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©2000 Cascadia Times

Clinton takes a green brush to his legacy

by Orna Izakson
/Cascadia Times

On October 13, President Bill Clinton stood overlooking a high-elevation, second-growth forest in Virginia and followed the lead of presidents ending their tenure throughout the century. In an effort to buff off some of the tarnish on his environmental legacy, Clinton announced that he had directed the Forest Service to prepare a detailed analysis of how best to preserve our forests' large roadless areas, and then present a formal proposal to do just that.

That proposal will consider at least 40 million acres in National Forest roadless areas of at least 5,000 acres. The move would effect nearly every state of the union, and ultimately could include up to 60 million acres if the Forest Service also recommends protecting smaller roadless areas of 1,000 acres or more from roads. The Forest Service says Oregon has just under 2.1 million acres in the larger roadless tracts and Washington 1.9 million. According to the Oregon Natural Resources Council, the Oregon number jumps to between 4 and 5 million if the 1,000-acre-plus tracts are included.

Notably left out of the proposal, but still on the table for consideration, is the Tongass National Forest. Though the largest and most ecologically intact National Forest, the Tongass is seriously threatened by logging. It is located in Alaska, a state whose congressional delegation includes some of the president's most strident political enemies. Clinton's announcement also left open whether logging, mining and grazing would be allowed in the affected tracts. And while the timber industry calls the policy a back-door way to create wilderness by administrative fiat, it clearly isn't wilderness: A subsequent president could go back through the administrative process and reopen the lands to road building.

The move is the culmination of a strategy that chose to attack the Forest Service's road-building budget instead of tackling formal wilderness designation during a hostile Congress. When victory came close in 1997, the administration stepped back to look at the issue. Environmentalists pursuing the strategy pulled together and brought in the big-money guns.

Clinton, eager to show that protecting the environment does not have to cost jobs, quickly noted that the proposal would have little impact on the timber volume coming from National Forests. The administration says the 40 million acres only include about 9 million acres of marketable timber, and that the cut would be reduced nationwide only by 28 million board feet out of a total 4 billion board feet. Clinton says the shortfall would be easy to replace.

And it's the administration's comment about replacement that makes some activists in Oregon and Washington nervous. The Rocky Mountain states have 10 times more roadless acreage available for protection than do Oregon and Washington. But Oregon and Washington, and the Tongass National Forest, are where the big, old-growth trees are. Will Clinton's roadless area policy point the chainsaws back at the region that has long been ground zero of the timber wars?

Roy Keene, a forester based in Eugene, Ore., considers offering uncertain protections to 40 million acres "a dangerous distraction" from the ultimate goal of protecting all old growth.

"That's a risky opportunity for a bait and switch game," he says. "If you start to look at the big picture and where the money is in the federal timber, you see it's in the Northwest. That's where the money is, that's where the cut is, that's where the big, high volume timber is." And, he says, the industry is going to come back for it.

No one, from the strongest proponents of the president's policy to its harshest industry critics, is willing to say Northwest forests won't feel some bite. But they generally point to Clinton's 1993 Northwest Forest Plan, or Option 9, saying it will curb any major increase in logging in the region. After five years, Option 9 is already floundering in the face of lawsuits that argue it is not being properly enforced nor doing enough to protect imperiled species. Everyone from Ken Rait, director of the Heritage Forests Campaign, which has been spearheading the roadless battle, to Chris West of the Northwest Forestry Association says that upping the cut in the western Cascades would bring the gavel of U.S. District Judge William Dwyer -- who shut down Northwest forests for five years to protect the Northern spotted owl -- crashing back down.

The legal backing for Dwyer's momentous 1989 decision to halt logging on national forests in western Oregon, Washington and California, was the requirement under the National Forest Management Act to maintain viable populations of vertebrate species well distributed throughout their range.

Parts of NFMA are already under attack in Congress, Keene says, and a new president could target the parts of the law impeding old-growth logging, vaporizing the legal hammer on Dwyer's desk. "I think you can rest assured that if the Congress remains Republican and we get a Republican president, those viability standards would be revised," he says. "I think that's a no brainer."

Northwest activists need to focus not on wilderness, but on the last unprotected old-growth stands, Keene says. "The battle right now in the Northwest is not over the roadless areas. It's over who gets the old growth, us or the industry."

The issue goes beyond just trees.

"If you want to protect biodiversity and hydrology, you go after new logging and new roading proposals," says George Sexton, a watershed coordinator for the American Lands Alliance based in Eugene. Sexton likes Clinton's proposal, but says it's irresponsible to think that protecting only large roadless areas can adequately address all concerns about biodiversity, water quality or old growth. "Isolated 40-acre patches of 400-year-old trees are incredibly important, but they don't get included in anyone's Sierra Club calendars, and they don't get identified as heritage forests by the Heritage Forests Campaign. But that's triage."

Rait, of the Heritage Forests Campaign, says the roadless area policy is just one of many necessary steps. "Obviously the hope is that we protect not just the roadless areas but the remaining patches of old growth. We've got a mechanism now for getting the roadless areas protected and ongoing efforts by the forest community to protect remaining old growth are going to continue and hopefully be successful."

Chris West says the industry, for its part, is biding its time, trying to work the angles on the administration's policy, watching the public hearing process and then weighing its options.

How concerned is the industry?

"Big time concerned," West says, especially about Clinton making an end-run around Congress. "We're talking about 40 to 60 million acres, or between 25 and 30 percent of the National Forest system to be designated via presidential proclamation."

One area where industry and environmental critics of the policy converge is with their cynicism about Clinton's true intentions.

Michael Donnelly, a veteran Northwest forest activist, grumbles that the policy is nothing more than Clintonian sleight of hand, a victory on paper with no real force on the ground. "Clinton/Gore get greenwashed without having to save a single tree," he complains. "The media bought it and now the public thinks Clinton saved the forests for the fourth time."

Chris West, of the Northwest Forestry Association, uses almost the same words: "This is nothing more than Clinton trying to replace his current legacy and paint it green."

Orna Izakson writes from Fall Creek, Ore.