Thirty-some years ago, a local businessman dropped by The New Era to chat with the publisher.
The vistor reported that he’d heard about a movement to shut down logging in the local national forest, ostensibly to protect a small, shy creature with a cuddly appearance, which was believed to require the deep recesses of old-growth forests for its survival: the northern spotted owl.
“This is dangerous,” the visitor warned.
We all know what happened thereafter, and the memories are particularly painful for people who lived in Sweet Home in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The court decisions, instigated by radical environmentalists, whose real concern was clear-cut logging, and the resulting political turmoil that produced the Northwest Forest Plan in 1996. That plan left many timber communities, such as Sweet Home, impoverished and the spotted owl still declining, more recently courtesy of its larger cousin, the barred owl.
Now, 20 years after the Northwest Forest Plan, comes a new proposal by some of the same folks who instigated the original spotted owl movement. This one is called the Douglas Fir National Monument.
As we report on pages 1 and 11, its authors propose setting aside a nearly half-million-acre expanse of forestland, most of it immediately east of Sweet Home, to protect “one of America’s greatest natural treasures, the coast Douglas fir forest ecosystem.”
It’s the brainchild of Andy Kerr and Stephen Sharnoff. Kerr is not unfamiliar to anyone who knows anything about the bitter timber wars of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, in which he played a lead role.
He has since settled down in a log home in Ashland, from which he exits to lobby for and advise environmental causes in Washington D.C. His areas of expertise, listed on his website, andykerr.net, include “killing, stopping and removing dams,” high-donor and foundation fund-raising and political strategy, a wide range of environemntal and conservation causes, industrial hemp and national monuments.
Sharnoff, a Berkeley, Calif. resident, is a nature photographer who specializes in lichens. He does beautiful work, which has been featured in major magazines such as National Geographic.
Their 24-page proposal is slick, glossy and well-endowed with Sharnoff’s quality photography. For someone who isn’t close to the action, it’s a convincing piece of work.
But it lacks substantially in critical areas that, we would hope, federal officials would seriously consider before they advise President Obama, who has the authority to create such a monument.
One is science. The politics during the environmental timber wars left little room for true science, really. Social and political pressures can often have toxic effects on wise policy.
We’re not suggesting that environmentalists’ concerns about timber harvests on federal lands were entirely invalid. We’re not even suggesting that the spotted owl and other creatures believed to be dependent on the hallowed groves of deep old-growth forests for survival, aren’t important.
But when U.S. District Judge William Dwyer shut down logging in vast stretches of federal lands on May 23, 1991, his justifications – provided by opponents of logging – were as thin then as they are now.
And, two decades later, the wounds from that thrust and what followed are still visible in communities like Sweet Home.
In the 25 years since, the science hasn’t gotten much better, which is one reason why Oregon State University is working to establish an Institute for Working Forest Landscapes in our local forests.
Meanwhile, as we said, the spotted owl is still in decline. But even before the finalization of the Northwest Forest Plan, which was the end result of Dwyer’s and other rulings, significant questions were raised about the validity of the presumption that the species could only survive in ancient forests.
Apparently, few cared. The die had been cast, despite the fact tha the mold was largely a combination of what now appears to have been junk science, savvy public relations and politicking.
It’s that kind of mentality that propels us headlong, as a society, into stupid mistakes, and that’s why we’re concerned that intelligent, informed voices, such as Dr. Thomas Maness, dean of the Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, could be ignored by federal officials.
Kerr remains expert at advocating for these causes.
His website lists dozens of wilderness areas, Wild and Scenic Rivers designations, congressionally legislated special management areas, Oregon Scenic Waterways, and one proclaimed national monument that he credits himself with engineering between 1975 and 2013.
More recently, he’s involved himself in the Old Growth Protection and Jobs Act of 2011; the expansion of the Wild Rogue Wilderness and Rogue Wild and Scenic River, the expansion of Oregon Caves National Monument, the “establishment of 2.6 million acres of new national forests and wildlife refuges in western Oregon,” and other similar efforts.
Maness, meanwhile, has been watching the development – or lack thereof – of turning the Willamette National Forest into a productive resource for both its inhabitants and its neighbors.
His OSU School of Forestry has been working with the U.S. Forest Service to establish a “world-class research and outreach center for healthy landscapes,” the Institute for Working Forest Landscapes, in the state’s forests to develop better management of forest resources by balancing ecological, social, and economic needs.
We need that. The fall-out of the legal decisions and the administrative reaction on Sweet Home is obvious to anyone who lived here before and after the timber wars. There’s no question that poverty has significantly increased in our community in the last 20 years.
In 1999-2000, the earliest figures immediately available, 45.5 percent of students in Sweet Home School District were eligible for free or reduced lunches, one fairly reliable measure of poverty levels. The figure for Linn County as a whole that year was 36.8 percent. Last year, 2014-15, the figure for Sweet Home School District was 63.8 percent, a 40.2 percent increase. Linn County’s was 44.3 percent, a 20.4 percent increase over those 15 years.
Life has been tough, but Sweet Home has not been idle. The Oregon Jamboree is one of the community’s efforts to find new ways to survive.
We also have recently hosted the Governor’s Solutions Team, whose focus was to help Sweet Home establish recreational, economically and environmentally responsible and viable use of the forests east of town. We’ve hosted the Livability Initiative, another effort to improve things here.
Beyond the questions of how those proposing this national monument can sustain their arguments with solid science is this: How much do they really care about the fallout on the human population created by their proposal?
Neither of them, they acknowledge, have had a close public encounter with Sweet Home in recent years. As far as we’ve been able to determine, there has been zero communication at all with Linn County officials about this idea, let alone people who actually live within miles of where the monument would be located.
Let’s stop and think about this for a second: They advocate establishing a half-million-acre virtual shutdown of our local forests and they haven’t bothered to even discuss it with anyone in Linn County before their plan saw the light of day.
Since their proposal contains no references to any of OSU’s efforts to do solid science in the very areas they’re targeting, we wonder if they are aware of those either.
The public arena can be pretty slimy and it’s interesting, if not aggravating, to watch how public policy gets made.
At the risk of being overly cynical, this proposal appears to be essentially the brainchild of two individuals, one who despises logging and the other a guy who takes beautiful nature photos and who loves lichens, to impose what they want on us, who live hundreds of miles away.
This thing is dangerous because at least one of them, Kerr, has had a lot of success ramming through legislation or administrative decisions that line up with his view of how the world should be – and probably line his pocketbook.
But, at least in our case, another result is a poverty-stricken community struggling to find itself while hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest forestland continues to be overgrown and poorly managed, an accident waiting to happen on a hot summer’s day.
We implore President Obama and his staff, who have the power to make this call, to have a conscience and look beyond the slick brochure. Do the research necessary to determine whether another knee-jerk response or a sustained, scientific approach to forest – and community – recovery would be best for the Willamette National Forest.
We all value the great outdoors. That is why many Sweet Home residents live here.
We love the forests, the rivers, the wildlife and all the other pleasures that come from living in this environment – which neither of the authors do.