Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 4, 1992 TAG: 9203040282
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For years, the U.S. Forest Service has sold timber rights - for questionably low fees - to the logging industry, a practice which has affected national preserves from Southwest Virginia's Jefferson National Forest to the forests of the Western states.
Last year's proposal that the Forest Service keep key areas of woodland untimbered, in order to protect its natural ecosystem, caused a particularly loud uproar in the Northwest. But the issue is of national import.
Here in Washington state, the battle is fought on bumpers: "Stop Logging; Save the Owl!" "Ban the Owl; Save a Job!" The equation seems impossible to balance. Forest minus owl equals logger; forest minus logger equals owl.
Reared in the East, I came to this part of the country with a Paul Bunyan image in my head. But logging is now done by a few laborers, a number of tanks, and chains that stretch across stands of old-growth trees and mow them down in one swat.
The logger's job has been endangered for 20 years. Its predator has not been a spotted owl, but greed.
Forests are like seed corn: You can either treat them as a future resource, thinning selectively and waiting for trees to grow to full size, or you consume them all now. The latter requires less labor and produces lumber faster, but it also ends faster (and for good) the forest, forest-associated jobs, and the ecosystem.
At the present rate of destruction, even without wildlife restrictions, the available Northwest timber will last only five more years. How, environmentalists are asking, does the timber industry foresee its own survival?
It doesn't. With all the uproar over nature's taking away jobs, the logging industry itself doesn't plan to be here next decade. Cleared land brings a good price from developers, so there's little motiva-tion to cut selectively or plant future forest.
"My friends tell me I better cut while the cutting's good," said Matt Stanley, a young trail worker in the Quinault Rain Forest. His friends know the business won't last. Nonetheless, they resent attempts to protect what little national-forest timber is left. "When you're making good money," Stanley said, "it's hard to think you're going to stop for a bird."
The spotted owl is what biologists call an indicator species: Its presence signifies the well-being of hundreds of other plants and animals; its extinction indicates the death of an entire system.
In like fashion, the debate itself is an indicator. We have spent a century profiting from nature; flagging profits now should indicate that something ails the environment.
The issue is also an indicator of the question we will face again and again: Is it reasonable to protect nature during a time of financial crisis? The entire Endangered Secies Act is now under attack. Opponents say the act should be made more comfortable for expiring industries than expiring species. Whether we can run industries without a world full of species does not seem in question.
The threat that an election year poses to the spotted owl also indicates the smallness of our national vision. Focusing on nothing beyond our democracy has given us a shortsightedness that endangers the human species.
We live, before all, in a larger-than-democratic system: one not only of demos, but also of owls, trees, fish and moss - none of whom may cast a vote or purchase timber rights. If we have trouble considering these animals and trees as citizens of this land, perhaps we can see them as indicators of our own species: our children, all future children, whose existence depends upon the existence of wildlife.
The equation will balance itself, whether we help it or not. The owl's extinction, the loggers', our own: It's all the same.
Liza Field is a Roanoker living temporarily in Langley, Wash.
by CNB