesman-Review series makes clear, the mistakes are old. Since 1981, these atrocities have been deliberate, dishonest, coercive and expensive. The deliberateness, dishonesty and coercion came from the forest products industry and from senior government officials, appointed and elected. The expense was borne by the American taxpayers, who have financed a forest road system seven times longer than the Interstate Highway system.
In the rush to cut at any cost and regardless of any law, official documents were falsified and computer planning models were deliberately skewed. Honest and devoted foresters were pressured to approve cutting more trees than science, good judgement or the law would allow. When they protested, they were threatened. Tom Kovalicky recounted how former Sen. James McClure (R.-Idaho) tried to get him fired for refusing to approve more timber sales. Kovalicky’s boss, regional forester John Mumma, was coerced into early retirement because he insisted on following the Environmental Policy Act and the Forest Management Act.
Wisely, the newspaper stories focus on what has gone wrong and how to right it, not on individual culpability. That’s wise because most of these violations were not crimes, because the forests need reconciliation more than revenge, and because Democrats, now in control, are too quick to try to criminalize policy differences.
But Republicans are too casual about breaking laws which interfere with their predilections. That’s what the Iran-contra scandal was. The Western forest scandal, which got far less attention, may have done far more harm. The guilty, in this case, need not be prosecuted. If only they were decent enough to be as ashamed as the Spokesman-Review ought to be proud.