A book by David Harris, published by Times Books, 1995
Timber Story Full of Holes
With the concluding line in his new book The Last Stand, author David Harris blithely pronounces an end to North Coast logging conflicts. In one sentence, he accomplishes what has eluded the region's political, environmental and industry leaders for more than a decade.
Harris writes that the fighting faded along with a Redwood Summer of logging protests in 1990: "It had been two years of pitched battle, and now, the war was over, and nobody'd won."
Unfortunately, like too many other instances in this long-awaited book about the hostile 1985 takeover of venerable Pacific Lumber Co., Harris simply has it wrong.
The war continues, the shots still ring loud and clear to anyone with even a vague awareness of North Coast timber conflicts.
The fate of Headwaters Forest, the largest unprotected stand of ancient redwoods left in private ownership, remains uncertain. Despite Harris' declarations, environmentalists and the timber industry are expected to slug it out in Congress over yet another Headwaters bill, this one by Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Windsor.
Just six months ago, more than 1,000 protestors gathered at a Pacific Lumber sawmill at Carlotta in southern Humboldt County to demonstrate against a state decision to allow the company to conduct salvage logging of dead, dying or diseased old trees in Headwaters. A federal judge's order has kept the chainsaws silent pending environmentalists' appeal of the state decision.
Meanwhile in state and federal courts, the marbled murrelet, a rare seabird, has emerged as the spotted owl of the 1990's. Pacific Lumber and other timber companies are spending millions of dollars in legal fees to try and convince judges that selectively logging old trees doesn't endanger the robin-size bird.
In January, three Mendocino County supervisors came under fire after they helped Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento torpedo one of Gov. Pete Wilson's reappointments to the powerful state Board of Forestry.
Harris acknowledges some of these continuing skirmishes in a rambling 16-page epilogue, but it's too late. The Last Stand misses its mark. Even among protagonists in the timber wars, Harris is being roundly condemned for his flawed research and his inability to bring new perspective to California's timber woes.
Too bad.
Harris, a 1960s anti-war activist who was once married to folk singer Joan Baez, is the author of six previous books. A fine writer, Harris in earlier nonfictions works like Dreams Die Hard showed an ability to reflect deeply on difficult subjects.
But The Last Stand is surprisingly superficial, and so full of mistakes and mischaracterizations that when viewed in totality they create a nagging credibility problem for Harris.
Some examples:
* Harris describes Earth First! troubadour Darryl Cherney, burned out from riding Redwood Summer's emotional roller coaster, as screaming and shouting at fellow organizer and former lover Judi Bari in a restaurant overlooking San Francisco Bay.
It was then Sierra Club forestry chair Gail Lucas, not Bari, who was the target of Cherney's tantrum.
* Stanwood Murphy Jr., a grandson of the family patriarch who turned Pacific Lumber into the aristocrat of West Coast timber companies, "was the first member of his family ever to be fired" by the company, according to Harris.
In reality, "Woody" Murphy quit in February 1984 - two years before Pacific Lumber's formal takeover - to go into his own business. Company personnel records show management checked yes to a question on a form that asked whether he would be considered for rehiring.
* Pacific Lumber President John Campbell, a 26-year company veteran and former son-in-law of an influential board member at the time of the takeover, comes off as a boorish, back-slapping oaf eager to please his new corporate master.
History has yet to judge whether Campbell is a sell-out, as his detractors claim, or some kind of hero for keeping the 127-year-old company intact and more than 1,200 people at work during 10 years of political, environmental and regulatory turmoil.
But even his harshest critics give a nod to the business and political acumen of Campbell, a man described by friends and associates as warm, witty and well-read.
Harris' work fails to examine in any depth how to balance competing interests: corporate quests for accelerated profits, a vanishing way of life for workers and their timber-dependent communities, and the fate of the last remnants of an old-growth redwood ecosystem.
The book is, in the words of New York Times reviewer Mark Dowie,"long on narrative and short on analysis."
The Last Stand's flaws are so numerous that it has united timber war opponents.
"I think he's pulled a Richard Nixon, who declared the war in Vietnam a victory and then pulled out even as Saigon fell to the enemy," said Pacific Lumber's John Campbell.
Bari contends Harris has turned the timber wars into a fictionalized "Hollywood shoot 'em up."
"What gives him the right to use real people's names in a work of fiction?" Bari demands.
Jared Carter is a Ukiah attorney who has participated in virtually every key strategy session for the North Coast timber industry in the past decade.
"When you're through reading it, you end up with a feeling of 'So what?'" says Carter. "There's no analysis. Not even a few of the very serious issues involved are pondered."
Betty Ball of the Mendocino Environmental Center in Ukiah calls the book "a travesty, and a betrayal of the facts."
Even Cherney, who Harris admiringly elevates along with Sonoma County's Greg King to leadership roles in the North Coast environmental movement far larger than other more knowledgeable and dedicated forestry activists, concedes The Last Stand falls short.
"It's very painful for me to put the book down. But an accurate history is critical for any understanding of how society deals with these kinds of issues, and to get it wrong is to do a real disservice," said Cherney.
In fairness, Harris has skillfully woven together a tremendous amount of information surrounding Houston financier Charles Hurwitz's surprise takeover of a $2 billion timber giant for the bargain basement price of $900 million. Hurwitz and his Texas swagger forever reshaped the North Coast's political, environmental and economic landscape.
Harris' writing skills keep The Last Stand from bogging down in minutia. His story is fast-paced and chapters short and sometimes sassy.
In the first half of the book, Harris stays on firm ground when he writes of the Murphy family, which owned or managed Pacific Lumber for nearly a century. He accurately points out that despite widespread beliefs to the contrary each of the three Murphy grandchildren, who at one time tried to challenge the takeover, had inherited less than a fraction of 1 percent of the company's stock.
Harris' apparent inside information about the ties of Hurwitz, junk bond king Michael Milken and others during the flamboyant 1980s is compelling reading as the story unfolds.
Clearly, complacent Pacific Lumber directors were no match for a new breed of Wall Street investors.
As baffled company executives dawdled over what to do as Pacific Lumber "came into play," Harris writes, "The Texan hustled from Houston to New York to Los Angeles, concealing his intentions, plying the telephone at every opportunity and staying several steps ahead."
Harris also gives a well-deserved bow to Eureka lawyer Bill Bertain, who struggled for years at great expense to his pocketbook and to his health to finally get outside lawyers to take up the dissident shareholders' cause. As a result, former shareholders, including the wealthy Murphy clan, recently received as much as $10 more a share for their Pacific Lumber stock.
But The Last Stand slides into literary quicksand when Harris tries to make Hurwitz and Pacific Lumber the focus of the explosive summer of 1990.
Redwood Summer, rocked even before it could begin by an unsolved car bombing of Bari and Cherney in Oakland, did not target either until the end. Redwood Summer was about corporate overcutting of hundred of thousands of acres of industrial timberland, mostly in Mendocino County.
"Cut-and-run" logging practices of Louisiana Pacific Corp. and Georgia-Pacific Corp., the North Coast's two largest forestland owners, were demonstrators' targets. Pacific Lumber's accelerated logging on its Humboldt County timberland, and the fate of 3,000-acre Headwaters, lingered in the background.
To make matters worse for Harris, he has galled women activists in the environmental movement with the book's treatment of Bari and Cecelia Lanman of the Environmental Protection Information Center as appendages in the conflict between industry and environmentalists.
"He reduces the struggle to a personality conflict between male nemesis: Darryl Cherney and John Campbell, Charles Hurwitz and Bill Bertain," Bari said.
Who's to say what went wrong with The Last Stand?
While writing the book, Harris experienced great personal tragedy. His wife, the late writer Lacey Fosburg, and his father died within two weeks of each other.
Harris' dedication in The Last Stand reads, "For Lacey, God rest her soul, and my dad, God rest his."
Hopefully, Harris' wounds will heal. We can only wish the same for timber country, where the fighting continues.
[Reprinted without permission from the Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, California, Sunday, February 11, 1996, Forum Section. The Press Democrat said it would not grant permission to reprint articles either to environmentalists or to the timber industry in order that the newspaper not be accused of taking sides.]
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited