The organization was referring to something that really happened during an 18 month window resulting from President Clinton's having signed what was termed the Clear-cut Rider, in August of 1995. For one and a half years, the government and the timber industry were exempted from environmental laws, while citizens were barred from challenging exceptional timber harvest operations in court.
The devastating after effects of just this single period of "logging without laws" are mind boggling. Here is the Sierra Club's succinct description: "Forests in the Northwest that were full-grown before the Declaration of Independence .... fell to chain saws. Salmon in Idaho, grizzly bears in Montana, and drinking water in Oregon (were jeopardized). Healthy trees were clear-cut from Alaska to Alabama, even though the Rider supposedly allowed only logging of dead or diseased trees."
Without the "benefit" of any such special window, and over a longer time scale, the north coast and its watersheds have suffered industrial depredation. So, when a group such as the Big River Watershed Council comes up with a set of guidelines for the management and restoration of their watershed after years of destructive logging practices, and with these guidelines endorsed by the Redwood Coast Watershed Alliance for use in a whole cluster of parallel watersheds you wonder, what is really going on? What are these contradictory historical forces, battling for management of the "turf"?
Or put more simply, what is the "..root of the evil" here, and what hope is there, not only for regulatory support and enforcement of guidelines such as these, but for real restoration? The Big River guidelines provide a comprehensive and technically detailed methodology for returning the targeted watershed, and others like it, to their formerly healthy state, a condition supportive of widely varying and interrelated habitats, all of which would combine to allow the Coho salmon to thrive.
In case you are not aware of the fact, Coho Salmon have been classified as a "threatened" species in the North Coast, and without major changes in the environment there, they will be headed into the pit as an "endangered" species.
What, then, about regulation and its country cousin, "enforcement"?
Most readers of this publication understand that environmental protection for forests hangs by a relatively slim, albeit tough, thread, the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It is the ESA which has facilitated the real agenda of preserving the temperate forests of the Northwest, and this is what has so infuriated the timber industry. Spotted Owls and Marbled Murrelets are infamous within timber industry circles, and have been the butt of massive negative publicity campaigns.
In the current instance of the proposed watershed guidelines, the connecting "thread" to the enforcement power of government lies in the aforementioned decline of the Coho Salmon and other "anadromous" fish species (anadromous is a good Greek word meaning "climbing up the river" - - referring to those fish species, including steelhead trout and the Pacific lamprey, which return from the sea to inland habitat for spawning).
It is the "anadromous", and threatened, Coho salmon which brings watershed issues under the purview of the National Marine Fisheries Service for regulatory action. In a cover letter accompanying the proposed Big River guidelines which were sent to the National Marine Fisheries Service on June 27, 1997, Allen Cooperrider, Big River Conservation Coordinator, emphatically summed up the legal situation:
"On October 25, 1996 the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) listed Coho Salmon as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the Evolutionarily Significant Unit (ESU) which includes Big River. Thus, as of December 2, 1996, NMFS has responsibility to 'insure' that 'take' of Coho does not occur. We both recognize that Section 3(18) of the ESA defines 'take' to mean 'to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct' and that the courts have repeatedly interpreted this to include habitat destruction.[emphasis added] .....
Cooperrider continues: "We respectfully request that these guidelines be adopted without delay to meet your legal obligation to stop the unlawful take of Coho Salmon..we will not accept any further compromise in providing protection for these fish. The Endangered Species Act is not intended to be a negotiating tool; rather it mandates protection when conditions have become critical. Our watershed has already been compromised enough."
That conditions are critical has been well documented; now the proposed guidelines challenge regulatory agencies, (and particularly, in this case, the NMFS), in all their complex overlapping jurisdictions, to implement a whole range of remedies. Here is a list of the quite strong proactive regulatory steps proposed to be adopted:
¥ No new roads will be built in roadless areas: Roadless areas are generally areas of over 5,000 acres without existing roads.
¥ Outside roadless areas, reduce existing system and non system road mileage; in no case can there be a net increase in the amount (mileage) of roads.
¥ Watershed analysis must be performed prior to major management activities (e.g. road building or timber harvest). Such analysis must be up to federal standards, and approved by both the Big River Watershed council and the principal regulatory agencies.
¥ Riparian reserves (strips of land which include or directly impact streams, inner gorges, 100 year flood plains, and landslide prone areas) are clearly defined and marked as off limits, not only to timber harvesting activities, but to inclusion in calculations of timber resources.
¥ Timber harvest itself will be held to levels which assure (a) no net impairment of Coho-bearing streams, and (b) a re-growth of the forest to a density which restores historic levels of capture of the fog precipitation.
¥ Furthermore, timber harvest within a given watershed, or on a given ownership, will be limited to 2% of inventory per year (or 20% per decade). This would apply to all ownerships of 10 acres or larger.
¥ Clear cutting is prohibited on all ownerships except for single-family residential purposes.
¥ Water appropriation will be managed according to various definitions of "natural flow" and "adequate supply;" this means no additional dams installed adversely affecting any surface water source within the watershed, nor any additional drafting or allocation of water from any surface water source. Monitoring plans will be instituted.
¥Pesticides (including but not limited to herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides) strictly regulated. None permitted on wild lands or near or on public or private roads or highways within those wild lands within the watershed.
To the timber industry, and to some individual landowners, the provisions may seem draconian!
And this brings us to an earlier question we raised, about "...the root of the evil here". What is this process, "innocent" when viewed from the perspective of resource exploitation, yet "guilty" of bringing the Big River watershed into a "..seriously degraded" condition?
According to the technical information presented in the Guidelines, "...intensified logging and road building on industrial timberlands over the last three decades" are the culprits. In addition, "The watershed has been declared impaired by sediment under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act (California Regional Water Quality Control Board 1996)" and " High temperatures that approach lethal levels for salmonids have also been identified in portions of the watershed."
Also, a sustained timber yield in these northern California watersheds must take into account much more than mere replacement of biomass. The entire "hydrologic" process needs repair, including restoration of the forest's ability to utilize fog drip. We are talking major restorative practice in these proposed guidelines, practices which will affect every category of landowner, and bring the issue right to the front door of the "private property" shibboleth.
So the question extends well beyond that of "..raising public awareness" about the need to preserve species, forests, waterways, the entire global "ecosystem" of interdependent life systems, etc. Unfortunately, the generic issue, the underlying source of the problem as we now experience it, is more insidious than mere ignorance or "...lack of awareness." It is the continuing pressure by detached capital, i.e. free floating speculative capital, to "grow" itself (money, folks, money in search of dividend/interest income, plus, heaven never forbid, capital gains). It is corporate paper (not towels, but secondary investment instruments) which vastly leverages the "growing" of capital, and accelerates the further detachment of money from any accountability other than that of the bottom line.
We may look at the Hurwitz/Headwaters deal as something extraordinarily flagrant, or see the decline of Coho salmon as due to industrial irresponsibility. But in our ordinary, everyday calculations of personal worth, in our simple plans for retirement on pension funds (including that plan for living on the private country property nest egg with its metes and bounds and title insurance), we all participate in a kind of double speak about value. We all participate in the money scam.
In this kind of accounting, the ledgers simply have no tallying place for fog drip, green moss and the net worth of some biological concept like an "endangered species".
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited