Andy said in a comment:
Is it any wonder that the newly-elected President Clinton, who had promised during his campaign to resolve the nation’s thorniest environmental/jobs conflict of the late 20th century, would want a Forest Service chief up to the task. Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons was assigned the unenviable job of picking up the shattered pieces of national forest policy. Jim selected JWT as point person to lead the Forest Service out of the morass.
Sure Clinton promised to “resolve the issue” but he was a politician, and campaign promises are usually not worth the electrons used to write them down. They are the epitome of what I used to call in the Forest Service “management by wishful thinking.” So here I’d like to ask the question “was the issue resolved?” I would say … not.. we seem to be debating the same things as the early 90’s.
Which takes us back to the Utah lawsuit from yesterday. Would there be a way to do some kind of “peace proposal” between the western states and the feds on the topic of federal lands?
What can we learn from the “peace proposal” that was the Northwest Forest Plan about the process of, and the success of, one very expensive and prolonged experiment in peace-making?
Many environmental groups were not satisfied with the NWFP and continue to litigate various projects that follow the NWFP. So were the wrong people in the room for the agreement? What would it mean to violate the terms of the agreement? It seems like that would be clear from the timber harvest side, but perhaps not so much from the environmental side. Is it a case of the federal lands “quid pro nada” which is a systemic problem in which “protected lands” are not contested, but the “you can do that here” parts continue to be after the agreement? Or is the concept of peace irrelevant to these kinds of disputes?
If we go back to Chief Thomas’s restatement of classic Kohelet wisdom I posted this spring:
There is a time to fight. There is a time for all things under the sun. There is a time to make peace. I think the general environmental war related to the Forest Service is over. In reality, industry needs to abandon sponsoring “ghost dances” to bring back the buffalo—i.e., the good old days. Those days aren’t coming back. It is time for the environmentalists to ease up. They are not going to finish off those who extract natural resources. Now we’ve come to where we stand today. And it is time to ask, “What are some of the things that we could agree upon?”
People are answering that question at the forest level via collaborative groups and their “zones of agreement.” And we can ask “if they can, why can’t higher levels?” What is going on that happens at the larger scales so that we can’t get broader scale agreements that stick? My guess is that the higher level involves people who don’t care about peace. ENGO’s are going for their max desires. There is no reason to compromise for them, perhaps. Many politicians are beholden to political parties that want to milk, rather than resolve, disputes. I’d be interested in what others think.
Maybe resolving conflict, or making peace, are impossible in our chunk of the world.
For historical purposes, let’s look at this San Francisco Chronicle via Chicago Tribune article from 1993.
Strangely, the article was “updated” in 2021. I bolded the “old growth” part, but that may have been “updated.” I suppose I should check the Wayback Machine.
President Clinton’s peace proposal for the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest was rejected instantly by both sides, with environmentalists declaring it “voodoo forestry” and timber cutters vowing to fight it in court.
Delivering the plan he promised three months ago at his Portland forest summit, Clinton proposed reducing timber harvests 75 percent from historic highs to better protect the spotted owl and other species and committing more than $1 billion toward easing the economic fallout.
The president insisted that his strategy balances jobs and nature and can be defended both legally and scientifically, but he readily conceded that it “may not make anybody happy.” The problem, he suggested, is that after “years of overcutting,” there is simply too little forest left.
“We have to play the hand we were dealt,” Clinton said. “Had this crisis been dealt with years ago, we might have a plan with a higher (timber) yield and with more . . . protected areas. We are doing the best we can with the facts as they now exist in the Pacific Northwest.”
Clinton’s proposal-key elements of which must be approved by Congress or the courts-represents a dramatic shift in priorities for 22 million acres of federal land stretching from Northern California through western Oregon and Washington.
Instead of dedicating areas primarily to timber-cutting or to preserving a single species such as the northern spotted owl, Clinton’s plan would create a 6.7 million-acre network of forest “reserves” where a wide range of species would be preserved and “very limited” logging allowed.
But far from breaking the timber deadlock, as he had promised in Portland to do, Clinton’s proposal set off a new round of recriminations that appeared to underscore the irreconcilability of the competing visions for the largest remaining stands of virgin forest in the lower 48 states.
Environmentalists, who have been uncompromising in their demands that all or most of the old growth be permanently protected, were furious that logging would be allowed in the proposed reserves, which encompass 80 percent of the old-growth stands.
“The Forest Service refers to this as new forestry,” said Joan Reiss, the Wilderness Society’s regional director in San Francisco. “But when you’re talking about ancient forests, new forestry is voodoo forestry. We need inviolate reserves and we got none of that at all.”
The timber industry, meanwhile, said the reduced harvests-from a high of more than 4 billion board-feet a year in the late 1980s to 1.2 billion board-feet a year in the coming decade-would be a fatal blow to timber towns in the region.
“The president didn’t make good on either half of his promise for a balanced solution. This ain’t balanced and this ain’t a solution,” said Mark Rey of the American Forest and Paper Association.
“There is nothing in this plan that gives any hope to the people in the Pacific Northwest who depend on the forest products industry.”
Rey said the industry will fight back in the courts, where it will challenge Clinton’s plan and press for immediate timber sales, and in Congress, where it will push amendments to weaken protections for the spotted owl and other wildlife under the Endangered Species Act.
The California Forestry Association, which represents the state’s timber industry, said it will file a petition seeking an end to the owl’s designation as a threatened species in Northern California, where the bird appears to be thriving in second-growth redwoods.
Although the timber industry predicted job losses numbering in the tens of thousands, the administration said its plan would directly affect only 6,000 jobs and would wind up creating more than 8,000 jobs in coming years, mostly in environmental restoration work.
The economic package, which calls for $1.2 billion in new spending over five years, must be approved by Congress, as must a proposed end to tax subsidies for the export of raw logs from private lands.
And now we’ve got NOGA and shooting owls. Was there a better way?