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It was an unlikely setting for an unprecedented meeting. Two months ago, in a Japanese tea house 25 miles southeast of Portland, the tree huggers sat down with the tree cutters. On the table was the controversial 1996 Eagle Creek timber sale. In every public timber sale there are three players: the U.S. Forest Service, which brokers the deal; the timber company that wants the logs; and the environmentalists who want to stop or modify the sale. In this meeting, the environmentalists hoped to persuade the buyer to give them more time to get the Forest Service to transfer the sale to a less sensitive wilderness area. To their amazement, Adolf Hertrich agreed. First, though the timber-company owner had already started logging, he agreed to confine his operations to the less environmentally sensitive areas in the south end of the parcel to give the environmentalists more time to make their case. Second, he said he would switch to an alternate site altogether if the Forest Service deemed a swap of public lands to be in the public interest. Hertrich's position took the environmentalists by surprise and has, for the first time, put the onus solely on the Forest Service to stop logging on public lands. The Eagle Creek timber sale infuriated environmentalists for several reasons. First, it was completed in the final days of the salvage rider, a congressional mandate that smoothed the way for sales of timber on public lands by temporarily limiting the normal appeal process. Second, the sale, just east of Estacada, falls within the Clackamas River watershed, which supplies drinking water for southern metro-area cities. This led politicians ranigng from Lake Oswego mayor Alice Schlenker to U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Furse to ask the Forest Service to delay the sale until more watershed research could be done. The Forest Service refused, and the sale went through. Finally, although most of the approximately 1,000-acre sale isn't old growth (thanks to a massive fire 120 to 150 years ago), it has never been logged and is considered one of the most beautiful forests near Portland. Environmentalists are frantic to save it in the hope that it can someday be incorporated into the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness Area, which it borders. Now, thanks to Hertrich, they have a better chance than ever. Hertrich is no green. As owner of Vanport Manufacturing, he is diametrically opposed to the zero-cut-on-public-lands philosophy of groups such as Cascadia Forest Alliance and the Oregon Natural Resources Council. The 64-year-old logger studied forestry at the University of Michigan and in the Black Forest in his native Germany, then worked for the Forest Service for seven years before starting Vanport, today one of the leading exporters of finished wood products to Japan (which explains the tea house at his business). If Hertrich had his way, there would be no natural areas protected from logging--including Eagle Creek. He says science is on the side of the Forest Service, showing that proper management will benefit the watershed. Hertrich says the environmentalists who came to see him had no convincing scientific support for their cause, but he recognizes that they have something just as crucial. "They are coming from mostly a political or philosophical point of view, which is also very valuable, very sincere," he says. "The Forest Service is more and more governed by politicians. To log is in the best interest of the forest, but to be realistic, political point of view always takes precedence over scientific point of view." Regna Merritt of Oregon Natural Resource Council disagrees with Hertrich about the science. She says research proves that logging decreases slope stability and increases silt in the water supply. Also, she charges, the Forest Service has not completed all the species surveys it should have before making the sale. Still, while Merritt disagrees with Hertrich, she views him as an ally. "I think it's wonderful and remarkable," she says. "His flexibility and willingness not to cut this area has helped mobilize people who would have otherwise given up. Every group has been energized by this." Riding on this momentum, the ONRC has sought the help of the cities down river of the sale. It paid off. The West Linn City Council recently passed a resolution asking the Forest Service to reconsider the Eagle Creek sale. Council member John Jackley says the city has been concerned about the sale from the beginning, and Hertrich's willingness to compromise added some needed weight to the argument. "Oregon Natural Resource Council made a very compelling case that the future of the Clackamas water quality was at stake," he says. "We thought if we added our voice to the debate, we might have a shot at getting the Forest Service to change their mind." So far, however, the Forest Service hasn't budged. Roberta Moltzen, district supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest, has become the target of environmentalists. They say that by refusing to consider providing Hertrich an alternate site, Moltzen is ignoring public opinion against the sale. For months they have challenged her to defend her position in a public meeting. Moltzen says her detractors have mistaken her for an enemy. "I'm not the opposite end," she says. "I'm simply responsible for implementing the decision." The sale falls under the auspice of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which set criteria to protect northern spotted owl habitat from logging. Moltzen says critics of the sale should try to change the plan, not attack her decisions. Moltzen says there was plenty of debate before the sale went through and all questions of the environmental soundness of the sale have been settled. She sees no reason to go through it all again. "Meet publicly?" she says. "I don't think so." At this point, everyone is waiting. Hertrich has started logging Eagle Creek and says he will have to start moving north into the more contested areas of the sale come fall. He shrugs off the notion that he is an environmental hero. For him, it was a practical decision. If the Forest Service decides to change the sale, he says, he wants to be involved. As for the notion that most timber-company executives would just as soon have environmentalists arrested as have them over for tea, he says that although he doesn't agree with them, he was impressed with the intensity of their beliefs. "I think dialogue with anyone is good, unless they are completely crazy," he says. After 30 years of taking trees out of Northwest forests, Hertrich says there's only one reason he had never sat down and talked to environmentalists before: No one ever asked. |
