In Idaho, the loggers are losing: Idahoans have watched their lumber industry grind to a halt as environmentalists use the courts to stop logging in national forests. Meanwhile, locals struggle to earn a living

Insight on the News, Dec 24, 2001 by Valerie Richardson

Look in any direction along this stretch of rural Idaho near Cascade. It's all trees -- thousands upon thousands of acres of lodge-pole pine and Douglas fir, cascading down hills and blanketing mountains as far as the eye can see. For a century, the trees of the Boise, Payette, Nez Perce and Clearwater national forests provided the people here with shelter, work, recreation and a way of life.

No longer. As poet Samuel Coleridge once observed about the ocean -- "Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink" -- so Idaho's forests are filled with millions of trees that cannot be touched. For the last decade, timber communities throughout the Pacific Northwest have waged a legal and public-relations battle with environmental groups; by all accounts and on every front, the loggers are losing.

President Theodore Roosevelt's vision of maintaining the national forests as the nation's lumber supply was replaced during the Clinton administration by the idea that forests should be preserved in their natural state. The amount of timber that could be harvested was reduced drastically, both by the administration's moratorium on road-building and by the legal system, as environmentalists took to the courts to stop the logging.

That shift has come at a price. There are more trees and more old growth, but also more disease and dead wood. There are fewer chain saws in the forests, but also fewer mills, homes and families. And within the small, wooded hamlets whose denizens have cut and replanted the trees for generations, there is poverty, dislocation, anger and a sense of disbelief that slowly is turning into resignation.

"It's tough, especially for the kids, because they look around and there are trees everywhere you look," says Dick Vandenburg, a Cascade City Council member. "They don't understand the politics."

Idaho and the rest of the Pacific Northwest have watched the timber economy plummet during the last decade, taking with it a dozen mills and at least 30,000 jobs. The reasons include automation and greater efficiency, falling lumber prices and stiff competition from cheaper Canadian lumber.

"The reason the mills closed is soft prices, imports from Canada and the timber industry's willingness to move to other countries because of relaxed environmental standards under NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]," says Roger Singer, director of the Sierra Club's Idaho chapter. "The sudden downturn in the industry is due to market forces, not environmental challenges."

People in the timber industry maintain they could have handled such fluctuations without closing the mills. What they couldn't handle was the political assault from the environmental movement.

"All these mills have been around for almost a century," says Steve Bliss, a former mill worker and union representative from Horseshoe Bend. "They've been through economic upturns and downturns. They went through the Depression. But you can't operate without raw materials. It has nothing to do with the economy and nothing to do with demand. It has everything to do with the environmental movement and political correctness."

Each year, the U.S. Forest Service offers stands of timber for sale as determined under the forest plan, then takes bids and awards the sale to the highest bidder. (The national forests are distinct from wilderness areas, where trees by law cannot be harvested; in Idaho, where 68 percent of the Gem State's 53 million acres is run by the federal government, 7.5 percent of the land is classified as wilderness.) Starting in the mid-1980s, however, environmental groups began stepping up their opposition to timber sales in the national forests. Recently, they've managed to bring the process to a grinding halt by filing legal challenges, or appeals, to most timber sales.

The appeals usually are based on perceived problems with the sale, such as a failure to take into account endangered species or sensitive wildlife habitat. Sometimes they are successful, and a judge halts the sale. "The reason we're successful is because the Forest Service isn't playing by the rules," says John McCarthy, wildlife director of the Idaho Conservation League, which is responsible for many of the challenges. "They can't account for old growth and how it affects endangered species. We can always find experts on the inside who will say, `They're doing it wrong.'"

Even when the appeals fail, the process can drag on for years. That's too much time for small logging outfits and mills, which can go out of business waiting for a challenge to move through the legal system.

"You have one year to harvest whitewood," says Cascade Mayor Larry Walters. "But as soon as you put a sale up, you get hit with appeals. By the time it's resolved, that wood is no good anymore. It's just such a waste."

In February, Boise Cascade Corp. announced that it would shut down its mills in Cascade and Emmett, laying off 400 workers. While some critics blamed poor management, Chairman George J. Harad cited lack of raw materials. The closures came as the end of an era for Boise Cascade, which has seen its mills in Idaho decline from five to none. "Despite an adequate supply of timber, under the policies of the Clinton administration and pressure from environmental groups, the amount of timber offered for commercial harvest has declined more than 90 percent over the past five years," says Harad.