Skip to main contentOn a rainy Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2000, Bob Van Dyk put his 10-year-old retriever, Onus, into the back of his Ford pickup and headed out from his modest Forest Grove bungalow to a wooded area outside Camp Wilkerson, in Columbia County.
The Pacific University professor teaches a course on environmental politics and wanted photos to show what sorts of trees are sold for timber on state land. Even without getting out of the truck, he knew something was wrong. All around him, he saw a mix of younger trees under a tall canopy of 80-year-old Douglas firs. It's just the kind of diverse wooded ecosystem that the Oregon Department of Forestry says it wants to nurture on state land.
Why, he wondered, was it slated for clearcutting?
Van Dyk took out his Sony digital camera and snapped a few pictures. When he got home, he fired up the state forest mapping software on his computer. There, staring at his screen, he found one answer, but a host of other questions. To his surprise, those tall firs he'd just seen were ranked not as high-quality forest habitat, but as low-quality. That designation allowed them to be sold for cutting--as they later were.
Since then, Van Dyk has caught the state in widespread misclassification of forest--errors, he says, that could expose tens of thousands of acres of prime wildlife habitat to clearcutting despite a state directive saying such land should be spared. Two weeks ago, state foresters admitted they've made numerous mistakes in their inventory, and they promised to correct them. But the professor says the agency is not going far enough or fast enough to protect threatened species.
Van Dyk's discovery launched him into the middle of Oregon's next great eco-war. Years after the critters vs. jobs battle died down, it's about to flare up again, not in the remote woods of Douglas County but in Portland's back yard: what's collectively known as "the Tillamook," a key piece of the largest coastal temperate rainforest in North America.
In many ways, the coming clash will seem familiar. The two state forests in the Tillamook are home to the rock star of endangered species--the spotted owl--and numerous other protected performers, such as the marbled murrelet, a seabird that rockets to its nest at speeds up to 100 mph. The forests provide roughly 1,000 jobs in Tillamook and Clatsop counties alone, while disgorging millions of dollars in logging revenue to local governments and struggling public schools.
But this looming forest fight has a twist: another clash between state and federal officials. Quietly, in bureaucratic back-channels, Oregon is telling the feds to buzz off--and many conservationists are rooting for Uncle Sam.
Last week, environmentalists sued the state in an attempt to make it submit to federal authority and stiffen logging rules to protect endangered species. Meanwhile, armed with Van Dyk's findings, the Oregon Sierra Club has asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to see if the state is illegally pushing species to extinction by destroying habitat. The request could lead to federal action and boost the pressure on state foresters to change their ways.
An hour's drive to the west of the Rose City, what's been called the Sea of Green carpets the slopes of the Northern Coast Range.
There's little chance of mistaking the state forests for an old-growth wilderness area. Logging ruled here until a series of fires, dubbed the Tillamook Burn, ravaged hundreds of thousands of acres between 1933 and 1957. Most of the surviving hillside stands have succumbed to chainsaws. Winding through the 518,000 acres of forest are 2,800 miles of logging roads--enough to stretch from Beaverton to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
For many Oregon newcomers, the Tillamook and Clatsop state forests--covering an area nearly twice the size of Multnomah County--are just those big hills that must be crossed to get to Cannon Beach. But to natives, even city slickers like state Rep. Randy Leonard, this section of Coast Range means much more.
To replant the charred moonscape left by the fires, Portland schoolchildren, a young Leonard among them, were trucked to the Tillamook in school buses for two decades, planting what would become state forest land.
It was 40 years ago, but Leonard, a Portland firefighter, still vividly recalls those trips, walking the fire-scarred landscape with a trowel in one hand and a bundle of six-inch saplings in the other.
"I have this sense of ownership--it's really cool," says the Portland Democrat. "It's a funny thing when you plant something and it grows."
Grow it has. The replanted trees are now approaching prime harvest age, triggering a shift in the political calculus of the Tillamook.
Political observers give credit to Jim Brown, head of the state forestry department, which regulates logging on both state and private land. He foresaw the time when scientists and activists would turn their attention from old-growth controlled by the feds to the younger trees owned by Oregon.
Fourteen months ago, after years of work, the state Board of Forestry, which oversees ODF, approved a state-forest management plan designed to address environmental concerns while still letting the chainsaws rip.
The idea was that as the state sold stands in some parts of the forest for cutting, other stands would mature into good habitat. In this manner, like a juggler tending to numerous balls at once, state foresters could maintain places for endangered species at all times.
Today, however, the middle ground that Brown sought is already shrinking--just as the recession is increasing the pressure on state forests to support local economies. State records show that the average annual timber harvest in the Tillamook has more than doubled over the last three years.
Environmentalists, meanwhile--long preoccupied with big trees around Mount Hood--have finally figured out that there's a heck of a forest on the other side of Portland, and, led by the Audubon Society, they're speaking out.
It's not surprising: Besides the spotted owl, marbled murrelet and coho salmon, these woods are home to more than a dozen other endangered and threatened species--including some that have not yet been officially listed, such as the Columbia torrent salamander found mainly in the Northern Coast Range. At its March 6 meeting in Salem, the Board of Forestry is expecting so many enviro-demonstrators that it plans to corral them in "free speech zones" outside the hearing room.
Bob Van Dyk won't be carrying a protest sign. The political scientist's thesis was on the anti-abortion movement, not salmon protection. His classroom research, however, has turned him into an accidental eco-warrior whose weapons are found in computer programs and state file cabinets.
Poking around on state foresters' maps, comparing their forest stand ratings to aerial photos and his own observations (made during roughly 30 field visits), Van Dyk has come to some disturbing conclusions.
First, he's found that the state has graded up to 50 percent of its older stands in the Tillamook as low-quality--opening the door to clearcutting that would otherwise be banned. Second, many of those stands once were given a higher rating, but have since been downgraded by state foresters to a level that allows cutting.
When Van Dyk took his findings to state forestry officials late last year, he says, "they acted like they didn't have any idea what I was talking about."
He's since learned the forestry department already knew it had widespread misclassifications. As an internal ODF document from last April noted, "Mis-types are frequently found upon field visits and in need of adjustment."
According to other documents, biologists have repeatedly warned that the misclassification problem is jeopardizing prime habitat, contrary to the intent of the state's plan.
The state forestry department, for instance, almost automatically rates hardwood stands as low-quality--some 50,000 acres in the Tillamook State Forest alone. In a Feb. 2001 memo, however, Clint Smith, one of the agency's biologists, wrote that these may be some of the Tillamook's "most complex and healthiest stands."
Last month, after being grilled by Van Dyk and WW, state foresters conducted a review of 1 percent of state forest stands, the very oldest, and found that 63 percent--almost 1,600 acres--had been misclassified as low-quality.
Van Dyk is particularly haunted by one timber sale: Cougar Monster. Critics say the sale, slated for clearcutting, endangers owls and violates the state's own rules.
On a recent Sunday, Donald Fontenot, a Sierra Club volunteer who has been working with Van Dyk, led a handful of enviros and volunteers on a "groundtruthing" mission to Cougar Monster to verify the state's information and to see what's at stake.
Traveling on new logging roads and old abandoned ones, sometimes leaving the roads to bushwhack over felled trees and through salmonberry brambles, the crew trekked through a montage of forest landscape, with Douglas firs, hemlock, spruce, alder and the occasional old cedar. Some of the trunks were more than four feet in diameter, more than 100 years old. Only a few were painted with ODF's characteristic blue "W," standing for "wildlife trees" to be spared the saw.
Fontenot, a mild-mannered nurse who's the veteran of many national-forest timber protests, has come to a troubling conclusion about the state's practices. "The best way to see the Tillamook and Clatsop is to go to the timber sales," he said sardonically. "That's where the biggest and best trees are."
But the Cougar Monster sale has one big difference from others. Documents and interviews show that the forestry department knows full well this is some of the best spotted-owl territory it has. In fact, some employees did not want the southern section of Cougar Monster to be clearcut; their objections, however, were overruled by--as one biologist put it--"the strong desire" of foresters who wanted to maximize their harvest.
"They don't care about spotted owls, despite the fact that the trees they're cutting are right next to them," says Fontenot.
The group of greens wound through the woods, past elk, lynx and coyote droppings, a rare type of pale yellow snail, and mangled trees that serve as scratching posts for cougar and bear. The hikers stopped in their tracks as a defiant screeching filled the air--either a hawk or a bald eagle perched nearby, too stubborn to fly away.
At one point, where the abandoned logging road runs above a stream, Fontenot said he'd measured the slope as an 80-percent gradient--a prime candidate to clog the stream with silt from landslides once the trees are clearcut.
To test Van Dyk and Fontenot's claims, WW contacted Dave McAllister of the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, which is supposed to act as biological advisor to the Department of Forestry.
As the agency's habitat division chief, McAllister helped write ODF's forest-management plan, winning a gubernatorial award for it in the process.
He was not familiar with Cougar Monster, but when the forestry department's own description of the sale's southern section was read to him, he agreed that it sounded like it deserved a higher rating--one that, according to ODF's rules, is not eligible for clearcutting. "That didn't sound right at all," he said.
Asked about Van Dyk's concerns, state forestry officials say that for some stands like Cougar Monster, classification is in the eye of the beholder. They claim that even if there is widespread misclassification, it's no problem because mistakes will be caught before trees are cut. They say they will update their inventory--but it will take seven years.
For Fontenot and Van Dyk, this is not fast enough. They hold up Cougar Monster, scheduled to be auctioned March 19, as one of many examples proving the state agency does not catch its mistakes.
Even McAllister, the plan's co-author, worries about state foresters' "fix-as-you-go" strategy. He'd like to see a high priority on verifying the Tillamook's forest inventory. "You can keep putting it off and putting it off, and making decisions in the meantime," he says, "but you're going to be making some bad decisions."
"What I'm wondering is whether [state foresters] basically are looking for some harvest opportunities," he adds. "Which you can explain, but I don't know if you can defend it from the purposes of the plan."
McAllister's concerns are particularly noteworthy because, unlike many Department of Forestry critics, he thinks the state forest plan has great promise. Since the spotted owl wars erupted in 1989, the federal government has cut logging on its forests by about 75 percent. The hands-off approach, the feds say, is crucial to preserving dwindling species, but it has increased the pressure to clearcut private lands.
The state's approach, however, could show private foresters that there is another way, contends McAllister. "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a forest that was actually capable of supporting a variety of uses--timber, ecological, clean water, all of those things? That's the potential this plan has. If it falls on its face, I think it's doing a real disservice to this whole state."
Other scientists are less optimistic. By refusing to follow the federal model and make some Tillamook stands permanently off-limits to cutting, state foresters assume endangered critters will pack their bags and find new digs every time their home territory is cut. In the real world, most biologists say, fish, birds and amphibians aren't smart enough to do that: Home is home.
It's too soon to tell who's right, but concerned federal biologists are trying to patch some of the weaknesses they see in the plan.
The feds have leverage because Oregon has asked for an exemption from the enforcement provisions of the Endangered Species Act in the Tillamook.
The exemption would shield the state from lawsuits if its harvest policies accidentally killed a protected animal or destroyed its habitat. In exchange, under what's called a habitat conservation plan, the state would create and conserve habitat to make up for losses from logging.
Talks, however, are now in their sixth year, and Oregon is on its third draft of the habitat plan. While the two sides are said to be close to an agreement on protections for birds, observers say the state thus far has been unwilling to meet the feds' expectations to protect endangered salmon. (Fish streams are being clogged with silt from clearcut-related erosion, and crucial shade trees are being lost.)
Chuck Meslow, a retired biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, isn't surprised by the state forestry department's resistance.
In the early '90s, the state agency contracted with Meslow, a widely respected owl-research pioneer who also taught at OSU, to map spotted-owl nests in the Tillamook. He has continued to track the birds through former co-workers and students and says that he and his former colleagues noted a disturbing pattern at least up until the late '90s in state-approved timber sales in the North Coast Range.
"A lot of their cuts were placed adjacent to spotted-owl activity centers, and that just doesn't make sense when you're dealing with an animal that's in very low numbers," he says.
His suspicion? Pro-logging state foresters were trying to get rid of the owls. "The ODF's apparent agenda, in my view, would be best served if they didn't have any owls to contend with," he says. "I feel that, perhaps up until very recently, the objective of some of their managers was to help the problem go away."'
The pressure the forestry department feels to cut trees is understandable. It gets $53 million, 28 percent of its cash, from state timber-sale proceeds. And the surrounding counties, where many state foresters live, are even more dependent on Tillamook logging. Much of the forest was given to the state by counties on the condition that revenue from the trees would be shared with counties and public schools.
"This is supposed to be a working forest," says Tim Josi, a commissioner in Tillamook County, where revenue from state-forest timber sales makes up 37 percent of the county's general fund.
Finally, critics say ODF, a semi-independent agency, has an inherent pro-timber bias. The governor nominates members of the Board of Forestry, which oversees the department, but three of the seven members must come from the logging industry. Decisions are made not by voting, but by mutual agreement.
Internally, state forestry department biologists have complained that the agency does only the bare minimum its rules require, and their advice often goes unheeded. In one instance, draft documents describing several of the Tillamook District's timber sales proposed for 2002 claimed there was no need to survey for owls, since the stands contained no suitable habitat. That statement drew a pointed reply from Clint Smith, one of the department's biologists. "This is not true," he wrote on Feb. 5, 2001, adding he'd specifically told foresters to survey for the birds, since there was suitable habitat. "I recommend that this section be re-drafted to reflect the truth."
The U.S. Forest Service, ODF's federal counterpart, was blasted for its pro-timber culture until President Bill Clinton put a biologist in charge. "The Oregon Department of Forestry is where the U.S. Forest Service was 20 years ago," says Van Dyk, who thinks a similar change is necessary in Oregon.
The state forestry department's tendency to give endangered species short shrift is why Van Dyk and many enviros are pinning their hopes on the feds.
In February 2001, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sent state foresters a joint letter citing "overwhelming" scientific evidence that Oregon's forestry rules were killing fish. NMFS followed up with a more threatening letter in September 2001, warning ODF that state-approved logging appeared to have illegally harmed endangered salmon in 19 watersheds in Oregon--including both private land and state-forest land in the Tillamook.
Aware that its rules were too lax, the state started revamping them seven years ago. Today, it's still working on it. The feds, however, are not impressed by what they've seen of the state's draft rules, which were drawn up by a committee with a majority of logging-dependent interests.
The question is whether Oregon has to seek federal approval for its rules, as the state of Washington did years ago. Lawsuits seeking to force state laws to comply with the Endangered Species Act have not always succeeded, and this legal gray area is what the state is seizing upon to protect the Oregon's logging industry from tighter regulations. That's why the lawsuit filed last week, by the Pacific Rivers Council and the Audubon Society, is so significant.
Ted Lorensen, assistant director of ODF, says it's not the state's concern if Oregon's laws allow logging practices that violate federal law.
"Unless there's compelling evidence to argue that federal law takes preeminence over state law, we really have no basis for implementing federal law," he told WW. He sees no reason for his agency to enforce the Endangered Species Act. "Why should the state do it?" he said. "We're not funded to do it, and it would likely have unintended consequences that would be, overall, bad for forestry."
Culvert Inaction
Between 1983 and 1995, logging jobs in Tillamook and Clatsop counties declined by more than 10 percent. A 1996 study by the Oregon Department of Forestry said that more than half the drop was due to modernization and increased worker productivity, not timber availability.
There are 45 miles of hiking trails, 42 miles of mountain - biking trails, and 3 miles of nature/ interpretive trails in the Clatsop and Tillamook state forests.
Finding a quiet, scenic hike in the Tillamook used to be a huge challenge. A new guidebook from the Sierra Club makes it easy.
is available at several local bookstores.
Through the '60s, to make way for more profitable Douglas fir, state foresters bombarded less - profitable alder stands with chemicals used in Agent Orange, the notorious Vietnam - era defoliant. Stunted survivors are referred to as "zombie alder."
The timber industry has given $2.4 million to candidates in legislative races over the last 11 years, according to Janice Thompson of the Oregon Money in Politics Research Action Project.
Residents of towns such as Wheeler and Sutherlin have lately been complaining of the threat logging - related silt and chemicals pose to their drinking-water supply.
Lewis & Clark professor Dan Rohlf, an expert on endangered - species law, thinks a recent lawsuit seeking to force the state forestry department to stiffen logging rules has a good shot. "Pacific Rivers Council has been meticulously assembling a good case," he says, "and I think the legal precedent is on their side."
Last September, a federal judge in Eugene ruled that, due to an abundance of hatchery - bred cousins, coho salmon are not endangered. In December, a federal appeals court reinstated the fish protections pending a final ruling.
A recent study by biologist Mark Chilcote of the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife examined 12 Oregon rivers over 26 years, finding that hatchery salmon are one-third to one-eighth as likely to breed as natural - born fish.
Foresters defend clearcuts as approximating the effect of naturally occurring forest fires.
WWeek 2015