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Eugene Weekly : Coverstory : 8.30.07


Politics and Precipitation in the Coast Range






The fate of the Coast Range is sealed by location: Halfway between the North Pole and the equator and right next to the Pacific Ocean, which sends rain clouds in huge numbers ashore each winter. The moist, temperate climate has birthed the world's greatest forest, home to the oldest, largest trees on Earth, with more biomass per acre than any other terrestrial ecosystem.



When I was a kid, we fed chicken guts to a small brown owl in the evening underneath the towering trees up the hill from our house. One adult called it a "wood owl." Another called it a "pootie owl." The final, definitive, opinion was "spotted owl."


I've heard people say that the northern spotted owl has been acclimated to humans by hordes of biologists bearing lab mice as bait. It isn't true. That owl was completely unafraid of humans long before it got famous. No one ever goes to the Coast Range forest. In millions of years of evolution, the owl has never needed to fear humans because we've never lived in the lightless, rain-drenched, impenetrable jungle it calls home.

My parents still live in the same house, but there are no spotted owls anywhere within 20 miles. Every single bit of old growth has been converted to forestry's version of the cornfield, the ubiquitous Coast Range tree farm.



Many of my childhood friends were refugees from Valsetz. Drug abuse, domestic violence, poverty, unemployment: That's why we've got to log the Coast Range, the timber industry tells us. To fund social services.

The timber industry isn't going to solve the problem. They caused the problem, long before anyone had ever heard of the spotted owl.

Boise didn't burn out the town from sheer heartlessness. No, the town had to go because Boise needed to bury a bunch of industrial waste left over from the mill and didn't want people around drinking the water.

The old town site, there's your first stop on the Coast Range tour. Just head west out of Falls City (30 miles west of Salem). There's only one road. Drive it for an hour or so, if you dare. You'll know you're there, if you're not swallowed by the maze, by big signs that read:





I used to camp out on Phanno Ridge, off to the east. On hot summer days, sure enough, there'd be a dull BANG! and a white flash down in the valley. Acetylene or propane or something even worse left over the mill, dumped in a shallow grave, igniting in the heat. Everything else is gone.


Where'd all the trees from the Siletz Valley get to? Maybe the next stop of this tour should be the suburbs of Tokyo. Check out the wood in the new homes: Tight grained fir from the Oregon Coast Range. Curtis LeMay's B-29s leveled every city in the country, and the Japanese didn't rebuild with local materials. The fourth Tokugawa Shogun (not exactly the East Coast liberal politician type) banned logging on Japan's steep coastal mountains in 1666 — because landslides were burying too many of the peasants.

I once took the ferry across Japan's Yokohama Bay, one of the world's great harbors. This was in 1988, the highwater mark of Coast Range logging. A field of 7-foot thick Douglas firs a mile wide and 5 miles long bobbed gently in the still water. I don't know how much money changed hands to send an entire forest across the Pacific, but it had to be a lot, and not a dime of it stuck to the town I grew up in.



That's the people I grew up with. They kind of remind me a lot of landscape itself: Mostly unseen and extravagantly damaged. They aren't stupid; it's just that they only get to choose from a pack of lies what they're going to believe in. There are no friends, family, newspaper reporters or politicians who have ever offered up any truth.

Conflict is the norm for the Coast Range. A valley near where I grew up is named Socialist Valley after a radical IWW agitator who was murdered for trying to organize in the logging camps. It's as good a place to get shot at because of your politics now as it was then.

I've been involved in the Coast Range timber wars since before I could vote. I'm from the Coast Range. I've hiked the forest with congressional staff, reporters and foresters, too. The conservation group I founded, the Cascadia Wildlands Project, proposed a plan to triple logging in the Coast Range by thinning the second growth forest that are pretty much all that's left instead of logging the last of the old growth. That proposal would probably be law today if it weren't for the Bush administration.

The Bush administration's lovely parting gift to Oregon, the just released Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR), opens up the old-growth forests set aside for spotted owls in the Coast Range for logging — the few, scattered islands of old growth awash in a sea of clearcuts. The plan, says Curry County Commissioner Georgia Nowlin, "meets all requirements of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act."

Jim Frick, chairman of the Southern Oregon Resource Alliance, one of a dozen or so "grassroots groups" (with no members and funded exclusively by timber dollars) that's sprouted up to push the WOPR, says, "The Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act were put into the equation."


The plan isn't legal, and it wasn't intended to be legal. Spotted owl populations continue to decline, the owl's habitat continues to decline and logging more of their habitat will lead populations to decline still further. Duh.



I know the timber wars inside and and out. Mostly, though, I know the Coast Range. A "vexation of the spirit," that's what Ken Kesey said about it. Sometimes I think the place is a wound that's got no hope of healing.



The WOPR is open to public comment until November (at www.blm.gov/or/plans/wopr/).It'll be raining by then.