by Eric Rutkow
Clinton ended up winning the 1992 election and stayed true to his word. Barely two months after he was sworn in as the nation’s forty-second president, he and his top staff traveled across the nation to Portland, Oregon, for the promised forest conference. The event offered an opportunity for both the lumber industry and the environmental movement to project their strength and to spread their sound-bite-ready messages to a national media that had descended upon the city. Many lumber mills gave their workers the day off and bused them to Portland to protest. The owl supporters, for their part, drew large crowds with the promise of a massive rock concert to feature Neil Young, Kenny Loggins, and Carole King. President Clinton, the great empathizer, the man who had popularized the phrase “I feel your pain,” spent the day in a conference room with his top advisors, listening to the stories of nearly fifty local representatives from all sides of the controversy.
The conference itself, as Clinton had predicted, produced no immediate solutions, but it led the president to authorize a new scientific commission and to set a breakneck, sixty-day deadline for comprehensive recommendations covering all the federal lands involved. This new commission was led by Jack Ward Thomas, the Forest Service biologist who had been chairman of the ISC. He oversaw the hurried production of a massive one-thousand-page report that was released on July 1, only one month past Clinton’s ambitious deadline. The report laid out ten potential management scenarios, and Clinton selected option nine. The details of this option were complex, reflecting more than two decades of scientific research and policy analysis. But in the broadest terms, it placed 77 percent of the 24 million acres of federal lands that fell within the owl’s range in protective reserves; it reduced timber harvesting in the unreserved lands to 25 percent of the 1980s levels; and it expanded monitoring activities to a host of potentially vulnerable species besides the northern spotted owl. As Thomas later noted, “[T]he northern spotted owl was addressed as but one of many species and ecosystem components to be dealt with in forest ecosystem management.”
On April 13, 1994, the heads of both the Forest Service and the BLM signed a Record of Decision implementing a revised version of option nine, which became known as the Northwest Forest Plan (NFP). The Record of Decision explained: “This represents the first time that two of the largest federal land management agencies . . . have developed and adopted a common management approach to the lands they administer throughout an entire ecological region.” The ecological approach, with its concern for the totality of the forest and its trees, had now been implemented at the highest levels of government.
The passage of the NFP, however, did not instantly end the long-standing controversy. Both sides filed lawsuits to contest its validity. But much of the combative energy disappeared in late 1994, when Judge Dwyer—whose 1991 injunction had triggered an earlier panic—ruled that the NFP, at last, satisfied the “viability” requirement.
The effects of the NFP quickly began to reshape the economy of the Pacific Northwest. Timber production from federal lands dropped 90 percent. Men whose families had been harvesting the land for generations found themselves unemployed. Some towns were utterly devastated. But overall job loss numbers were smaller than most had feared, and the spotted owl soon ceased being a national priority.
The underlying issues, however, were far from resolved. In the 2007 book War in the Woods, historian Samuel Hays argued that the Pacific Northwest controversy represented merely one chapter in a larger, national struggle between “commodity forestry” and “ecological forestry.” Perhaps the largest theme of his book was that “forest issues were being adopted into political party agendas.” Clinton had helped to put the Democrats in the ecological camp, not only through his brokering the NFP but also through his eventual appointment of Jack Ward Thomas as head of the Forest Service. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, subsequently worked to roll back many of the protective measures that had been previously instituted, including parts of the NFP. The fights will likely continue into the future.
As for the “furry, feathery guy” that started it all, the outlook is less than inspiring. The protections instituted under the NFP slowed its decline, but total numbers have been dropping by about 3 percent a year. The largest threat, however, is no longer the destruction of old growth but the encroachment of a rival bird, the barred owl, a hardier species that seems to be steadily outcompeting its threatened cousin. Eric Forsman told the New York Times in July 2011, “I’ve certainly become much less confident as the years have gone by. . . . If you’d asked me in 1975, ‘Can we fix this problem?’ I’d have said, ‘Oh yeah, this problem will go away.’” In the end, it may prove that the spotted owl helped to save a forest, but that the forest could not return the favor. If the spotted owl disappears, it will still live on as testament to America’s ability to save its last great stands of continental old growth from the pressures of economic development.
And its ultimate importance extended even beyond the nation’s borders. As Time magazine noted in 1990, on the eve of the ESA listing, “From Brazil to Japan, the decision will be carefully observed. The stakes are that high. . . . It will . . . enhance or diminish U.S. credibility overseas, as America tries to influence other nations to husband their natural resources and protect their endangered species.” The nation, for centuries focused only on the fate of its own forests, had finally awoken to the importance and vulnerability of trees outside its sovereign territory.
Save the Rain Forest!
DEEP WITHIN THE tropical rain forests of Brazil’s Amazonian watershed, Francisco “Chico” Mendes made his living extracting natural latex from massive rubber trees that thrived in the hot, humid conditions. It was simple, traditional labor that caused little damage to the trees or to the surrounding ecosystem. But by the 1980s it was also an imperiled lifestyle. Land speculators wanted to burn down Mendes’s forest and transform it into pasturage for cattle.
As the leader of the regional rubber-tappers union, Mendes had been spearheading a fight to protect his trees. He eventually began working together with several environmentalists from the United States and other developed nations. They promised exposure, influence, and money; and by the mid-1980s, Mendes was spending much of his time traveling around the developed world to bear witness to the unfolding crisis of tropical forest destruction. But this was the sort of advocacy that made enemies of dangerous men, and Mendes knew as much.
On December 5, 1988, having recently returned to Brazil from an international tour, Mendes wrote, “I do not wish flowers at my burying, because I know they will go and root them up in the forest. . . . I go [home] to a meeting with death. I am not a fatalist, only a realist. I have already denounced who wishes to kill me and no measures whatsoever have been or will be taken.” Barely three weeks later, his prediction came to pass. Hit men hired by land speculators shot him dead in his own back doorway.
Mendes’s murder garnered relatively little coverage in the national press of his home country. There, it was the death of a minor labor leader, something that occurred with uncomfortable frequency. In America, however, it was major news. The New York Times placed the story on page one, and other media outlets followed its lead. Within weeks, several Hollywood studios began courting Mendes’s widow for the film rights to her husband’s life story. Bidders included Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Ted Turner, and Warner Bros.
It was a curious reaction to the death of a man that few Americans had ever heard of, but one that made more sense given the era’s broader context. The nation’s populace was in the midst of an awakening about the fate of the tropical rain forests, and Mendes had suddenly given the cause a human face. As a New York Times reporter noted in April 1989, “Mr. Mendes has emerged as a martyr for this nation’s growing environmental movement. . . . In death, the union leader has become a worldwide symbol of the effort to slow the destruction of Brazil’s massive rain forest.”
The movement that Mendes symbolized seemed to have arisen almost overnight. Indeed,
the tropical rain forests had barely warranted a thimble’s worth of press coverage before the late 1980s. But this belied a more complicated evolution in the way Americans thought about the global environment and, in consequence, the trees and forests beyond the nation’s boundaries.
A useful date to mark the beginning of this process—if only symbolically—was Christmas Eve 1968, almost precisely twenty years before Mendes’s murder. It was then that Bill Anders, a young astronaut aboard Apollo 8, captured the first image of earth from space. People were finally able to see the planet in its true form. There were no political boundaries, no sharp lines, no features grafted on by cartographers. It was just a blue and white orb, floating ethereally against a sea of infinite darkness. The day after the photo was taken, Archibald MacLeish, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and essayist, wrote, “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
This ideal of global brotherhood soon became a background theme for Senator Nelson’s April 22 environmental teach-in. (Its adopted name of “Earth Day” certainly reflected this sensibility.) Though many of the teach-in’s leading issues were local or national in character, a significant number were overtly international: pollution of the oceans, threats from nuclear fallout, the environmental consequences of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric of globalism suffused many of the speeches that poured forth on that April 22. Some even made direct reference to the newfound awareness that the Apollo 8 photograph had produced. As future Illinois senator Adlai Stevenson III said during his Earth Day talk, “We have reached for the moon and beyond, and looking back through space we have been confronted by the insignificance of the planet which sustains us.”
Two years after Earth Day, this emerging global environmental outlook was made the subject of a major U.N.-sponsored conference that took place over eleven days in Stockholm, Sweden. Known as the Conference on the Human Environment, it brought together delegates from more than one hundred nations. America sent a delegation, though its role in organizing was minimal. It was but one strong voice in a European-centered chorus—nations across Europe had recently experienced similar environmental awakenings. The strongest backer of the conference, in fact, was its host nation, Sweden.
The conference marked what many environmentalists and historians identified as the beginning of an organized international environmental movement. Though the delegates did not attempt to negotiate any binding agreements, they did agree on a statement of principles, a sort of foundational text for a new type of global environmental politics. It included twenty-six points, largely written as affirmations of cooperation and broad promises to confront the threats from industrialized production.
The declaration’s loose and somewhat vague wording reflected a fundamental limitation. There was no global authority on environmental issues. They could only be addressed with the help and support of sovereign governments. The political lines that had seemed to disappear when earth was viewed from space became quite conspicuous and indelible when rhetoric morphed into policy.
This was especially true for forests, which were not directly mentioned anywhere in the conference’s declaration. As the American experience had amply demonstrated, trees were some of the greatest natural resources that any nation possessed. Billions, and in some cases trillions, of dollars were waiting to be sawed and pulped and processed. And this did not count the value of the underlying soil for agriculture or of the mineral and petroleum deposits buried underground. Developing nations, which contained nearly all of the world’s tropical resources, had not yet chopped through their virgin growth to nearly the same extent as the United States. Any U.N. declaration opposing rain forest destruction thus contained undertones of rich nations telling poor ones how to manage their resources. To call for protection of rain forests, therefore, was to impose something of a double standard.
But many in the international environmental community saw the issue differently. The world’s temperate forests—such as those in much of Europe and America—were relatively young, having appeared only after the retreat of Ice Age glaciers. Tropical rain forests, on the other hand, had evolutionary histories that stretched back unbroken for millions of years. This longer timeline had allowed for the development of highly site-specific, interdependent biotic communities. No one was certain exactly how much ecological diversity existed within the tropical rain forests, but by the 1970s biologists were beginning to estimate that it likely amounted to more than one-half of all species on earth. Rain forest destruction, therefore, meant not only the loss of trees, but potentially of millions of life forms, only the tiniest fraction of which had been discovered, let alone studied. Three months after the Stockholm conference, the American journal Science published an article highlighting this point. It concluded: “[T]he sole fact that thousands of species will disappear before any aspect of their biology has been investigated is frightening. This would mean the loss of millions and millions of years of evolution. . . . We urgently suggest that, internationally, massive action be taken to preserve this gigantic pool of germ plasm by the establishment of biological gene pool reserves from the different tropical rain forest environments of the world.”
If the situation already seemed urgent in 1972, it would grow only more desperate in the subsequent years. Annual tropical rain forest destruction climbed steadily through the 1970s. At the close of the decade, the United Nations attempted to quantify the damage and issued a report citing an annual rate of thirty thousand square miles either logged or burned over, an area close in size to South Carolina.
The largest culprits were tropical timber harvesters. They cut through an estimated seventeen thousand square miles of global rain forests each year, mostly to provide tropical hardwoods to markets in the developed world. America was a particularly significant purchaser. Even before the nation’s independence, colonists had been importing commercial amounts of hardwoods from nations across Latin America and Africa. (The slave trade was even referred to, morbidly, as the trade “in ebony wood.”) Such species as ebony, mahogany, rosewood, and teak were among the most desired veneers for luxury furniture. Another popular hardwood species in America, though for a much different purpose, was ipê. Known also as the trumpet tree for its brilliant display of horn-shaped flowers, it was chopped down for its durable, rot-resistant wood. American cities in the postwar years began importing ipê for use in benches, boardwalks, and piers. When the world-famous Coney Island Boardwalk was rehabilitated during the 1960s, Brooklyn used ipê.
After the timber trade, the most destructive industry to the rain forests was cattle ranching. The U.N. 1979 report estimated that it burned through nearly six thousand square miles per year in the effort to create new pasturage. If that wasn’t ecologically troubling enough, the pasturage that ranchers created remained fertile for only two to five years before the soil began to exhaust and erode. This reckless land use nonetheless remained profitable because of a surging global demand for beef, especially in America. The nation’s postwar population displayed a somewhat insatiable appetite for red meat, especially with the arrival of fast food restaurants. Much of the cattle raised on former rain forest land was destined to be ground up and sandwiched between a hamburger bun somewhere in America.
In the years following the U.N. report, both cattle ranching and tropical timber harvesting continued their march of destruction at a steady pace. The overall rate of tropical forest loss, however, spiraled even higher. Much of the responsibility for this increase rested with settlers and small farmers. Faced with unequal property systems that concentrated fertile land among a small elite, they infiltrated the rain forests, slashing and burning in an effort to create new space for agriculture. And the poor soils meant that settlers needed to carve out new fields every few years. Adding to this pressure was a new wave of massive infrastructu
re projects, such as highways, hydropower dams, and mining facilities. Local governments were often too indebted to fund these projects independently, but they frequently found financing from multilateral development banks (MDBs). The MDBs were controlled by Western countries and were more interested in positive economic returns than in negative ecological consequences. Once again, the fingerprints of the developed world were all over the charred stumps of the rain forests.
By the mid-1980s, due to these new development stresses, rain forest loss was estimated to be topping fifty thousand square miles a year. Adrian Cowell, a British journalist and documentarian who worked closely with Chico Mendes, labeled this period “The Decade of Destruction.”
The deepening of the rain forest crisis corresponded with—and, in part, facilitated—a growth of international environmentalism. The United Nations had first created an environmental program in the wake of the Stockholm Conference. The White House began to display an interest in the international environmental movement several years later—in 1977, President Jimmy Carter ordered a report on the global environment and its potential impact on American life by the year 2000. Soon, new nonprofit organizations began to form to deal specifically with international environmental challenges. Two of the largest were America-based: the World Resources Institute (WRI) (founded 1982) and Conservation International (founded in 1987).
