Opinion Column: Ancient Groves

Former Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin argues that the Siuslaw National Forest's sensible logging a model to counter the greed that's again whittling away at old growth.

The canopy of an old-growth cedar on Mount Hood. Photo by Oregon Wild.

During my last years as a U.S. congressman from Oregon, the treatment of the public's old-growth forests in the Northwest provoked national indignation. Decades of what many saw as excessive logging had whittled the ancient stands to a fraction of their former magnificence.

At the center of that debate was the northern spotted owl. Saving the owl meant protecting the old growth, its home. Nearly 15 years later, the spotted owl is still in decline. And yet, inconceivably, it is once again under political attack.

As reported last Sunday in The Oregonian, some now say the spotted owl will never fully recover. Which raises the question of whether the considerable economic dislocation in Oregon's timber industry was for naught.

I'm not a forest biologist. Nor are most of those who dismiss as worthless the effort to save the owl. They include the Bush administration and its backers in the timber industry who have conspired to resurrect corporate logging of the public's old-growth forests. Others may be right that the aggressive barred owl, an invasive species reported to be spreading through Northwest forests, is a contributing source of the spotted owl's continued decline.

But these lines of argument miss the bigger picture.

Thanks to the spotted owl, much of its habitat -- the last remaining 15 percent of the region's old-growth forests, according to The Oregonian's own reporting -- have been protected for current and future generations. These ancient stands provide a legacy of special places in which Oregonians hike, camp, fish, enjoy family and friends, or savor the simple pleasure of unmatched solitude.

But that's only the beginning. Science has taught us that old-growth forests are irreplaceable in safeguarding clean water, protecting world-class fisheries, controlling floods, providing sanctuaries for rare plants and animals, and procreating forms of life that, in their interplay, give forests strength and vigor.

The clamor over the spotted owl and our forests led to the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. With old-growth forests disappearing fast, a day of reckoning was coming. The spotted owl merely brought it sooner. It was simply a matter of whether change came before or after the last old-growth tree was cut. Under the landmark plan, industrial logging was weighed for the first time alongside recreation and the needs of salmon and other fish and wildlife.

Oregon's timber industry retrenched and has since adapted. And though it always covets more trees, it's doing well. The Western Wood Products Association reports that lumber production in 2005 in the 13-state Western region was its highest since 1990, paced by increased output from mills in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. This shows that regional mills don't need to cut old growth to be viable.

Unfortunately, these figures don't represent enough horizontal trees for the Bush administration. It's out to increase corporate logging by destroying protections for public old-growth forests, rolling back the clock on our inheritance of salmon, clean water and wildlife habitat. Its gambit is a new "recovery" plan that removes spotted owl habitat as an obstacle to logging old growth and erases the benefits the ancient groves provide.

Outside the Washington Beltway, local forest managers have moved beyond the old bloodletting that the administration seems eager to resume. By focusing logging on public lands previously logged -- many of which are now overgrown and in need of thinning -- and staying out of pristine old-growth reserves and roadless backcountry, they are providing wood to local mills while actually improving conditions for fish and wildlife.

Managers of the Siuslaw National Forest have convened loggers, local governments, conservation groups and recreational users to design projects that enjoy broad community support. For their efforts, they've won numerous awards -- and the Siuslaw is consistently among the largest timber producers among Oregon's national forests.

By dragging Oregon and other Northwest states back into the ill-informed past, the administration undercuts enlightened thinking shown to work in places like Oregon's Siuslaw National Forest.

There's a word for this: greed. Irresponsible, indefensible, perfidious greed. Benefiting the few, mainly the timber industry, at the expense of almost everyone else.

Congress must stop this without delay. Lawmakers should pass legislation to take the matter out of the administration's hands, to direct the Forest Service in the West to follow the Siuslaw model -- logging previously cutover lands and preserving roadless backcountry areas and our remaining old growth, the incubators of forest life.

This is a prescription for flourishing rural communities and healthy stocks of salmon, steelhead and other important wildlife that make up the web of life on which each of us depends.

Les AuCoin, a resident of Ashland, represented Oregon in the U.S. House of Representatives for 18 years until 1993. He is a co-author of the book "Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Management" (Island Press, 2006).