Timber Wars

Al Letson:

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Speaker 2:

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Al Letson:

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. It’s finally started raining where I live in the Bay Area. And I mean, finally. Last year’s wildfire season was horrific, dim orange skies, air that was dangerous to breathe, and ash falling from above for weeks on end, not to mention the actual fires themselves. Just in California alone, there were more than four million acres. An area bigger than Connecticut incinerated. And of course, there were record-setting fires all over the West.

Kate Brown:

Every year for the last 10 years, we burn about 500,000 acres.

Al Letson:

This is Oregon governor Kate Brown on CBS’s Face The Nation.

Kate Brown:

This year, this week alone, we’ve burned over a million acres of beautiful Oregon.

Al Letson:

When the governor talks about beautiful Oregon, she’s talking about places like Mill City, in the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It’s surrounded by towering forests.

Tim Kirsch:

I want to say about 9:30, 10:00 at night, I started hearing our fire whistle blow up in town.

Al Letson:

Tim Kirsch is the mayor of Mill City.

Tim Kirsch:

I’m telling people that are in their driveways, “You need to pack up and go, or at least be ready to go in an instant.”

Al Letson:

Mill City was largely spared, but towns surrounding it were leveled. And even before flames went out, the blame game around last year’s fires began.

Audio:

President Trump renewed his stance Monday that California’s wildfire crisis is due to the mismanagement of California’s forests and not connected to climate change.

Well, I think this is more of a management situation.

Al Letson:

We’ve been fighting over the best way to manage our forests for decades. After this past fire season, some argue we need to cut down more trees to prevent fires, save our forests, and even reverse climate change. But you also heard people arguing the opposite, that our history of logging is part of the problem and we need to cut down fewer trees. So supposedly the same goal, but completely opposite ways of getting there.

Confused? Well, to really understand, you have to step back 30 years to when this fight over the forests began. Today we’re partnering with the podcast series Timber Wars, produced by Oregon Public Broadcast. It’s about how the fight over old growth forests and a bird called the northern spotted owl, help turn environmental conflicts into culture wars, wars that continue to shape the debate over how we manage our forests today. Reporter Aaron Scott starts the story with a protest that became known as the Easter Massacre.

Aaron Scott:

The Pacific Northwest has an image. For many folks, it’s one shaped by episodes of Portlandia, lots of Subarus, brunch lines, and flannel, also 90s grunge music and tech giants, like Microsoft and Amazon. But before all that, the Pacific Northwest was a sleepier place, a damp corner of the country, largely outside the national spotlight. It was a region dominated by a single industry, logging.

Stephan Weaver:

I started in the timber industry, basically, out of high school.

Aaron Scott:

Stephan Weaver lives in Stayton, Oregon. For a lot of his life, he worked as a tree faller, also called a timber cutter. Basically, it was his job to cut down colossal trees with a chainsaw and shout “timber”.

Stephan Weaver:

Yeah, you had a lot of pride in what you did. 99% of the timber cutters did. There was that 1% or 2% that were just there for the buck. But some of the best timber cutters came out of the Detroit Canyon.

Aaron Scott:

Detroit Canyon is inside Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. It’s home to some of the biggest and old trees in the world. Douglas Fir, western red cedar, western hemlock. They can tower 300 feet into the air and stand eight feet wide. They feel like pillars holding up the sky, which is maybe why folks, who saw them disappearing, felt like the sky was falling.

Stephan Weaver:

Where it really all started was that North Roaring Devil sale in-

Aaron Scott:

It’s impossible to pin down exactly when the timber wars started, because they had a different beginning for everyone involved. For Stephan, it was in 1989 in these forests, at a timber sale called The North Roaring Devil.

Stephan Weaver:

There were a lot of things that went on up there.

Aaron Scott:

Back in March of 1989, Detroit Canyon was blanketed in snow. Still, Stephan’s bosses wanted him in there cutting.

Stephan Weaver:

We were snowmobiling in. We’d have to make two or three trips, because we didn’t have a dozen snow mobiles. It was just a mess.

Aaron Scott:

The US Forest Service makes up names for the various timber sales. The trees Stephan was cutting were part of a sale called the North Roaring Devil, and it was controversial. That’s a lot of why he was riding into those woods by snowmobile.

Stephan Weaver:

They didn’t want to plow the roads so these other people could walk or drive in.

Aaron Scott:

By “other people”, he means environmentalists. They have been fighting in court to stop the logging of the giant centuries old trees. Stephan was under pressure to get the job done fast.

Stephan Weaver:

Then on Saturday night before Easter, Jim Morgan called me up.

Aaron Scott:

Jim Morgan was Stephan’s boss at one of the biggest timber companies in the canyon. And he said, “I need 10 men.”

Stephan Weaver:

I need them. Tomorrow morning. Sunday morning. I said, “It’s Easter, Jim.” He says, “I don’t care. I want 10 cutters in the morning. And you’ll be compensated very well for it.”

Aaron Scott:

So what was with the rush? Well, there was a court date on Tuesday, and there was fear the judge could side with environmentalists and put this logging on hold. So the fallers were racing to cut the trees first.

Stephan Weaver:

We thought once it was on the ground, it was kind of a done deal.

Aaron Scott:

So on Easter morning, Stephan and his crew got up before dawn, piled into their trucks pulling snowmobiles, and headed into the woods where they were met with a surprise.

Audio:

Logging crews arrived at 5:30 this morning to find 30 protesters who sealed off the entrance to the site. Since Friday [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

The protesters were standing shoulder to shoulder across the road and holding signs stating “Save our old growth” and “Earth first”. The loggers stopped and discovered the media was there too.

Audio:

… this morning, and confrontations seem possible, but both sides chose to talk about the issues rather than fight over them.

I think this is kind of a-

It’s not being very productive.

Yeah. This argument isn’t really productive [crosstalk]

Well, I don’t think anything’s productive. Do you think this is being productive?

… you guys [crosstalk]-

I got a crew of man I’m paying-

I know.

… to be productive, and I [crosstalk] How much money do you pay out of your state industrial insurance. How much [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

In the news footage, you can see Stephan standing in the group of loggers, and he looks annoyed.

Stephan Weaver:

We could talk to them, and they could talk to us, but our views were dramatically different about the situation. So at that time, there wasn’t any middle ground. They just didn’t want that timber cut. They didn’t want any timber cut.

Aaron Scott:

Stephan and the loggers had been hired to cut the trees, but they weren’t the protesters real target. That was the logging company that bought the timber and the US Forest Service, which made the sale. Many people today might think the Forest Service is all about taking care of forests. But it’s main job at the time, particularly in the Northwest, was selling trees to the highest bidder. For most of the 20th century, foresters in the government viewed trees as crops. The plan was to harvest the last of these ancient giants and replant them with saplings. But for protesters, these trees had a completely different value.

Catia Juliana:

I drove here in ’85. And all I knew about Oregon was that there were lumberjacks and big trees, so I stopped and fell in love it and never left.

Aaron Scott:

Catia Juliana moved to Eugene for college. The city was a hotbed for liberal activism. The day before Easter, she went to a nonviolence training. And just as it was ending, someone rushed in and said they needed people to protect some ancient trees. So Catia volunteered.

Catia Juliana:

We arrived about midnight, and it was full on stuff was happening. There was people with walkie talkies greeting us.

Aaron Scott:

Activists had been fighting for years to stop logging in this area. It included groves of ancient trees that were so beautiful, folks thought of them in sacred terms, referring to them as cathedral forests. And they were willing to put their lives on the line to protect them, because scientists had started to establish what many nature lovers already felt. These were not just crops. They were complex ecosystems that played vital roles, filtering water and slowing floods, and providing essential habitat for hundreds of creatures, from songbirds to salmon. Trees also reduce greenhouse gases by pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in their trunks and needles. And the biggest 1% of trees store 50% of the forest’s carbon. But of course, knowing you want to save the trees is different from knowing how to do it. To Catia, it was overwhelming.

Catia Juliana:

One person who stood up and started talking about making a strategic plan to really get some stuff accomplished, and it sounded really reasonable, so I was like, “I’m just following that guy around.” And it ended up being Tim.

Aaron Scott:

Tim Ingalsbee was a graduate student, who worked as a firefighter for the Forest Service in the summer. Not to give away the ending of this story, but he and Catia are now married. And he’s with us in their living room. Tim had heard about the logging through friends. He knew that being there was risking his summer job, but he couldn’t handle what the clearcuts did to the forest.

Tim Ingalsbee:

Those are the proverbial moonscapes. It’s just nothing but scorched earth. This is not why I wanted to work for the Forest Service. I want to do forest service, and this is quite the opposite.

Aaron Scott:

So the night before Easter, while Stephan was calling his cutters, Tim was helping lead the resistance. All they had to do was hold off the loggers two or three days, until other environmentalists could file an injunction against the timber sale in court.

Tim Ingalsbee:

And if they could lay trees down before the case went to court, the judge would moot the case, because, yeah, he might’ve deemed it an illegal timber sale, but he can’t order the trees to be stood back up. So we called it at the time, “chainsaw justice.”

Aaron Scott:

Chainsaw justice, meaning the loggers chainsaws got to be judge, jury, and executioner. The protesters stayed up all night, dragging fallen logs and rocks from the forest and piling them on the road. Anything to that would slow down the logging trucks and snow mobiles come morning.

Audio:

Well, I was thinking build a wall between the two barriers of cars too.

Tim Ingalsbee:

We built these immense barricades. And when dawn’s rising, you just see the work. And it’s, “Okay, the loggers will never get through that.”

Aaron Scott:

And the loggers didn’t. They actually went home that first day after talking with the protesters. But then the Forest Service showed up with a front end loader. Think bulldozer.

Tim Ingalsbee:

And within minutes smashed the handiwork of all of that took hours to build.

Catia Juliana:

When they came in the machinery, I realized I was a little out of my depth, and I got very scared, so I just ran up the road. And I had no idea what I was going to find, but what I ended up finding was this man, Leo, in the middle of the logging road, trying to bury himself in this pyramid of rocks. And he started yelling at me, “Help me! Help me!”

Tim Ingalsbee:

Yeah, buried right up to his neck in a barricade of boulders. And that is what held off that front end loader. I mean, the blade came right up to him intimidating him. But he couldn’t move, so it fended them off for the rest of that day.

Audio:

You want to be carried out or you want to be walked out? Are you staying in the roadway? [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

The deputies set to work. Moving the rocks and pulling Leo out. Deputies arrested him and 12 other on disorderly conduct that day. But as word spread, more people arrived to take their place.

Tim Ingalsbee:

Similar actions have been taking place all through the ’80s, but in very remote places with just a handful of people. This was at Breitenbush Hot Springs on the doorstep of Portland, so there were dozens and dozens of people coming, hearing the news, “We’re going to go save the forest.”

Aaron Scott:

Despite the reinforcements, Tim and Catia still felt like they were up against the unstoppable juggernaut of the timber industry and the federal government.

Catia Juliana:

How are we, this little ragged band of individuals with very little resources, how are we going to stop this terrible machine that’s really, in the span of just a few years, taking the very last parts of the forest?

Aaron Scott:

The irony of human psychology is that while the environmentalists felt like they were the proverbial David in the fight against Goliath, the local loggers and their families felt that way too. Rightly or wrongly, they saw these scrappy protesters as representatives of big national environment groups, groups that were about to put all future timber sales in national forests on hold all across the northwest. So for the loggers, it was like their very existence was under attack.

Stephan Weaver:

[crosstalk] Come on in.

Aaron Scott:

Hi, Stephan. How are you doing?

Stephan Weaver:

Oh [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

I wanted to know what was at stake in the fight over the forests, besides the old growth. So I went to see Stephan, who was hired to cut the trees.

Stephan Weaver:

… They don’t make them any more, and they’re hard to come by. It’s kind of dirty out here.

Aaron Scott:

We start out back at the shed where he stores his chainsaws.

Stephan Weaver:

This is pretty much as small as saws we use.

Aaron Scott:

It’s bright orange and the size of what you buy at the hardware store.

Stephan Weaver:

[crosstalk] 32″ bar, that’s what we use every day. And this [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

But then he reaches into the back of the shed, and he pulls out a big white mechanical box with two handles. It’s so big, I would’ve guessed it was a portable generator. But it’s actually the body of his first chainsaw, a McCulloch 125.

Stephan Weaver:

[crosstalk] a nasty [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

It’s just missing the saw bar, or the long steel plate that the chain whips around to cut into the trees.

Stephan Weaver:

I could run a 50″ bar, a 4′ bar pretty much. I should clean the damn thing up, but this-

Aaron Scott:

And is that about a big of a bar as where ever used even earlier?

Stephan Weaver:

We used some bigger ones, some 60″ bars occasionally for [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

Imagine that for a minute. A chainsaw that’s big enough to get on all the rides at Disneyland. How big a tree needs a five-foot-long chainsaw?

Stephan Weaver:

But I’ve got some pictures that I’ll show you, some big trees.

Aaron Scott:

I’d like that.

Stephan Weaver:

I dug them out.

Aaron Scott:

Stephan takes me back inside and opens a picture album of the trees they cut at the North Roaring Devil sale. The photos show a couple of loggers in helmets and red suspenders, standing on top of a fallen log.

These are enormous. He’s standing on a tree that is tall as… Or wait, is that you?

Stephan Weaver:

Yeah, that’s me, I-

Aaron Scott:

You’re standing on a tree that is as wide as you are tall.

Stephan Weaver:

Oh yeah, there was some huge timber up there that was from five to seven, eight foot on the stump.

Aaron Scott:

That means eight feet wide at the base. These were the kind of trees Stephan cut all through the ’70s and the ’80s. He spent every day in the woods, rain or shine, sick or injured.

What did you love about it?

Stephan Weaver:

Oh, back then, I liked being outdoors. I hunted. I fished. And it was a feeling of freedom out there, because you might work for somebody else, but when you’re out there working, you’re your own boss.

Aaron Scott:

You also make good money without needing a college degree.

Stephan Weaver:

When I was 23 years old, I was making between 25 and 35 thousand dollars a year, and hell, I thought I was really making big money.

Aaron Scott:

Timber was the economic lifeblood of all the small towns in the Santiam Canyon and many of the small towns throughout the Northwest. If you didn’t have a job at the mill or in the woods, you had a family member or a neighbor who did. And your kids probably played on a baseball team sponsored by the local timber company.

Stephan Weaver:

Then, it was a good feeling. In the ’70s and ’80s, we figured, “God, we’re going to do this forever.”

Aaron Scott:

Stephan planned to log until he retired. He even built up a business that employed nearly 30 cutters. But environmentalists wanted to keep Stephan from ever cutting trees again, or at least these ancient ones. So back at the North Roaring Devil sale, when the loggers returned on the second morning, their wives and families came out in support.

Audio:

Save our loggers! Save our loggers! [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

Their main goal was countering the protesters’ message to the news cameras.

Audio:

This is our livelihood. This puts on food on our tables.

Save our loggers! Save our loggers! Save [crosstalk]

Aaron Scott:

For both sides, the clock was ticking. The judge would decide whether to halt the logging the next day. So the question was, would there be any trees left standing for him to rule on? The loggers and law enforcement started up the final stretch of plowed road, led by the Forest Service’s front end loader.

Stephan Weaver:

We kind of went in in a caravan, all went together, because these people were on the sides of the road and up in the hills. And this one guy, he jumped up off the side of the road and got right in my face and threw some mud and then spit in my face too. And I was mad. And I stopped the pickup. And Jim Morgan said, “Just set here. Just take it.” I said, “You just don’t know how hard that is to take.”

Aaron Scott:

Meanwhile, Tim knew they couldn’t stop the convoy, so he ran up the road into the deeper snow, where the loggers would have to continue on snowmobiles.

Tim Ingalsbee:

And then one by one, other people started joining me. And we said, “Let’s make our stand here.” And right at that moment, we here the whine of a snowmobile. So we just held hands like paper dolls, spread out across the road. And sure enough, it was a snowmobile carrying the county sheriff. And he was standing up on the back, and he jumps off. He says, “You’re all under arrest!” And he actually handcuffed us together holding hands. And it was the most bizarre moment, because he steps back and then realizes, “Oh, there’s one of me and five or six of you. And you’re all handcuffed together and still blocking the road.” So the sheriffs have been doing all of the arrests up to that point, and the Forest Service is out of the camera view, staying behind. But that required a bunch of Forest Service people to… We had laid down in the snow, and they had to drag us out. To me, that was shocking, the lengths that the agency was going to try to preempt the court case. I mean, it was just kind of a mad rush to get those trees cut down.

Aaron Scott:

On Tuesday, two days after the protests started, a federal judge heard the environmentalists’ challenge. Like many justices in Oregon, he was widely regarded as sympathetic to the industry, so his ruling came as no surprise.

Audio:

A federal district judge in Portland, Oregon, today rejected a request by conservationists that he block logging on a stand of centuries old trees.

Aaron Scott:

Protestors kept trying to slow the logging. They experimented with climbing into the branches and locking themselves around the trunks in a human chain with bike locks. But eventually, Stephan and the other loggers finished cutting down the remaining trees, which is why environmentalists took to calling it the Easter Massacre. But unlike the smaller protests that had come before, this time the nation paid attention. The North Roaring Devil sale got covered by the likes of Good Morning America, The Today Show, and NPR.

Audio:

Loggers and environmentalists in Oregon are locked in a battle over a stand of ancient trees. The Bugaboo logging company is attempting to kill the trees before [crosstalk]

Tim Ingalsbee:

That was the first time that at least public opinion radically shift. We weren’t a bunch of eco-terrorists in the woods. We were upholding the law and defending what was irreplaceable.

Catia Juliana:

And it is really the action that put old growth logging in ancient forests on the map. It really helped form the movement and inform our tactics.

Al Letson:

These tactics were just the beginning. Environmentalists had an ace up their sleeve, that would prove more powerful than a hundred protesters in the woods.

Audio:

Environmentalists are accused of turning the Endangered Species Act into a terrorist weapon to kill off the timber industry.

Al Letson:

How an owl swooped in to save the trees and reshape the timber industry. That’s ahead on Reveal.

Krissy Clark:

I’m Krissy Clark, host of the podcast, The Uncertain Hour. And this season, we’re looking at this thing we used to call employment. You know, a job? The kind where the place where you work pays you at least a minimum wage, gives you health insurance, sick days, vacation. Those kinds of jobs have been disappearing in a whole lot of industries, replaced by subcontractors, gigs, and armies of non-employees. In this season on The Uncertain Hour, we dig into history and policy to figure out what happened to the American job, office workers, ER doctors, janitors, baseball players, maybe even your job. Check out this season of The Uncertain Hour, wherever you get your podcasts.

Al Letson:

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Throughout the ’80s, environmentalists kept losing. They could slow down logging in old growth forests with protests and lawsuits, but in the end, most of it got cut. There just weren’t that many laws that protected trees, but there were laws that protected animals. So with the last old growth forests on the line, a few conservationists got creative. Aaron Scott, from the Timber Wars podcast at Oregon Public Broadcasting, picks it up from here.

Aaron Scott:

Environmentalists like to say, “There isn’t an endangered ecosystems act, but there is an Endangered Species Act,” so this idea started percolating that they could old growth forests by protecting an animal that needed those forests to survive. Fortunately for them, scientists had identified one such animal, the northern spotted owl. The timber industry recognized how dangerous this idea was and tried to nip it in the bud. So it laid on the pressure with politicians, government agencies, even conservation groups, like the National Wildlife Federation.

Andy Stahl:

The Weyerhaeuser Company had threatened to close all of its lands to hunters and fisherman nationwide, so that was somewhat persuasive, because the National Wildlife Federation was mostly hunters and fisherman.

Aaron Scott:

This Andy Stahl. He worked for the National Wildlife Federation, and he was one of the first to want to pursue a strategy saving the northern spotted owl. But his bosses wanted him to drop it so bad, they fired him.

Andy Stahl:

The fired me on Friday. They rehired me the following Monday, subject to the following constraints, “You are to make no outgoing phone calls. You are to sign no correspondence. You are to attend no meetings. We’ll continue to pay you to do nothing at all.”

Aaron Scott:

The reasons environmentalists were afraid of going after the owl were complicated. First off, they were worried that they’d lose, and then they wouldn’t have any leverage, even if it was just the threat of going to court. But in many ways, winning was an even bigger fear, especially if they used the Endangered Species Act, because while the act was passed almost unanimously, the perception was that it was designed to protect big, beloved animals, bald eagles, blue whales, and things like that. The fear among leading conservationists was that stretching it to apply to things, like tiny fish and reclusive birds, might get them what they want in the short term, but the backlash could lead to the death of the law.

Andy Stahl:

There were concerns that the spotted owl was a bridge too far, and that it would bring down the whole Endangered Species Act, and environmentalism writ large would die.

Aaron Scott:

But Andy thought he saw a way to protect the owl without putting a target on the Endangered Species Act. So he went to work for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. We now know it as Earth Justice. And they decided to go straight at the agency that had power over most of the remaining old growth, the US Forest Service. At the time, the Forest Service was saying that you only needed 500 nesting pairs of owls to maintain genetic diversity, and each pair needed a thousand acres. So do the math and you are only going to protect at most 500,000 acres. That’s just 1% of the forest land around where spotted owls lived. And that left Andy with a question.

Andy Stahl:

What was the basis for saying that 500 pairs of spotted owls were sufficient to maintain a sustainable population?

Aaron Scott:

Did I read it was based on a study of fruit flies?

Andy Stahl:

Yeah, well, the 500 was. It was remarkable. A government document, a Forest service document, said, “500 (personal communication, M. Soulé),” a person’s name, and that was it. That was the authoritative citation for saying 500. Well, I didn’t know who M. Soulé was, and this was before Google. So I looked around, it turned out it was a guy named Michael Soulé at the University of California at Santa Cruz. So I called him up. I said, “You’ve been cited as the authority behind protecting 500 pairs of spotted owls, which would be a substantial reduction from the current number.” He said, “I have? I never said that.” “Well, what did you say, Michael?” “Well, the Forest Service called me up, and we talked a bit, and I told them that they should go look at a paper that a colleague of mine wrote, in which he studied fruit fly mating in a jar and found that, if you have 500 fruit flies, they are randomly mating in the jar. And that’s a sufficiently large population to prevent a particular bristle hair mutation from becoming fixed in the population and taking over.”

I asked Michael, “What does that have to do with spotted owls?” He said, “Nothing at all. It has nothing to do with spotted owls.”

Aaron Scott:

So 500 pairs came from a leap of logic straight out of eighth grade biology. It was junk. But Andy couldn’t halt logging until he had a better number. And no one had done that science. Andy would have to find someone, and put them on the case. A cross-country search eventually led him to the evolutionary biologist Russell Lande in Maine.

Andy Stahl:

I remember sitting in a lobster shack on the coast of Maine, and Russ says, “I’ve been thinking about your owl question.” And he grabs a butter-soaked paper napkin and starts writing formulas on it, which is all Greek to me. He says, “This is how I’ll go about solving it.” And he starts explaining it to me. And it was really quite elegant what he’d done.

Aaron Scott:

What Russell Lande had done was build on the math that one of his professors had developed for the Farm Bureau to help eliminate pests. Basically, his professor had modeled how many bugs you had to kill to wipe out an infestation, such that the bug population couldn’t recover and recolonize the crop.

Andy Stahl:

What Russ did was he took that mathematics and flipped it on its head.

Aaron Scott:

But if you ran the numbers the other direction, you could figure out how many owls you needed to keep alive, in order to ensure that they recovered and recolonized the forest. All the variables were basically the same. You needed to know how far an animal will travel to mate, their odds of finding each other, and their reproduction and survival rates. Plug that into the equation, and you can figure out how much forest you need to be confident that every time an owl dies, a new one is born. Lande’s math showed that owls as a whole couldn’t survive in a landscape unless about a quarter of it was mature, old forest. And that meant, if we wanted to keep the owl alive, we’d have to stop cutting old growth almost immediately. So in 1989, they filed an injunction against the US Forest Service.

Andy Stahl:

Well, I walked up the hill in downtown Seattle to the federal district court house, walked into the clerk’s office, and presented it to her. She looked at the caption, and she said, “Ah, we had been expecting this.”

Aaron Scott:

This was a complicated lawsuit. On its face, it was about spotted owls. But it was really about old growth. But it was really, really about finding out whether the government was breaking the law, or the law itself was broken. The first law in question the National Environmental Policy Act. It’s main requirement is that the government tell the truth and disclose the consequences of its decisions. Team Andy’s contention was that by underplaying the spotted owl’s population requirements, by sticking to the number 500, it wasn’t telling the truth. The other half of the lawsuit was based on another law, the National Forest Management Act.

Andy Stahl:

And it says the plan that you adopt for managing these forests has to protect the survival, the viability of all native vertebrate species.

Aaron Scott:

The core of their argument hung on just this one sentence. But it gave all the power to scientists, not politicians or timber executives, to determine what constitutes a viable population. And basically it meant, you can’t knowingly drive an animal to extinction.

Andy Stahl:

We said, “Look, these plans don’t do it, because spotted owls are not fruit flies.”

Aaron Scott:

So what was the ruling?

Andy Stahl:

Yeah, the ruling was a preliminary injunction granted.

Aaron Scott:

The ruling was like a bomb that exploded across the Northwest.

Audio:

The US Forest Service has stopped all timber sales in 13 national forests in Oregon and Washington. The decision affects nearly five billion board feet of timber.

Aaron Scott:

And it wasn’t just one decision. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund had filed lawsuits against the Bureau of Land Management and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. By the time they were done, all three agencies had to step up their owl protections. And that meant putting most new timber sales in federal forests on hold.

Al Letson:

There used to be a time when old growth forests stretched across parts of the Middle East, Europe, and most of the US, but people cut them down so long ago, that most of us don’t even remember they were there. This was the last chance to save the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, but it came at a cost.

Stephan Weaver:

When you go from being a logger to flipping hamburgers down at McDonald’s, it wasn’t a very good deal.

Al Letson:

That’s next on Reveal.

Speaker 12:

America was founded as an experiment in democracy. And that experiment, with all its contradictions, false starts, and demands for something better, is at a crossroads. Our new weekly show, called The Experiment, explores the surprising beauty and absurdity that happened when America’s big ideals collide with Americans’ everyday lives. Find The Experiment from The Atlantic and WNYC studios on Apple podcasts.

Al Letson:

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. If you roll out a map of the Pacific Northwest, and you put your finger down on any of the national forests, chances are that, in the 1980s, the nearest small towns depended on timber from that forest. Earlier in the show, we told you about the Easter Massacre, where a stand of old growth trees was cut down near Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. If you were to put your finger down there, the biggest nearby town would be Mill City, where really the name says it all. So when it came to saving old growth forests and the animals that live in them, it meant that places like Mill City would pay a price. Here’s Oregon Public Broadcasting Reporter Aaron Scott again.

Aaron Scott:

I was told that if you wanted to talk to some of the old-timers who logged in the ’80s during the end of the old growth bonanza, you should head to the Mountain Cafe at 5:00 AM on a Thursday.

Speaker 13:

That’ll work.

Aaron Scott:

Thank you so much.

At this hour, the place is empty, except for one table in the corner.

Speaker 14:

This is the ROMEO Club, retired old men eating out.

Aaron Scott:

This week’s meeting of the ROMEO Club counts two retired loggers, one retired mill-manager, one retired butcher, and two retired government foresters. The group is sitting around a big circular table waiting for their food. And true to form, there’s a lot of flannel and suspenders to go around.

How long have you guys been meeting here on Thursdays?

Speaker 15:

10 years?

Speaker 16:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 17:

There’s more than that. There’s been a coffee shop discussion table since I moved here in ’74. And I know it was going on long before that.

Aaron Scott:

But back then, it wasn’t just retired guys. In its heyday, Mill City had a couple cafes like this that would be full of loggers first thing in the morning, stopping in to fill up on coffee and eggs on their way into the woods.

Speaker 14:

Everybody was here at least one day a week. Some people here were six or five. It changed.

Aaron Scott:

It changed. Now, the loggers in the black and white photos hanging on the walls outnumber the ones getting breakfast. And that decline began with those first court rulings in 1989.

Did it feel like it changed the forests got locked up overnight or was it more of a process?

Speaker 16:

It wasn’t gradual. It was just instant. Yeah, as soon as that happened, it was over.

Aaron Scott:

An instant isn’t a huge exaggeration. The protests and court rulings over the owl all came within months of each other. It felt like a landslide suddenly crashing down on the community. And a PR battle was being waged in the media, one that many folks in timber communities felt like they were losing to a bunch of old trees and scruffy environmentalists. So pro-timber groups began to put out pamphlets and press releases and organized rallies in towns up and down the Northwest. If there was a court hearing, they were outside it with signs. If there was a political event, they were circling the block with their logging trucks.

Audio:

A crowd of over 8,000 people jammed Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland for a pro-timber rally. Workers from all around the state were given the day off to protest proposed logging cutbacks.

We’re talking about jobs.

Right, okay, but this is also-

We’re talking about-

There’s also the future too.

Environmentalists-

Right now, it’s important.

… having problems with this owl. They’re saying that this owl-

It is a problem.

[crosstalk] okay.

Aaron Scott:

But it wasn’t just loggers versus environmentalists, rural versus urban. The timber wars started splitting small towns apart too, and no one experienced more than Cherie Girod.

Cheri Girod:

Then I guess we’ll go in my office.

Aaron Scott:

Cherie runs a non-profit in Mill City that deals with everything from domestic violence to counseling out-of-work loggers. She comes from a third generation timber family. And her husband, Jim Girod, owns a local grocery store.

Cheri Girod:

He was riding bicycles across the United States with his son for Doernbecher Hospital. And somebody went in and put out the rumor that he was a part of the eco-terrorists. And why would anybody shop his store?

Aaron Scott:

Just because he liked bicycle riding?

Cheri Girod:

Just because he liked bicycle riding. That’s something that they do. It was a war. You are either on one side or you are on the other side.

Aaron Scott:

So Cherie jumped into action. She printed up T-shirts for the staff that said “We support the timber industry.” She called the mill owners and reassured them her husband was on their side. She even spoke at a rally about how the community needed to stand together and not turn on each other.

Cheri Girod:

And we finally got it settled.

Aaron Scott:

It’s almost mind boggling to me that they would be so focused on even just one business with the idea that, “Oh, you might be sympathetic.”

Cheri Girod:

People were hurting that bad, and they were that scared, and they were that upset, and they were looking for somebody to blame. If anybody wasn’t on our side, then you were definitely the enemy.

Aaron Scott:

But one scapegoat rose above everything else, the northern spotted owl. Just as it became the mascot and the legal linchpin for the environmentalists, it became a symbol of everything the logging communities hated and feared.

Audio:

I don’t think any of us want to see the spotted owl to become extinct. But if it’s us or the owl, then I don’t care what happens to him.

Aaron Scott:

Folks started making bumper stickers and T-shirts that said things like: “Save a logger. Eat an owl” and “Spotted owl tastes like chicken.”

Audio:

If you thought it was the 25 cent drafts that brought this crowd to the Town Tavern this evening, you’re wrong. These loggers came for the spotted owl dinner special.

Aren’t you worried you might be eating the last of an endangered species here?

Yeah, it is really worrying me, because I’m an endangered species.

Aaron Scott:

Of course, the meat really was chicken. But remember how some environmentalists didn’t even want to try to list the spotted owl under the endangered species act, because they feared it could backfire on the law and that it would distract from the fight to protect ancient forests. Well, it kind of did. The US Fish and Wild Service finally listed the northern spotted owl as threatened on June 22, 1990. And the backlash was immediate.

Audio:

Environmentalists are accused of turning the Endangered Species Act into a terrorist weapon to kill off the timber industry.

It’s a disaster. They’re going to shut the mills, like this in Oregon and Washington, down, period.

It’s nothing more than a glorified barn owl.

Aaron Scott:

The irony, of course, is that the Endangered Species Act wasn’t really what locked up the old growth to begin with. It was the other somewhat confusing environmental laws that Andy Stahl and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund used. But for some reason, everyone has always blamed the Endangered Species Act. Maybe it was the fear that it would also lock up private forests. And maybe it’s the fact that instead of playing out in legal briefs in courtrooms, it played out in nightly news and in public hearings, as the Reagan and Bush administrations fought against their own scientists and judges in a multi-year tug-of-war over whether or not to list the bird.

Tom Fencl:

When they had the hearings for the spotted owl thing-

Aaron Scott:

Tom Fencl was one of the retired loggers around the table at the ROMEO Club. I went to see him afterward at his home.

Tom Fencl:

[crosstalk] waited in line for two hours to testify, get in there and look over at the panel. That really made me mad, and half of them were gone or they were sleeping.

Aaron Scott:

Oh no, because it’s so many people were testifying that it took-

Tom Fencl:

Yeah, just so many, all day, probably a thousand, I don’t know, maybe more than a thousand. But I got up there to testify. I said, “Well, you people ought to have the decency to at least wake up and listen rather than either be gone or sleeping.” Well, that didn’t go over very big, but it didn’t change nothing.

Aaron Scott:

That sense of not having any say over your own future, that sense of not even being listened to when you’re asking for help, that festers, And it grows. And in this case, it turned the Endangered Species Act into the poster child for government overreach, a status it holds to this day. Because, never before had the protection of a single animal affected so many people, especially a motley owl that hides in the dank forest like a criminal. So the Endangered Species Act became the villain that got all the blame. And just as environmentalists feared, calls to repeal it echoed all the way from cafes in Mill City to the White house.

Audio:

I will not sign an extension of the Endangered Species Act unless it gives greater consideration to jobs, to families, and to communities. It is time to make people more important than owls.

Aaron Scott:

While conservative politicians have never succeeded in getting rid of the Endangered Species Act, the backlash to it did win one major victory for the timber industry. After being portrayed as the villains cutting down America’s last ancient forests, the logging side managed to flip the script, so that they were the underdogs.

Audio:

Now, owls versus loggers in the Pacific Northwest.

Aaron Scott:

As they made their case, both sides were throwing all sorts of numbers around.

Audio:

250,000 jobs in the West.

Environmentalists call these figures by the National Forest Products Association outrageous.

Exactly how many jobs are at stake is a matter of considerable dispute.

10 to 15 percent, that’s all.

Aaron Scott:

But it was a lot more complicated than owls versus jobs. The timber industry was already undergoing massive changes that had nothing to do with the owl. An economic recession in the early 1980s drove a lot of mills out of business, and those that survived adopted new technology that resulted in even more layoffs.

Audio:

In the 1970s, it took seven mill workers to turn a million board-feet of logs into lumber. In today’s modern, computerized mills, the same amount of timber creates two jobs or less.

Aaron Scott:

The recession hammered the final nail in the coffin of what had once been thriving unions in the Northwest. And then there was the issue of exports. Timber companies were exporting raw logs overseas without milling them here first, which meant they were exporting those mill jobs too.

Audio:

Some workers, including those who have already lost their jobs, say the real problem is in exporting raw logs.

That is going-

That’s a cover up. Its a cover-up. I lost my job Friday, and that’s a cover-up. Its not the owl!

[inaudible]

It’s not the owl! Talk about those exports.

[crosstalk] I’ll tell you what, it is real…

Aaron Scott:

Over the course of the ’80s, even before the owl, timber jobs that had once paid a premium turned into average-wage jobs. These were just like the changes that were reshaping other industries, like farming, mining, and manufacturing. But there’s one big difference. The timber industry was able to pin most of it on the spotted owl and environmentalists, because the owl did hurt the industry. After the government came up with a plan to protect the spotted owl and other old-growth-dependent species, logging in federal forests dropped by more than 80%.

Stephan Weaver:

It decimated a lot of communities.

Aaron Scott:

This is Stephan Weaver again, the logger we met at the beginning of the hour.

Stephan Weaver:

It was real bad. It was bad on me. I mean, I went from, let’s say, just having a good job to no job for a while. But I picked myself up. Well, I didn’t. I was really mad at the world. In the late ’90s era, I kind of hated everybody that didn’t like the trees to be cut. When you go from being a logger that makes $40,000 a year, maybe back then 50, to flipping hamburgers down at McDonald’s, it wasn’t a very good deal.

Aaron Scott:

Whether it was a good deal or not, depends largely on where you call home. Today, a third of timber towns are economically worse off. But a third have stayed the same, in part because there’s still a massive amount of logging happening on private land. Another third are better off than before, because they have managed to play of the beauty of the national forests around them to attract tourism, recreation, and new businesses. As for the timber wars, they didn’t end. They just evolved. Now instead of fighting over just old growth forests, we’re fighting over all the forests, because they play a huge role in combating climate change. Forests absorb and store carbon. They regulate and filter drinking water. And many of the animals that depend on them, like the spotted owl, are even more threatened than ever. So now, environmentalists want to protect all publicly owned forests, not just the old ones.

But we’re also fighting over them because they’re burning. One side thinks to make things better, we should be cutting more trees and putting out fires. The other side thinks logging and suppressing the fires that historically burn these forests has made things worse. The timber industry and environmentalists are still operating with two completely different world views. That old saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” well here, the fight feels even more basic. The two sides can’t even agree on what a forest is, or what it’s for, or, most importantly, what’s our role in it. After decades of fighting, the battle lines are the same, but the stakes are even higher.

Al Letson:

Today’s show came to us from the podcast Timber Wars. It’s from Oregon Public Broadcasting, and it explores so much more about the wonders of the forest and the consequences of this battle. You can find Timber Wars wherever you get your podcasts. It will change the way you see forests.

This episode was reported by Aaron Scott and produced by Peter Frick-Wright and Robbie Carver. David Steves, Ed Jahn, and Brett Myers edited the show. Fact checking by Matt Giles. For archival audio, thanks to NPR and the KEZI-TV Chambers Communication Corporation Collection at the University of Oregon Libraries. Special thanks to NPR Story Lab. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Amy Mostafa. Laura, my favorite, Gibson composed the music for today’s show. Sound design by Robbie Carver, and audio engineering by Steven Kray, along with J Breezy. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Brett Simpson is our production assistant. Our digital producer is Sarah Mirk. Our CEO is Christa Scharfenberg. Matt Thompson is our editor in chief. And our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. Our theme music is by Camerado, Lightning.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.

Speaker 18:

From PRX.