Bill Moyers looks at the ongoing debate about how we manage the rapidly disappearing old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Featured in the program are environmentalists, politicians and industry representatives.
TRANSCRIPT
ENVIRONMENTALIST: Five percent – that’s all that we have left. And we’re still continuing business as usual and the trees are still coming out of these forests as fast as possible.
LOGGER: [to educational demonstrators} You’re sick! You’re all so sick! It’s not your lot I’m logging …
LOGGER: My little granddaughter is going to come home from school and tell me everything I’ve ever done in my is life is wrong and I should feel guilty about that.
ROY KEENE, Forester: The victim in the way we’ve been practicing forestry, quite frankly, is the public.
JEFF DeBONIS, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics: The timber corporations have a stranglehold on the Forest Service and on Congress and the sad part is, is that the Forest Service has gone along with it.
Rep. ROD CHANDLER (RWA) : When I go out and I fight for people whose jobs depend on agriculture or forest products industries, I think I’m representing people who send me here.
RICHARD MANNING, Author, “Last Stand”: It’s meaningless to talk about our rights against the rights of nature. We are a part of nature. It sustains us.
BILL MOYERS: Tonight, “The Politics of Trees.”
I’m Bill Moyers. Politics is in the news, and so are trees. In fact, the politics of trees is one of the big stories of this election season.
PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: [June 12, 1992} We come to Rio with a proposal to double global forest assistance and we stand ready to work together, respecting national sovereignty, on new strategies for forests for the future.
BILL MOYERS: Only two days earlier, NASA scientists had released satellite photographs of the tropical rain forest in Brazil and the Pacific Northwest forest here in the United States. They showed that our forests are more heavily damaged than those in Brazil. The President made no reference to the photographs.
PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: And we will reform at home, phasing out clear cutting as a standard practice on U.S. national forests.
BILL MOYERS: The administration did announce a reduction in the amount of timber harvested by clear cutting, which permits the wholesale cutting of large areas of trees at once. But much of the clear cutting will be replaced by a form of logging that leaves only a handful of trees standing per acre. Environmentalists say this is just as damaging as clear cutting.
Meanwhile, President Bush has approved a proposal by Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan to open logging on four million acres of old growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. Logging is prohibited on these acres under the Endangered Species Act, but the White House supports an amendment that would allow economic considerations to override the prohibitions.
SENATOR MAX BAUCUS (D-MT): I hope today marks the beginning of the end of a difficult chapter in Montana history.
BILL MOYERS: The Senate has now passed a controversial bill that would allow logging on four million acres of Montana wilderness that is part of the national forest system. Taxpayers subsidize timber sales in Montana and northern Idaho forests last year by more than $23 million.
We actually set out to do this broadcast back in the spring, but before we could go on the air, events kept overtaking us – the Rio conference, legislation in Congress and now presidential politics. So we decided to hold that first broadcast and watch the debate over the summer, as it indeed came to a boil. Using some of the earlier program which never aired, we’ll try in this hour to bring you up to date.
In states like Washington, Oregon and Montana, the lines of the debate have been drawn as a choice between jobs or the environment. Environmentalists charge that Congress, the Bush administration and the timber industry are in cahoots to cut trees faster than they can be replaced and to let the industry finish off the last of America’s old growth. In other quarters, you’ll hear it said, “Not to worry. When a tree falls, there’s more where” it comes from.” Obviously, the industry and its critics don’t quite see eye to eye.
NARRATOR: [television commercial} How do we balance America’s need for wood with the need for wilderness, the need for paper with the need for wildlife? Tough questions, but we’re working on the answers. That’s why in the last decade, America’s leading forest products companies have spent more than $100 million to protect the environment and to protect wildlife. After all, we’re not the only ones who need trees. The American Forest Council, helping to protect the future of America’s forests. [“American Forest Council: For More Information, Call 1-(800) 388-TREE”]
LOBBYIST: [“The Simpsons”} Congressman, this is Springfield National Forest. Now, basically, what we want to do is cut her down. As you can see in our artist’s rendition, this is old growth, just aging and festering away. In comes our logging company to thin out the clutter. It’s all part of nature’s, you know, cycle.
CONGRESSMAN: Well, Jerry, you’re a whale of a lobbyist and I’d like to give you a logging permit. I would, but this isn’t like burying toxic waste. People are going to notice those trees are gone.
LOBBYIST: Congressman, this is where it gets awkward. I never quite know how to put this. I just want to-
CONGRESSMAN: Offer me a bribe? [they laugh]
BILL MOYERS: When The Simpsons take on an issue, you know it’s no longer a laughing matter. Let’s consider how that came about. The U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905 to manage and conserve publicly owned forests. Part of its mandate was to sell timber to private companies. The government would profit by selling the trees and industry would profit by harvesting them. If industry cut down too many trees too fast, the Forest Service would act to put things right. The ideal was to log only at a rate that would allow nature to replace the trees being cut. Critics say that’s not what’s happening today. Although environmental laws restrict the amount of cutting on national forests, industry has used its political and financial clout to press for more logging. One federal employee who blew the whistle on that pressure has paid a price for speaking up.
JOHN MUMMA: [Congressional hearing] My name is John Mumma. I’m regional forester of the northern region, a 25 million acre national treasure of some 15 national forests located in Montana, northern Idaho, portions of Washington and North and South Dakota. I’m here today with a heavy heart, a heart that’s in shock at what’s happening in the national forests of this country.
BILL MOYERS: John Mumma, a wildlife biologist and 28-year veteran of the Forest Service, was removed from his job when the forest in his region did not sell the amount of timber targeted by Congress. He claimed that to do so, he would have had to break environmental laws governing the agency.
JOHN MUMMA: [Congressional hearing] Over the past few years, I’ve experienced several instances of what I regard as undue interference and pressure by political figures in the management of the northern region. I believe that this interference was designed to force me to make some decisions that were unwarranted by existing law.
1st HEARING OFFICER: Have you ever told the chief that you’d have to break the law to achieve your assigned timber targets?
JOHN MUMMA: Yes, I have.
1st HEARING OFFICER: You have?
JOHN MUMMA: Yes, I have.
2nd HEARING OFFICER: Could you identify those who brought pressure upon you?
JOHN MUMMA: Specifically, I would say, certainly members of the delegations in both Idaho and Montana. You want me to be more specific?
2nd HEARING OFFICER: I would like you to be more specific.
JOHN MUMMA: Senator Burns from Montana, Congressman Ron Marlenee, Senator Larry Craig in Idaho.
BILL MOYERS: You should know that Forest Service chief Dale Robertson denied that legislators applied pressure on John Mumma. You should also know that Mumma was given a choice by the secretary of agriculture. He could transfer to a Washington desk job or resign from the agency. He resigned.
Jeff DeBonis also worked in the Forest Service and, as a timber sales planner for the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, he saw the environmental effects of clear cutting. When he decided that the Forest Service was bowing to political pressure to cut timber at any cost, Jeff DeBonis started the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, to which he now devotes himself full-time.
Jeff DeBonis, is what happened to John Mumma an exception?
JEFF DeBONIS, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics: No, actually, it’s an endemic problem. It’s happened to lots and lots of people, Forest Service employees. The different thing about Mumma was that he was a very highly-placed official, really, in our line command, second only to the chief, in terms of direct line of authority. And he went public with it.
BILL MOYERS: Why? What’s going on? What’s creating this kind of agitation and frustration?
JEFF DeBONIS: Well, I can give you my example. I came into the Forest Service 13, 14 years ago, right out of the Peace Corps and the environmental movement of the ’60s and ’70s, with very high ideals. When I started working for the Forest Service, I believed the rhetoric that they were, in fact, protecting the resources and meeting the public trust. After you work within the agency for a couple, three years, you begin to realize that the underlying motive of the Forest Service is to cut trees at all costs.
BILL MOYERS: What was the straw that broke the camel’s back, in your case?
JEFF DeBONIS: For me, it was finally going to the Willamette National Forest on the west side of Oregon. I called it “west side future shock” because what was happening on the Willamette forest was extensive degradation in the watersheds, in the forests, to wildlife populations, to the fisheries habitat because of this mindset of getting the cut out at all costs.
BILL MOYERS: Where is the pressure coming from now? Somebody in Washington said to me that the industry and the corporations have a stranglehold on Congress. Do you think that’s true?
JEFF DeBONIS: Absolutely and it comes from large amounts of political pressure and money. And the sad part is, is that the Forest Service has gone along with it.
BILL MOYERS: Let’s take a look at some examples of how that influence is brought to bear. We have a piece here.
The timber industry has friends in high places. John Crowell was once general counsel to Louisiana Pacific, one of the country’s largest purchasers of federal timber. In 1981, President Reagan appointed him assistant secretary of agriculture, responsible for the Forest Service. He refused to approve any forest plans that did not increase logging in the Northwest.
As a Senator, Idaho’s James McClure used his position on the Appropriations Committee to pressure the Forest Service in his state to increase timber goals. Soon after his 1990 retirement from the Senate, he was elected to the board of directors of the Boise Cascade Corporation. That same year, Boise Cascade was the number one purchaser of National Forest timber.
Since 1985, political action committees of the timber industry have contributed more than $5 million to members of Congress.
Isn’t the government earning money when it sells timber to private companies?
JEFF DeBONIS: No, no. The Forest Service loses at least $350 million a year in its subsidized timber sale program. Now, there are a few individual forests that, under certain ways of accounting, they do make money, but that’s a very small percent of the overall Forest Service timber program. Overall, they lose at least $350 million a year.
BILL MOYERS: But don’t we need that timber for our wood products?
JEFF DeBONIS: Absolutely not. What comes off the National Forest is about 14 percent of all wood products used in America. Our National Forests’ true value are the fact that they are the last vestiges of functioning ecosystems in the North American continent.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what do you mean by that? What’s important – why should we care about that?
JEFF DeBONIS: Well, because there’s so few areas left where the natural forest, the way it evolved over, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, is still intact. In other words, what we have done, as a society, and what we’ve done is, we’ve taken very complex forest lands, cut them down, converted them into what I call “simplistic tree farms” where you have only one or two or three species. It’s kind of like an agricultural model.
BILL MOYERS: Why should my friends from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, the people gathered in this studio, care about what happens to a forest in Washington, Oregon, Montana?
JEFF DeBONIS: Because forests are like the life support system for our planet, in many ways. Old growth forests produce incredible amounts of oxygen. Old growth forests are a carbon sink. They literally hold – they bring – they suck out and hold tons of carbon, which we know now the release of carbon is creating the greenhouse effect and global warming. Old growth forests provide some of the most incredibly clean water on the planet. Old growth forests provide [unintelligible] fisheries, salmon habitat, which is a very big economic factor in the Northwest.
BILL MOYERS: We have another biologist who says something to support what you’ve just been saying about the forests.
CHRIS MASER, Forest Ecologist: [“Rage Over Forests,” National Audubon Society] The average trees in this stand are 400 to 600 years. That means they take about two and a half centuries to decompose and recycle in the soil, which means that the forest really grows, on trees, so a forest is really always growing on itself. There’s nothing wasted out here. This wood that we’re sitting on eventually will rot and recycle in the soil. That is what forms the organic material. That’s what the forest grows on. That’s the nutrient capital, a lot of it that becomes stored below ground. If we remove all of the wood from the forest floor, we will eventually greatly impair the ability of the trees to grow. This is the way nature reinvests into the system. All we, as human beings, can do is maintain the options for the next generation. We’re spending the options when we liquidate the old growth. Whatever options they have are what we leave them. And an option spent is no longer an option. You can always cut old growth, but once it’s cut we can’t grow it back. No one has ever done it.
INTERVIEWER: We’re making all those decisions today.
CHRIS MASER: We’re making them today for the dollar, pure and simple. Nothing else is being taken into account.
BILL MOYERS: Because the forest is environmentally and economically crucial to all Americans, there is more to this story than public land being cut by private companies. Those companies also cut trees on land they own, raising the question of whether private land should be held to a public trust. There’s strong evidence in recent years that the companies have been cutting their own trees, the trees on their land, ruthlessly. The faster they use up those trees, the sooner they can demand subsidized access to trees on public land and the faster they cut, the faster they can pay down their big debt. In the 1980s, as you know, the world of junk bonds and leveraged buy-outs took a toll on Wall Street, Main Street, but also on the nation’s forests. Trees became just another asset to be sold off to pay huge debts incurred in corporate takeovers. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the case of the Pacific Lumber Company.
NARRATOR: {“The Forest Through the Trees,” 1990] For years, Pacific Lumber cut less redwood than it was growing on its land and still made a profit. The result: the largest acreage of valuable old growth redwoods in private hands. These trees made Pacific Lumber an ideal takeover target as junk bonds began to reshape American industry. In a 1985 hostile takeover, corporate raider Charles Hurwitz bought out Pacific Lumber and its forests. Seven hundred million dollars in debt, Hurwitz then ordered double-time shifts and doubled the number of ancient redwoods cut.
The company has logged up to the edge of Headwaters Forest and cut a road into it, challenging a court injunction. Pacific Lumber plans to log 450 acres in the heart of the forest now and the rest of it by the year 2007.
CECELIA LANMAN, Environmental Protection Information Center: Pacific Lumber Company has stated over and over again in court proceedings, at hearings before Senate committees, in their own prospectus to their stockholders, that they intend to liquidate, to cut the remaining old growth within 20 years. And at the rate that they’ve accelerated their cutting, we feel it’s probably about five years.
ROBERT STEPHENS, The Pacific Lumber Company: We started logging in that tract 35 years ago. This isn’t something new. We’ve been logging old growth for 120 years. It isn’t as though we started logging old growth two years ago or five years ago or that Maxxam is the first man in the world to cut down a redwood tree. We’ve been doing it – we started logging in Sand Creek 35 years ago. This is just a normal, continuing operation that’s been going on all this time.
INTERVIEWER: The critics have said that you’re doubling, or maybe even tripling the cut rate.
ROBERT STEPHENS: We did. That’s been published. That’s no secret. We doubled it.
NARRATOR: As the only major source for old growth redwood, Pacific Lumber could expect up to $20,000 for each enormous tree. Response to Pacific Lumber’s takeover was widespread – federal investigations, worker buy-out plans and proposed legislation in Sacramento. Nineteen eighty-nine was the third year in a row Assemblyman Byron Sher introduced a modest bill to limit old growth logging. When the bill reached the Assembly floor, many spoke but few listened. When the dust settled this bill, like Sher’s two earlier bills, failed.
Hurwitz claimed that debt repayment was behind his logging policy. That claim rang hollow when he used Pacific Lumber cash for another corporate takeover. In 1988, Charles Hurwitz took home over $5 million. The next year, $8 million.
BILL MOYERS: Charles Hurwitz once told a meeting of Pacific Lumber employees, ”There’s a little story about the golden rule. Those who have the gold, rule.” Ironically, since the film was made, Pacific Lumber’s let it be known that they may not log the 3,000 acres of old growth in the Headwaters Forest. They might instead sell the forest to the state of California in order to payoff more junk bond debt.
Pacific isn’t the only timber company whose trees have been sacrificed to pay debt, so we’re joined by former reporter Richard Manning, who saw the results of similar clear cutting in Montana while reporting on environmental issues for The Missoulian. And he wrote about them in a fine book called Last Stand: Logging, Journalism and the Case for Humility.
Why are you a former reporter?
RICHARD MANNING, Author, “Last Stand”: Well, the newspaper I worked for couldn’t deal with the outcry from the timber industry after I wrote the series and so after about a year of harassment by the timber industry, the newspaper decided to reassign me and I simply resigned rather than accept a reassignment.
BILL MOYERS: So you were penalized for telling the truth about logging?
RICHARD MANNING: It would seem so, yes.
BILL MOYERS: What was the truth you told?
RICHARD MANNING: Essentially, the two timber corporations in Montana, combined, own an area in western Montana about the size of the state of Delaware. That’s about 1.8 million acres. They’d owned those lands for quite some time and, in fact, they were a part of our community, or we thought so. During that time, they subscribed to the doctrine of “sustained yield” forestry, or said they did. But rather quietly, around 1978, the two timber companies decided to abandon sustained yield. They didn’t tell anyone about that, as you can imagine, but they did. And they wanted to clear cut all of their lands, strip everything so essentially they would have no trees left, they said at the time, in about 30 years. It turns out that they did it in about 10.
BILL MOYERS: But isn’t this their right? I mean, this is their land, private property.
RICHARD MANNING: When you begin speaking about the forest, there’s no such thing as an isolated forest. As a matter of fact, the lands are what are called “checkerboarded” with public lands and so you have a section of land that’s about 640 acres – it’s exactly 640 acres – which is square. And if you look at a map of Montana which happens to be color-coded, it looks like a checkerboard. And so the corporate land’s interspaced with the public lands.
BILL MOYERS: And the purpose of that is so that when land – when trees are cut on one parcel of land, private land, the public land next door compensates for that?
RICHARD MANNING: Supposedly, yes, but the cutting techniques were so egregious during this period that it was degrading the water quality and all the other environmental qualities on the adjacent public land. For instance, our trout streams in Montana are now so silted that they don’t produce trout.
BILL MOYERS: You went up there to see what were the results of the cutting. What did you find?
RICHARD MANNING: I was shocked. I mean, I was a resident of Montana. I had been writing about these issues for a very long time. And still, when I drove mile on mile on mile of logging road and saw nothing but the devastation, it would actually make me physically shake when I’d go back to the office. I didn’t quite believe it had happened and no one in Montana did.
BILL MOYERS: Is that because you’re romantic about the forest?
RICHARD MANNING: No, at the point, I wasn’t. In fact, it brought me to that kind of realization later on that there was more to the forest than just the kind of nuts and bolts economics that I’d been writing about right along, when you see that kind of destruction on that scale. But at the time, no, I was kind of naive about those issues, but I still couldn’t, as a human, ignore what I had seen.
BILL MOYERS: But other humans were getting jobs cutting those forests, and that’s what the forest industry has told us over and over again, that there’s a trade-off, that we need these jobs for people like the loggers and their families and that’s just a trade-off we have to make in the 1980s and ’90s.
RICHARD MANNING: But they traded off their jobs in the space of about 10 years.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
RICHARD MANNING: I mean, a logger can have a job today, but the job’s not really worthwhile to him if it’s going to go away in 10 years, and that’s what happens when you log in the fashion the corporations logged. They eliminated these guys’ jobs and so they suffered, the human community suffered, as much as the natural community did in our end of the state.
BILL MOYERS: You write in Last Stand that this story is not so much about the cutting of trees as about the ways in which we cut trees. How do we cut them?
RICHARD MANNING: We clear cut. We do clear-cut forestry in this country now. We have no respect for the patterns of nature and we believe in our hubris that we’re able to go in and wipe out nature’s forest, a complex relationship, and instead replace it with trees of our own devising. We think that’s a better tree and, in fact, it’s not.
BILL MOYERS: A tree farm?
RICHARD MANNING: A tree farm.
BILL MOYERS: What’s wrong with a tree farm?
RICHARD MANNING: A tree farm ignores nature. I built a house this summer and got to know a lot of carpenters. They’ll tell you what’s wrong with a tree farm. It produces substandard lumber. They can’t use it anymore because nature grows a better tree. The growth rings are spread so far apart because of the rapid growth of that tree farm that the lumber from it will warp. It’s waney, it’s twisty and it’s hard for a carpenter to use.
BILL MOYERS: Is there a way to cut trees without causing so much pain?
RICHARD MANNING: Oh, certainly, and it’s done. It’s done. There’s selective cutting all through Montana. It’s not on these corporate lands, but there are small companies that go out, they practice sustained yield and they take a few trees at a time.
BILL MOYERS: So not all companies are doing what you found in Montana? There are some good companies that are cutting – creating jobs and still respecting the delicate ecology of the forest?
RICHARD MANNING: Certainly, but they’re a very small percentage of the land.
BILL MOYERS: We’re joined now by Congressman Rod Chandler from the state of Washington. Washington has 23 million acres of forest in both public and private hands.
Congressman, thank you for joining us today.
REP. ROD CHANDLER (R-WA) : Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: Are environmentalists like Jeff DeBonis wrong when they want to preserve old growth forests?
REP. ROD CHANDLER: I think – no, not preserving, because I even have legislation that preserves old growth and that’s appropriate and there ought to be more land set aside to protect old growth. But I grew up with two traditions. One is the enjoyment of the outdoors – hunting, fishing, hiking, camping in those forests that we knew and loved. But we also depended – my family, families around my home town of LaGrande, Oregon, depended upon those forests for our livelihood. And I think it’s a balance between the two that we need to achieve.
BILL MOYERS: What about the allegation or the implication in The Simpsons sitcom a minute ago that people like you who take money from political action committees are actually, in effect, getting bribes?
REP. ROD CHANDLER: No. That’s – that’s just ridiculous. When you look at the legislation and our attempts at even making modest modifications in the kinds of law that have, I think, moved the balance over toward the preservationists, you just try in Congress to get some of that legislation passed. And don’t tell me that the preservationists don’t have their own political action committees, that they don’t make their own contributions. And, you know, look at that side of it, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: But the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that environmental groups have contributed about a third to members of Congress that the timber industry companies have contributed. It doesn’t seem quite an even playing field there.
REP. ROD CHANDLER: Well, all I can say is that when I go out and I fight for people whose jobs depend on agriculture or forest products industries, the water in the state of Washington, I think I’m representing people who send me here. Yes, we are all dependent upon contributions from various groups in order to get elected. But to suggest that somehow that buys your vote or that because one side contributes more than the other, that’s to ignore the facts.
BILL MOYERS: We’re going to meet some of those loggers you talked about in just a moment. But first, we’ve heard from a professional forester, a professional journalist and a professional politician. Before we meet a couple here in the studio, let’s hear from some men who cut the logs.
1st LOGGER: [“Ancient Forests: Rage Over Trees”] When I was 18, that’s when they would allow a young man to be involved in the logging because of the danger. I stayed in there all of these years, up until 1974, when I retired. I’m aware of the logger’s life, the sweat, the cold, the freezing weather that you’re in, the kind of pay that they get, the dangers that are subjected to, and most of them getting crippled up one way or the other. The falling of the trees is something that you don’t forget. With the handsaws, as you went into the woods, it was quiet, excepting for the silken “swish, swish, swish” of the saws, as it worked through the tree. When the tree was about to fall, there was a call of “Timber!” And this is what I heard: “Timber! There she goes! There she goes!”
2nd LOGGER: [“Our Vanishing Forests”} We’ve all logged so many years and that’s our trade and if it all shuts down, we’re going to have to turn around and start right from the bottom again.
3rd LOGGER: If they can preserve the spotted owl, they can preserve man, as well.
4th LOGGER: When a mill closes or something, I just kind of close my eyes and turn around and say, you know, ”What’s going on here?” You know, there’s not really much – you go up and you talk to a guy that worked there, here he’d been there 18 years, getting ready to retire, he’s down the road. He’s got five kids and a house payment and two cars. What’s he going to do?
Rep. BOB SMITH (R-OR) : Nobody – nobody’s concerned about the elimination of jobs and people, I guess, anymore. All we want to do is for some – some scientist somewhere to say that we’ve got to stop harvesting timber in the Northwest. I hear my time is up, Mr. Chairman, but I’ll tell you this. There are lot of people whose jobs, 71 communities in Oregon, who depend upon the timber industry, over half of the income. You’re going to put them out of work. You’re going to create refugees and I don’t see the purpose of it.
Ms. SKIRVIN: [timber industry television commercial} Timber’s been in our blood for generations and hard work has been a way of life, but hard work isn’t enough anymore if people in Washington, D.C., don’t understand we’re hurting. So let’s stick together in the Northwest. Get behind our members of Congress and take one single message to Washington, D.C.: “There are people here, too.”
NARRATOR: Let our representatives know we’re counting on ’em.
BILL MOYERS: Roy Keene lives in Oregon. He’s worked as a logger, a timber broker and a forester since the 1970s. The organization he directs, Public Forest Foundation, tries to promote forestry that is less harmful to the land. Tom Hairons is a logger also, from Mill City, Oregon. He’s been organizing his community in opposition to some of the environmental restrictions that limit logging in the national forests.
Tom, that piece made logging look quite romantic. Is that the way it’s still done?
TOM HAIRONS, Logger: It is. It’s a lot more sophisticated than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The equipment’s a lot more expensive. But there’s still a certain element of romance for me, anyway. I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.
BILL MOYERS: Do you feel threatened? Do you think your job is in jeopardy because of –
TOM HAIRONS: Oh, absolutely. I – we had – Bill we had – we had a small logging company. I do mean small, and getting smaller by the minute. We had about 23 employees three years ago and we’re now down to five, myself and my son and three other people.
BILL MOYERS: Roy, aren’t loggers really up against it? I mean, jobs are being lost. Wood is being – unprocessed logs are being shipped to Asia, where they’re – where jobs are going to Asia? That’s where the mills are turning these into furniture and the wood that’s off the ship back to us. Aren’t loggers up against it?
ROY KEENE, Forester: Loggers, I think, like a lot of the communities, have been very cleverly manipulated by large industries to fold into one large organization. I think loggers and small communities should be in their own little consent group and their own union and not folded in with the big industries. Some of the largest processors also happen to be some of the largest exporters and they are also some of the largest bidders on public timber, so it comes back to loggers getting themself in trouble by forming allegiances with groups that I think are at direct odds with their welfare.
BILL MOYERS: Is there a way to have our cake and eat it, too, to have jobs and preserve these trees for biological reasons and for posterity’s sake?
TOM HAIRONS: I suspect there is but, you know, we need to start making land managers making land management decisions instead of bean counters. That’s the problem that corporate America has, that it’s in the natural resource business.
BILL MOYERS: You mean, they’re cutting it all down for the next quarter’s profits?
TOM HAIRONS: That’s – you know, that’s what bean counters do, is – they’re concerned about the next quarter. We’re talking about
BILL MOYERS: That’s what happened in the ’80s.
TOM HAIRONS: Yeah. We’re talking about a life cycle here, you know, that runs into the – can run into the hundreds of years or, if we look at it from rotation cycles, into the, you know, 80, 90 to 150 years in – we’ve got guys managing these companies that are only concerned about what’s happening next quarter.
BILL MOYERS: And what do they do, therefore?
TOM HAIRONS: Well, they – whatever they need to do to maximize the profits or to show the stockholders the best dividend for the next quarter.
BILL MOYERS: You know, it’s interesting. You’re speaking as a man who stood up against some of the environmental legislation out in Oregon. You sound like a conservative, and yet you’re saying they’re not acting right when they cut only for the next quarter.
TOM HAIRONS: That’s right.
BILL MOYERS: Right?
TOM HAIRONS: That’s right. But, you know, I’ll say some same things about the environmental rhetoric, too, you know.
BILL MOYERS: Say it. Say it.
TOM HAIRONS: You know, that movement needs to change its paradigm, which was set 30 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: How do you mean?
TOM HAIRONS: Well, this idea of acting out of fear and guilt. That’s what bothers me about the whole environmental movement is that, you know, my little granddaughter is going to come home from school and tell me everything I’ve ever done in my life is wrong and I should feel guilty about that, you know? I don’t-
BILL MOYERS: About being a logger?
TOM HAIRONS: Yeah. Or – yeah, because what we’ve done here is, like, we do in a lot of social movements, is we’ve vilified the victims.
BILL MOYERS: Who are the victims?
TOM HAIRONS: The people of Mill City, Oregon, are the victims, the people that have built up these communities surrounding the national forests, based on a promise made 50, 60 years ago, and are now having that jerked right out from underneath them.
BILL MOYERS: What about that, Richard Manning? Are you vilifying these – the victims?
RICHARD MANNING: Yeah, if he’ll include in the victims the forests of Mill City, Oregon, then we’ve got something to talk about now because that’s exactly the problem stated backwards that he sees in the environmental movement, that we’re not looking at community here, in the sense of human and natural community combined.
BILL MOYERS: Aren’t you reading into forests the same values that human beings read into their own community?
RICHARD MANNING: No, I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to say that in human communities, we ought to read into those – our communities the values the forest already has.
BILL MOYERS: And what are those values?
RICHARD MANNING: That integration, that connection, that interconnection that goes through the entire web of forestry. Each unit in that forestry or each form of life supports the other forms of life and of death.
TOM HAIRONS: Wait a minute, here. We’re – we’re operating on a principle here and a doctrine of intrinsic values, is what he’s saying, you know, that all life is equal and that’s what the Endangered Species Act is based on and that’s why it doesn’t work and that’s why it hasn’t worked in the case of the Pacific Northwest forest is because we’re talking about human values as opposed to the rocks having value without any humans.
BILL MOYERS: What about that, Richard?
RICHARD MANNING: It’s meaningless to talk about our rights against the rights of nature. We are a part of nature. It sustains us. If we are to be sustained for the next 10,000 years, as a species, then we must pay more attention to what nature’s doing. Just practice our self-interest, that’s all I ask.
BILL MOYERS: Roy, do you think we can do that?
ROY KEENE: I want to answer that question by coming back to an earlier statement we made about the victim and I want to suggest to the people at the table and the audience that the victim in the way we’ve been practicing forestry, quite frankly, is the public and that we may think that we are separate from the forest and we may think that the forest is separate from us, but in reality we are all stewards of our forests.
JEFF DeBONIS: We’ve gotten to the point that there is so little old growth habitat left, ancient forest, temperate rain forest left, by all accounts, less than 10 percent, that the Endangered Species Act as it was set up is the last-ditch effort to pull out – to put the stops on a very unbalanced situation. Balance was lost 50 years ago and we’re at the point now where there’s so little left that the Endangered Species Act comes into play because the ecosystem is falling apart.
BILL MOYERS: I hear Tom saying people are the endangered species.
JEFF DeBONIS: And people are – have been – unfortunately, the way we’ve done the timber industry in this country-for 150 years, we’ve seen communities built up and get busted because of overcutting. And what we have in the Northwest is the last frontier. The same thing is happening in the Northwest that happened in the Southeast. It happened in the Northeast. It happened in the upper Great Lakes states, where big timber companies came in, they overcut and they left. And they’re doing the same thing in the Northwest. And so we have either – we can either stop now and pay the price or we will be paying the price in another 10 or 15 years. That doesn’t mean, though, that as a society, we can’t make some transitions here. We can make some transitions right now in these communities that will get through these rough times that we’re going to have, either now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now, in order to get back on what I would call a sustainable level of harvesting at some point down the road.
BILL MOYERS: It seems to me that either/or is not going to achieve the results any of you are talking about. Is there, in the way we look at forest, the possibility for a new way of looking at politics that might move us beyond the paralysis and the deadlock and the frustration that everybody feels?
ROY KEENE: Well, I think part of our – part of our problem, both politically and in our forestry, has been that we are so conditioned to instant gratification. And I think that a lot of problems in forestry could be resolved by focusing on what we leave instead of what we take. And this gets back to the concept of bean counting. We’ve got people that are counting how much we take out each quarter out of the forest, rather than looking at the condition and state of the forest that we’re leaving.
RICHARD MANNING: And, in fact, what we’re – we’re talking about corporate control of forest and clear cutting. We’re talking about a war against diversity. We’re talking about a mono-culture. That’s what we’re talking about in American politics at the same time, because a mono-culture is more manageable. If we create the American public into one sort of consumer, then we can manage the American public. And so if we’re to take a lesson from the forest to American politics, it has to be in this toleration and even encouragement of diversity of the communities.
BILL MOYERS: And how does that work practically so that Tom doesn’t go back to Oregon and find his job gone?
RICHARD MANNING: A great deal of decentralization, of talking about community control and not talking at the national level or between environmentalists and loggers, but talking at the community level, saying, ”What are our common interests and how do we, as humans, fit into this unique community?”
JEFF DeBONIS: I couldn’t agree more. Sustainable forestry gives sustainable communities, gives sustainable jobs. That’s what we’re talking about.
BILL MOYERS: Over a long period of time.
JEFF DeBONIS: Over a long period of time, yes.
BILL MOYERS: If we take care of the forests now, you nurture jobs for Tom’s grandchildren.
PANELIST: That’s right.
JEFF DeBONIS: Exactly. What we have seen happen is a move toward larger machines, more capital-intensive forestry, which puts people out of work. What we would see in a sustainable scenario would be people-intensive forestry, and I’ll give you just an extreme example. You can hire probably 15 or 20 people and horse-log, selectively log a stand and that will put 15 or 20 people to work or you can buy a $750,000 feller-buncher that employs one person that cuts twice as much timber and the money goes to pay – to pay off the debt on a $750,000 feller-buncher. That’s an extreme example of what we’re talking about is that we should be looking at-
BILL MOYERS: Looking at what?
JEFF DeBONIS: Human-centered forestry.
BILL MOYERS: The last word is yours. Do you think there is, in the way we see trees, the politics of trees, a new politics for America?
TOM HAIRONS: Probably – I hope that what comes out of this and what I hope will influence the environmental movement out there is a kinder, gentler regard for people and more compassion for people in this- we’re being swept aside by a social movement in western Oregon and western Washington. That’s what’s happened to us. And, you know, we’re not going to change that and we’re not going to destroy that social movement and we don’t want to. But we’d like to put more of a human aspect into it to where the people count, too, and people are not counting out there in this debate now on owls and old growth.
BILL MOYERS: Since we taped that discussion, the presidential candidates have been politicking in the forest.
PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: [July 14, 1992] Some of these Sequoias, I was reminded by Dale as we walked through the grove, were already seedlings by the time Christ walked the earth. In Revelations, we learn that the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. We are healing our forests, our parks and our lands. And it’s a beautiful country and I want more and more of the American people to enjoy settings like we’re in right here today.
COMMUNITY LEADER: [July 25, 1992] Look, Governor, you know we’re here to ask you some questions, particularly about those that interest people in the Northwest and the environment is one of them, the spotted owl controversy, balancing that with logging interests and that sort of thing. What would you do differently than the Bush administration has done?
Governor BILL CLINTON: It’s obvious that what – to me, that what we need is a long-term plan that preserves a significant amount of the old growth forest, permits responsible logging to continue, explores new technologies, aggressive reforestation and real, substantial efforts to diversify the economies of the affected communities. I don’t think there is a simple or an easy answer and there’s not a short-term answer, in my view, that’s satisfactory.
BILL MOYERS: How this election might affect our forest policy is something I’ll be discussing with two writers who have covered these issues for many years. William Dietrich has just written a book on the controversy entitled The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covers science and the environment for the Seattle Times.
Perri Knize is a freelance journalist who reports on the environment for the Atlantic Monthly. She’s now living in Missoula, Montana.
What is – how would you sum up George Bush’s record on the forests?
BILL DIETRICH, ”The Final Forest”: Well, I think Bush has sent a very mixed message. He has proposed major tree-planting campaigns both in the United States and the world. He’s talked frequently about the importance of forests. On the other hand, the agency that he oversees was initially refusing to list the spotted owl as a threatened species. His appointees have been critical of any attempt to slow down the harvest of the woods here. And so I think the President has been somewhat inconsistent on this issue publicly and maybe this campaign can clarify a little bit exactly what he does believe.
BILL MOYERS: How do you see Bush’s record?
PERRI KNIZE, Journalist: Well, I just look at what’s happening now with the Council on Competitiveness and how they-
BILL MOYERS: That’s the Dan Quayle-
PERRI KNIZE: That’s the Dan Quayle-
BILL MOYERS: -council that-
PERRI KNIZE: -council and they’re trying to
BILL MOYERS: They’ve been cutting a lot of-
PERRI KNIZE: They’re trying to reduce regulations that would hamper business and they want to recommend that they cancel the appeals process so that ordinary citizens can no longer appeal individual timber sales on the national forests. I see that as proof positive that Bush is a darling of industry.
BILL MOYERS: The Washington Post recently did a long piece called “Clinton’s uneasy peace with industry” and it says, “Arkansas’s powerful timber interests take priority over environment.” It seems that when push came to shove, Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas did the very same thing that George Bush has done as president, choose industry and “jobs” over environmental concerns.
PERRI KNIZE: I think it would be useful if we could frame the question as other than “jobs versus forests” or “jobs versus trees.” It’s – timber mining is what they’re doing. I mean, the trees are gone and then so go the jobs. When you have the industry complaining about jobs, why are they selling the trees to Japan that have not been processed? Why don’t they have them processed here? They’re giving those jobs to Japanese workers. So their argument doesn’t really hold water.
BILL MOYERS: Aren’t you having a real fight, even as we speak here, in Montana over the Montana wilderness bill?
PERRI KNIZE: Yeah. The senate passed a version of it that virtually nobody’s in favor of except the sponsors of the bill. And unfortunately, something does have to be passed because the areas that are now unprotected are going to get logged unless they get protected by legislation. And I think that because this is kind of the last place that we have in the lower 48 where you’ve got elk, moose, wolves, grizzly bear, wild greyling salmon, all living together in the same – it’s kind of like the Serengeti, you know, of the United States, it’s very critical what happens here. And it’s quite different than the Pacific Northwest, where you actually had some profit off logging there. Montana, the northern Rockies, they’ve never made a dime on timber there. They’ve lost millions of dollars every year there.
BILL MOYERS: Isn’t it so that in the northern slopes of the Rockies, the timber cutting is actually more costly to the environment because of the nature of the soil up there?
PERRI KNIZE: Yes, it’s very high elevation, steep, thin soils, short growing season. It takes 120 years to grow a tree to maturity there. A lot of times they just don’t come back. You bare those slopes – just last month they had a – they had had a slash burn that went out of control in the Bitterroot Valley-
BILL MOYERS: A slash burn is-
PERRI KNIZE: Is after they log, the set the slash on fire and kind of try and start the growth cycle going again by adding carbon. And what happened was, is they had a heavy rain storm and the entire southern mountain came down into a creek, killed 99 percent of the fish there. It was a blue ribbon trout stream. That kind of thing happens all the time because it’s just not terrain that’s suited for this type of management.
BILL MOYERS: I’m sympathetic when I hear you, but then I read Bill Dietrich’s book and I – you spent a lot of time out there with the soldiers of the forest, the loggers, the cutters, those men who make their living and have for generations in those forests, and they come across as very sympathetic. I’m torn.
BILL DIETRICH: You do get torn when you talk to these people. I mean, they put up with dangerous, low-paying jobs so they can live in the woods. They have a one in three chance of being killed or seriously injured in their career. They take their self-image, their self-esteem from the fact that they can do this with skill. And it pains them that they’ve been painted as the villains in this and they think they’re the victims, that they’ve been whipsawed, essentially, between the big timber companies, between Congress, between the environmental elite, that they were trying to do the job the best that they knew how and that suddenly, after having housed the United States with all this low-cost wood, they’re being dumped on.
BILL MOYERS: Well, given the shared appreciation of both the foresters, the environmentalists and the cutters, the loggers, the workers, is there any chance of a common ground on this?
BILL DIETRICH: Well, I think there is. I mean, I think there is – and I think a lot of people have a pretty good idea of what the solution might be. First, to preserve a substantial block of the old growth that we have now. Second, to reform the way we grow and harvest trees so it, you know, gives more wildlife values, protects streams and that kind of thing. Third, to do a better job as consumers in how we use wood. I mean, I think recycling a newspaper is just as important as planting a seedling. And fourth, I think this country really needs a better land ethic than we have. We need to start looking way out in the future and I don’t think Congress or the public that it answers to has done a real good job of that.
PERRI KNIZE: I think part of the problem is also that you can go ahead and legislate all these things – we have wonderful legislation on the books. The problem is enforcing it, getting the regulations in. And how is that going to happen? Well, it’s because it’s really a political problem and what you have to – and the politics comes down to money. And what you have to do, I think, is change the incentives that are motivating everybody and what’s motivating the Forest Service is their budget. They want to maximize their budget, like any bureaucracy, like any organization, just like the timber companies want to. And we are funding the Forest Service with timber dollars. They get a large percentage, just about all of the gross timber receipts to fund all their other programs and-
BILL MOYERS: So they have a self-perpetuating interest in letting the trees be cut.
PERRI KNIZE: That’s right. I know of one forest supervisor who decided not to have any cutting on his forest anymore and the first thing he was told was, “Do you know what that’s going to do to your budget? No more money. Sorry, you’re not going to be able to do your wildlife improvement projects and everything.” So what you have to do, I think, is change the way in which the national forests are funded and once you do that-
BILL MOYERS: How?
PERRI KNIZE: Well, what I’ve recommended, and other people have recommended, is that we start funding the forests out of recreation. The Forest Service has found that people are willing to pay a small amount of money to use the national forests. They’ve found, in fact, that in actual dollars, they could raise $5 billion a year on recreation fees on the national forests. That is two and a half times their timber budget alone. It’s two and half times their budget.
BILL MOYERS: Who has been showing leadership on this over the last few years, anybody in particular?
BILL DIETRICH: The first answer I would give would probably be scientists, which I think is interesting. But it was really the scientists who said, ”Wait a minute. We can’t keep running things the way we’re running them” or ”We’re pulling all of our cards out of this house of cards we’ve built and the ecosystem is going to collapse.” And so they sounded the alarm. And the irony is that they sounded it 20 years ago and it’s taken them this long to be heard. And if we had made some of these decisions 20 years ago, we would have had a lot more trees to essentially compromise with, to kind of let people down easily.
BILL MOYERS: Other than the scientists, did you see any leadership in the ’70s, in the ’80s?
BILL DIETRICH: No. The leadership wasn’t there and that’s been a tragedy of this fight. I mean, I think there are individual Congressmen, probably, who have spoken out from time to time and voices of concern have been raised, but we haven’t had the kind of White House leadership that’s focused on this issue at all.
BILL MOYERS: Back in June, when NASA came out with that satellite photograph that showed that the forests in the Northwest were more damaged than the Brazilian forests, what did you think?
BILL DIETRICH: I’ve flown over the Northwest forests and I’ve seen endless photographs and it does look like they’ve been used for machine gun practice. I mean, they’re just rife with clear cuts. And I’ve had foreign visitors come to Seattle and I’ve gone out into the woods with them, people from countries like Brazil and Malaysia, where cutting down the forests is a major issue, and they’ve been shocked. They’ve been shocked at what they see in the Pacific Northwest and they’ve turned to me and said, “How can you Americans complain about what we’re doing when you’ve done worse?”
BILL MOYERS: Do you see any hope for turning that around any time soon?
PERRI KNIZE: Frankly, I don’t. I think that the Forest Service and the administration have done a lot of public relations cosmetics to try and convince the public that they are changing and that they are going to handle this issue differently. And what I see on the ground is the same old monkeyshines.
BILL MOYERS: I’d like to give the last word to a citizen named Graham R. Hodges of Liverpool, New York. Here’s a letter he wrote this summer to The New York Times.
“What do the ancient trees of our virgin forests have in common with Yellowstone Park, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Park? Answer: They belong to all Americans in common, not to any Wall Street corporation, to the Japanese who buy them so cheaply or even to the rapidly shrinking workforce of loggers who are waiting to cut them down. We did not create them, we inherited them. They’re not ours or anybody’s to destroy. When they’re gone, there will be no more and jobs for loggers will vanish with them. What’s at stake is not the spotted owl. It’s whether these big cedar, redwood and fir trees, a common inheritance that we neither planted nor tended, belong to all of us Americans or to a few who want to cut, rape and run. There is ample land in the United States for plantation trees that can furnish all the lumber we need. The Forest Service knows this. It’s up to us to tell the Forest Service whether the few own these trees or the many. For the sake of our grandchildren, the White House can save them, if it wants to.”
I’m Bill Moyers. Thanks for listening to America.
You can view more about the series, Listening To America, on this website.
This transcript was entered on April 9, 2015.
