by Eric Rutkow
The momentum from Earth Day helped to finally push Nelson’s cause onto the nation’s political agenda. The ideas that he had first proposed in his “Environmental Agenda for the 1970s” speech now began to gain widespread support. Several months after Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency was created, and the ensuing years saw the passage of landmark environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Act (1976), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (1980, also known as Superfund). The 1970s had turned into the “environmental decade,” and Nelson remained at the center of an environmental movement that had come of age around the day that he created.
However, by 1980 the national mood was shifting. Nelson’s environmental leadership became a liability in a time of rising conservatism. He lost his Senate seat in the same election that lifted Ronald Reagan to the White House.
By this point, Nelson was sixty-four years old. Retirement was an obvious option, but Nelson was not yet ready to abandon the issues that he had been championing for more than thirty years. He accepted an offer to serve as counselor for the Wilderness Society, where he could carry on the legacy of Leopold, Marshall, and Zahniser. In 1995, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. At the presentation ceremony, President Bill Clinton said, “As the father of Earth Day he is the grandfather of all that grew out of that event.” Nelson died ten years later, on July 3, 2005. The New York Times obituary described him as “the architect of America’s modern environmental movement.”
Earth Day, meanwhile, had taken on a life of its own. Though Nelson had intended it as a onetime affair, many of the organizers and participants wanted to see it institutionalized. April 22 soon became an unofficial day of environmental awareness in America, and the idea gradually spread to other nations. For the twentieth anniversary in 1990, activities were held in more than 140 countries. Global involvement was estimated at 200 million people. The annual celebrations continue to serve as a showcase for leading environmental concerns.
Earth Day’s institutionalization, however, also abraded the status of Arbor Day. Trees were no longer a stand-alone concern, but part of a broader outlook. If further evidence of this shift was needed, perhaps it could be found in the decision of the Yale School of Forestry—the nation’s oldest—to change its name in 1972 to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Nonetheless, the rise of environmentalism did not mean that Americans had stopped paying attention to their woody resources. Rather, in the years ahead, the fate of the nation’s trees would continue to demand public attention, and one of the greatest forest battles in the history of the nation was looming on the horizon.
The Forest or the Trees?
ON APRIL 2, 1993, the scene in downtown Portland, Oregon, was chaos and cacophony. Logging trucks snaked along the streets and honked their horns. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tens of thousands of demonstrators—split into two rival factions—gathered in the rain to march and chant and hold up placards: “For a Forester, Every Day Is Earth Day”; “Clinton, Gore, Cut No More”; “We Support Our Timber Industry.”
The real action, however, was unfolding away from the public square. In a conference room nearby, where C-SPAN cameras were broadcasting live and reporters from national media outlets jockeyed for space, sat Bill Clinton, the newly elected president; Al Gore, his environmentally oriented vice president; and a full third of their cabinet. They had come to listen. And they had come to seek a solution for a crisis over the region’s great forests, the very same tree-filled landscape that had once captivated Frederick Weyerhaeuser, had once provided the Sitka spruce that altered the course of World War I, had once produced the Douglas fir timber that sustained the postwar housing boom, and that now was locked up by court order. It was a day that had the potential to affect tens of thousands of jobs, tens of millions of forest acres, and, quite likely, the future of logging itself.
Yet this controversy—grand enough to summon a president and his cabinet from three thousand miles away, powerful enough to bring an entire industry to its knees—had begun, innocently enough, over the future of an owl that few had ever seen.
The animal in question, which by the time of Clinton’s appearance had become among the most studied creatures in history, was commonly known as the northern spotted owl. The word “spotted” referenced the flecks of white that dotted its chocolate plumage and helped distinguish it from other owl species. The word “northern” conveyed its range. It was the northernmost of three spotted owl subspecies, its territory extending from the lower reaches of British Columbia, through Washington and Oregon (where its numbers were highest), and into parts of Northern California. Within this region, it typically made its home in the snags and hollows of trees whose provenance often predated that of the nation.
Europeans had first identified the northern spotted owl in the mid-nineteenth century, but the subspecies, which hunted at night and lived in the deep woods, garnered almost no attention until the late 1960s. It was then that a young wildlife biologist, Eric Forsman, first encountered the owl’s distinctive hoot, “a kind of barking sound,” as he described it. Intrigued, Forsman began to seek out the reclusive creature and, along with several other researchers, started to map its habitat. As they gathered data, they realized that the owls nested almost exclusively in the undisturbed, unlogged forests that were known as “old growth.”
This type of monarchical forest had once covered nearly the entire region. But centuries of lumbering had exhausted almost all of the old growth that was not held in public trust, mainly as national forest. Even this remaining portion—about 10 million acres spread across a 24-million-acre area—was rapidly falling to the lumberman’s ax, a consequence of the postwar decision to expand industrial access to the national forests. Unless something changed, the northern spotted owl’s demise seemed inevitable.
There had been a time when such a concern would have been met with blank stares, if not outright mockery and charges of lunacy. Daniel Boone, the embodiment of the frontier spirit, had not protected forest animals; he had killed them (and did it barehanded, according to the legends). In the race to settle the continent, Americans had lustfully, even gleefully, decimated the buffalo, eradicated the passenger pigeon, and slaughtered numerous other species. Sportsmen like Teddy Roosevelt had demonstrated some concern for the perpetuation of animals, but only those that counted as game. Predators and anything too small to serve as a mounted trophy remained dependent on their wits.
It was only during the era of Aldo Leopold that a more encompassing view of wildlife began to emerge. Leopold’s own conversion had taken place early in his career, when he was stationed in the Southwest and hunting wolves as part of the Forest Service’s varmint eradication policies. In a famous passage, he wrote,
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Leopold’s new perspective gained increasing traction among conservationists with the growing acceptance of ecology, which gave equal weight to all the organisms in a given environment. The forests were no longer just about the trees, but about the entire spectrum of life, from bacteria to fungi to insects to predators, like the wolf and the spotted owl. The health of a forest could be measured not in board feet but in biodiversity.
The need to protect this biodiversity subsequently became one of the tenets of the post–Earth Day environmental movement. The decade-long legislative reformation that Senator Nelson helped spearhead included the p
assage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The new law created a system through which endangered or threatened plants and animals could have their numbers protected and, ideally, increased.
Nixon applauded the ESA as a measure that would give the federal government the “needed authority to protect an irreplaceable part of our national heritage—threatened wildlife.” But the act was much more than that. Whether or not Nixon realized it, he had just authorized one of the most powerful tools in the history of conservation. And as the spotted owl saga would soon demonstrate, it was impossible to protect the endangered wildlife without preserving the entire ecosystem that sustained it.
The ESA, however, was not the only step that Congress took to protect biodiversity. In 1976, it passed the National Forest Management Act, a sweeping set of reforms that, among other things, heightened the Forest Service’s obligations to protect threatened species. Whereas the 1960 MUSYA had simply listed wildlife protection as one of the five main uses for the national forests, this new act authorized an independent scientific council to promulgate specific regulations for the management of wildlife. The resulting regulations, adopted in 1982, required the Forest Service to manage habitats “to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired non-native vertebrate species in the planning area.” Thus, even if a species wasn’t specifically listed under the ESA, it might still necessitate special protection if its home range was located within a national forest.
Such was the case with the northern spotted owl. By the early 1980s, it had been subject to a decade’s worth of research, and almost all the studies confirmed the subspecies’ near-absolute dependence on the old growth that was largely contained in national forests. In 1983—one year after the “viability” regulation was enacted—the Forest Service recognized the northern spotted owl as a key “indicator species” to forest health, and the agency subsequently proposed a special management plan for the national forests in Oregon.
However, it was a limited, conservative plan designed to minimize any impact on logging activities. Many in the Forest Service had remained committed to maximizing timber production above all other uses. This attitude was, broadly speaking, loyal to the vision of Pinchot and in the early twentieth century would have seemed downright progressive.
But times had changed. The rise of ecological thinking meant that many—biologists and environmentalists in particular—felt that a perspective that privileged logging was shortsighted, backward, and ultimately a danger to the long-term health of forests. By the mid-1980s, national environmental groups began to direct their legal resources toward challenging the government’s management of the northern spotted owl. (Their ultimate goal was widely acknowledged to be the protection of the old-growth forest itself; however, as a matter of legal strategy, it seemed efficacious to champion a threatened species and indirectly preserve the forests as a type of vulnerable habitat.) Advocacy groups filed lawsuits against the Forest Service as well as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which also controlled some old-growth acreage and which was similarly obliged to factor biodiversity into its land-use planning.
The northern spotted owl, the size of a football, had been transformed into a political football. And it was being tossed around in the battle over old growth and in the ideological clash between the production-minded groups who saw the trees for the forest and the ecologically minded groups who saw the forest for the trees.
Despite all of this attention, the owl was not yet even listed under the ESA. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which executed the act, had initially reviewed the issue in 1981. At the time, the scientific case was still being built and it was decided that listing was unwarranted. The science quickly grew more conclusive, but the politics was another matter. The FWS was understood to be beholden to President Reagan, a man who considered environmentalism a threat almost on a par with communism. During his first term, Reagan had appointed James Watt to lead the Department of the Interior, which oversaw the FWS. Watt’s antiregulatory policies were so extreme—and his personal politics so offensive—that he was forced to step down in 1983 amid a wave of popular outrage. As for Reagan’s attitude toward trees, it could be summed up in two statements that are well known in certain environmental circles. The first was made during his campaign for governor of California, “A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?” The second is a paraphrase of comments he made during the 1980 presidential campaign: “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles.” In late 1987, the FWS officially denied the northern spotted owl listing for a second time.
It was a temporary setback for the environmentalists, but they still had an ever-growing scientific literature and they still had the courts. An appeal of the FWS decision was filed in federal court, and in 1988, a judge ruled that the agency’s decision had been unconstitutionally “arbitrary and capricious or contrary to law.” Shortly after this, a different judge held that the BLM’s plan for the spotted owl was inadequate. Suddenly, the possibility that the spotted owl might upend the logging industry seemed very real.
Many loggers were already worried about their future job security. Increased automation was rendering some jobs superfluous, and competition from Canada and the southern pine plantations was threatening profit margins. If the old-growth forests were to be locked up, it could mean the disappearance of tens of thousands of jobs overnight. The livelihood of entire communities was at stake. Panic began to grip many in the Pacific Northwest. Bumper stickers appeared that read “I love spotted owls . . . fried.” The logging industry, worried about its access to the green gold of the old growth, stoked the fires and rallied locals in defense of the status quo. To many of the people who depended on the forests—few of whom considered themselves opposed to environmentalism—the issue seemed less about traditional logging versus ecological stewardship than about owls versus jobs.
The situation was spiraling toward crisis until Mark Hatfield and Brock Adams—the U.S. senators from Oregon and Washington, respectively—stepped in to allay the tension that threatened to tear their states apart. They fashioned a plan that would temporarily grant approval for the BLM and Forest Service spotted owl plans, but would also create an interagency scientific committee (ISC) to study the issue further and report back in a year. Their plan gained approval from Congress and was enacted in 1989. For the moment, a crisis had been averted.
But it was to be a brief moment indeed. The newly created ISC was staffed with experts on spotted owl research, including Eric Forsman, the researcher who first drew attention to the spotted owl, and Jack Ward Thomas, an ecologically minded biologist in the Forest Service. Their report, which appeared in mid-1990 and contained more than four hundred pages, only reinforced what environmentalists had been arguing for years: “We have concluded that the owl is imperiled over significant portions of its range because of continuing losses of habitat from logging and natural disturbances. Current management strategies are inadequate to ensure its viability.” Several weeks later, the FWS released its long-awaited, court-ordered decision. It declared that the spotted owl was “threatened throughout its range by the loss and adverse modification of the suitable habitat as the result of timber harvesting and exacerbated by catastrophic events such as fire, volcanic eruption, and wind storms.” Then, the following spring, a federal district judge in Washington, William Dwyer, ruled that the Forest Service’s 1988 management plan failed to meet the “viability” requirements as concerned the spotted owl. He issued an injunction, effective immediately, to shut down all logging operations in the national forests of Oregon and Washington. More than 20 million acres were suddenly locked up.
The panic now returned with renewed intensity. Mills shut down. Loggers got pushed into unemployment lines. Communities watched helplessly as their income streams dried up. Debates raged in the local papers, in the local bars, and on the streets. The crisis was consuming the Pacific Northwest, and it soon spilled over into national politics as America geared up for a presidential electio
n.
The incumbent, President George H. W. Bush, viewed environmentalism somewhat more charitably than had his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. But Bush’s support for natural-resource protection ended rather abruptly once it threatened to impede economic growth. Of the spotted owl, he memorably said during the 1992 campaign, “And yes, we want to see that little furry, feathery guy protected and all that. But I don’t want to see 40,000 loggers thrown out of work.” This was the classic “owls versus jobs” dichotomy that the lumber industry promoted (though its statistics put potential job losses well above one hundred thousand), and Bush’s stance largely ignored the underlying issues, namely the survival of old growth and the clash of worldviews between strict productivity and ecologically informed logging.
Bush’s Democratic challenger was Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a baby boomer who had come of age in the post–Earth Day era. Clinton seemed to embrace many of the tenets of environmentalism and even named Senator Al Gore, one of the most outspoken environmentalists in Congress, as his running mate. Clinton’s view of the Pacific Northwest crisis did not conform to the popular “owls versus jobs” framing, but attempted instead to capture the larger themes. As he explained, “We could remove all the restrictions on logging tomorrow and even put more people to work. . . . But then in a few years we’d have no trees at all to log. So the issue is, how can we have a stable logging environment and keep a significant number of people working and still preserve the old-growth forest, and by the way, the spotted owl.” Clinton offered few concrete proposals, but promised, if elected, to convene a forest conference so that he and his top staff could “listen, hammer out alternatives, and then take a position that . . . will try to be fair to the people whose livelihoods depend on this and fair to the environment that we are all obligated to maintain.”
