It's been two and a half years since the historic Headwaters Forest agreement was signed on March 1, 1999, between Maxxam/Pacific Lumber's owner, Charles Hurwitz, the State of California and federal officials, exchanging 480 million public dollars for the permanent protection of the Headwaters and All Species Groves, plus 50 years' protection for five other ancient redwood stands, totaling some 7,500 acres.
Derisively dubbed "The Deal" by activists, it was viewed variously as a corrupt compromise, a taxpayer rip-off (along with the 1.6 billion dollar bailout of Hurwitz's savings and loan junk bond debacle) and perhaps worst of all, a weakening of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). But the company's public relations machine, after initial bitter complaints about the "new restrictions," has touted the plan relentlessly since signing it as the best thing since rubber stamps.
How have Humboldt County's forests, fish, wildlife and people been faring under the new rules of the realm? This article highlights five areas in Maxxam/P-L's 200,000-acre corporate ownership, all conspicuous for the same key concerns that drove the twelve-year struggle to "Save Headwaters Forest": preservation of old growth and its dependent species, water quality protection, and sustainability of both jobs and the environment, in this irreplaceable part of the planet we call home.
As you may recall, to get the money, Maxxam/P-L had to submit a Sustained Yield Plan (SYP), and a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), itself a prerequisite for an Incidental Take Permit (ITP). The product of dueling biological and political imperatives, the final version of these documents, wrote Kevin Bundy in the Environmental Protection Information Center's (EPIC) 1999 Headwaters Forest Update, was "...maddeningly complex, riddled with loopholes and of dubious scientific merit. The HCP/SYP combines a federal application for a license to kill endangered species with a state level long-term logging plan to justify short term forest liquidation."
Under the SYP, approximately 9,000 acres of Douglas fir, mostly in the Mattole River watershed, as well as 450 acres of ancient (unentered) redwoods, and 8,300 acres of "residual" (previously entered) redwoods, were "made available for logging."
The euphemistically named HCP is essentially a list of measures supposed to "...mitigate and minimize," (instead of prohibiting, as the ESA requires), "the impacts of habitat destruction and outright killing of threatened species." Bundy writes, "Its provisions are therefore designed to result in a net decrease in numbers of endangered species on the property, as the habitat available for their survival and recovery shrinks."
Indeed, shrinking the forest seems to be an operating principle of the SYP/HCP/ITP nexus. For example, to mitigate for the planned destruction of over 10,00 acres of pristine and residual redwoods in federally designated marbled murrelet critical habitat, the birds were allocated twelve reservations, known as Marbled Murrelet Conservation Areas. These MMCAs come with a 50-year lease and total just 7,728 acres, only 3,000 acres of which are old growth, and of that, two-thirds is scattered residual redwood broken by clearcuts. The MMCA set-asides also relieve the company of any further requirement to do actual field surveys for murrelets, so what they don't know won't hurt them.
It may hurt the murrelet, though. "Murrelet populations are plummeting faster than ever," says Cynthia Elkins at EPIC, which has filed a state level lawsuit against the HCP. "None were seen in Grizzly Creek this season." If there are no sightings, the area may be listed as unoccupied and can be prioritized for logging under a tiered ranking system. With 92% of its original habitat gone, "...we need every stand protected for the recovery of the species," says Elkins.
Another way of paring down the forest, while seeming to protect it, is the HCP's "no clearcut" buffers, of varying widths, for riparian areas and streams, including the hard won 30- foot setbacks on Class III water courses, the seasonal rivulets that carry sediment down steep, erosion-prone slopes into larger, fish-bearing streams. But 2,200 acres are exempt from this lighter touch during the plan's first five years. Selective logging is allowed within the outer 20 feet of the buffer, so they can still cut in the "no cut" zone. The company has wasted no time beginning operations on huge "commercial thinning" plans of 400, 500, and 600 acres on Bear, Yager and Blanton Creeks.
The National Marine Fisheries Service estimated a return of only 1,500 Coho salmon statewide this season, down from more than 500,000 in the 1940s. Local returns during the past dry fall and spring have been pitifully low.
Other HCP requirements cover road standards for winter use. The company has rocked many roads. But the increase in winter operations still results in too much "pollution from hillsides that have been clearcut and sprayed with herbicides, then discharged over a vast network of logging roads across Freshwater, Stitz, Jordan and Bear Creeks, and the Elk River," EPIC claims in a lawsuit under the Clean Water Act.
"About the only areas they stay out of," says Rob DePurna of THP Watch, "are the areas of mass wasting."
This gigantic 705-acre plan was acquired by Hurwitz, already approved by California Department of Forestry (CDF), from Sierra Pacific Lumber during the deal-making frenzy of 1998-99. Equivalent to 656 football fields, it lies entirely inside the Headwaters Reserve's northern boundary, forming the last contiguous second growth buffer to the groves, which are surrounded otherwise by clearcuts.
THP 520 allows cutting right up to this edge, exposing "protected" (and paid for) trees to blowdown and wind tunneling effects, severing connectivity along the murrelets' flyway between Elkhead Springs and the National Wildlife Refuge at Humboldt Bay, and dumping dirt into the South Fork of the Elk River, to the detriment of the Coho and other aquatic creatures.
The "Hole," however, is somehow not subject to HCP rules. From day one, the corporation, with attorney Jared Carter at the legal helm, has argued that THP 520 should not be held to HCP standards, let alone the ESA, despite its designation as critical murrelet and Coho salmon habitat. Twisting arms all the way to Governor Davis's office, it got a THP amendment for helicopter yarding and winter operations changed from a major status, with public comment, to a minor one, without it.
After the Regional Water Quality Control Board's (RWQCB) repeated requests for an adequate water quality monitoring program were ignored, the regional board in June of this year issued an historic order to comply. Instead, the company appealed to the state board, challenging the regional's authority to issue such monitoring orders, and insisting that CDF has sole control over logging operations.
Unlike the HCP's hazy "watershed analysis" component, the RWQCB's idea of monitoring requires specific baseline data before, during and after logging. "A 20% rise in turbidity above natural background levels equals a violation, and is a likely outcome," Josh Brown, the North Coast Earth First!er who helped organize the education and defense campaign to save the "Hole," tells us. "Our only hope to stall logging in the 'Hole' is to get the monitoring done and insist on compliance. Water quality restrictions, if applied, could make it more worthwhile to sell than cut." Meanwhile, thirteen new plans have been filed in the South Fork Elk River watershed, and Maxxam/P-L is demanding the go-ahead, regardless of a moratorium still in effect. A precedent-setting decision is still pending at the state Water Quality Board.
The fate of Freshwater, a small rural-residential community between Eureka and Arcata, where Nate Madsen saved his ancient redwood "Mariah" by outsitting a THP, may also pivot on such water quality issues. A community of homesteads and ranchettes, some with 100-year-old orchards, Freshwater has long thrived on the creek's clean and sufficient flow. But residents were forced to depend for months on court-ordered bottled water deliveries from P-L when its drinking water was contaminated by upstream operations in 1999. Flooding is now common, even from small water storms. Siltation has widened and filled in the creek bed, and residents have the pictures and documentation to prove it. Or so they thought.
Freshwater was the company's first attempt at "watershed analysis" under the HCP. Its plans call for cutting the last remaining one-third of the watershed within the next five years. At first it held public meetings, appearing open to community input. But well-informed residents soon saw the company was more interested in obfuscation than cooperation. Maxxam/P-L again refused to conduct water quality monitoring, again defying NCWQCB orders.
With residents armed with information, and an agency standing tall that has, says longtime resident Kristi Wriggley, "...refused to allow clearcutting, burning, herbicides or other practices that can destabilize, poison and muddy our waters," the company seemed (almost) to have met its Waterloo. But in March, despite public outcry, and over Water Quality's opposition, CDF lifted the two year moratorium, before completion or review of the vaunted watershed analysis, and without keeping its promise to hold public hearings. It also doubled the amount of allowable logging to 500 acres, whereupon, according to Rob DePurna, "P-L had a logging fit," filing a spate of plans, several of which are already approved. The first plan, 01-253, is an 80-acre clearcut.
Adding insult to injury, Water Quality hearings scheduled last spring to evaluate the impacts of these plans were postponed "indefinitely." Also, the Humboldt Watershed Council's legal challenges were clobbered in court by a visiting judge, who ruled "insufficient evidence" had been brought to link the damage to the logging.
"P-L biologists try to defend over-logging by masking the true relationship between canopy removal and the sedimentation that causes inundation of downstream properties," said Bob Martel in Voices of Humboldt County, the publication of the Humboldt Watershed Council. Water Quality opposes the plans, which they have said violate the Clean Water Act.
Many readers know about the intense, ongoing struggle to save the Mattole watershed from Maxxam's maw. At stake are the forests along the upper and lower North Forks, the two biggest tributaries of the Mattole River. This area contains the largest low and mid-elevation contiguous old growth Douglas fir in California, and one of the few stands of its kind left globally. The ancient forest and coastal prairies of this unique landscape provide homes for numerous imperiled species, including the northern goshawk, spotted owl, pacific fisher, tailed frog, torrent salamander, red tree vole, as well as Coho salmon and summer steelhead. Rare plant species are found here, such as the long bearded, nitrogen-fixing usnea longissima, a lichen discovered by a Mattole citizen monitor. But the HCP lumps all the endangered species into only six "focus groups."
Known for its dramatic storms and earthquakes, the steep, fragile watershed straddles three active fault lines, the "Triple Junction," and gets over 200 inches of rainfall, some places, some years. This combination of weather and geology increases the likelihood of landslides synergistically.
The Mattole River offers critical fish habitat, and the community is known for its heroic and innovative restoration work, especially its streamside hatch-box program. Nevertheless, the river is listed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as sediment- and temperature-impaired. The health of the estuary, at the amazing opening and closing mouth of the Mattole, is also a crucial factor in the survival, or demise, of young fish.
Also known as the "Sacrifice Zone" of the Headwaters Forest deal, this "...long deep mass, nearly 3,000 acres of pristine forest," as longtime resident, salmon supporter and eco-dramatist David Simpson describes it, belongs to Maxxam/P-L. The HCP calls for downsizing the landscape through even-aged management, "...removing virtually all trees over eighty years old, converting a vibrant, functioning old growth ecosystem into a tree farm," says Freeman House, author of Totem Salmon, past president of the Mattole Restoration Council, and restorationist.
The SYP calls for liquidation of the remaining old growth, starting with clusters of 50- to 60-acre clearcuts pockmarking Rainbow and Long Ridges, twelve miles deep inside corporate property lines.
In the time between Hurwitz's 1985 hostile takeover of the family-owned Pacific Lumber Company, and September 1998, he had cut 468 acres, about 15% of his Mattole holdings. By June 2001, another 202.5 acres, mostly old growth, had been cut in both the upper and lower North Forks.
"They would have cut more," says Ali Freedlund, THP Coordinator at the Mattole Restoration Office, "but they were slowed down by the constant early monitoring and activism of the Mattole community."
For the past two years, monitoring and activism have been taxed to the max. Faced with Maxxam/P-L's record of over 250 violations before the deal, and its nonperformance and noncompliance afterward, an intrepid group calling itself the Northcoast Timber Monitors (NCTM) organized its own program to "...pick up the slack left by state and federal agencies, who perpetually lack the staff to do the job," explains newer resident-activist Sawyer. The NCTM brings video documentation of actual and potential field violations to the agencies, to help support enforcement of environmental protection laws.
Citizen monitoring, lawsuits by Michael Evenson and Dan Eresman, appeals, stays and demonstrations at CDF held off the chainsaws for a time, but in November 2000, cutting commenced on Rainbow and Long Ridges. It was met by six solid months of determined nonviolent resistance in the woods and at the gates.
About thirty rotating protesters occupied the land throughout a freezing, wet winter, establishing a "Mattole Free State," building blockades and lockdown devices. This spring they again faced aggressive loggers and county sheriffs who chased, beat and pepper-sprayed the activists as they approached live chain saws, perched on platforms or scrambled into smaller trees to save the big ones.
"Cal-OSHA Laws [prohibiting free cutting while people are in the fall zone] were completely ignored as trees were felled towards forest defenders, just like the way they killed David Gypsy Chain," reported Mattole forest defender Felony from the front lines. "The sheriffs stood around watching and guffawing." (Chain was the young man who died together with the redwood tree he was defending in Grizzly Creek in September 1998.)
Older Mattole residents gathered at the gate for 5 am vigils joined by folks from all over the county.
Finally, declaring it could "no longer tolerate" such incursions on its property rights, Maxxam peeled off its public relations gloves, revealing the fist of corporate authority in Humboldt County, and commanded convoys of cops (including Department of Fish and Game employees) to break the resistance. Many forest defenders were finally arrested and jailed. Some have taken their cases to court, with results ranging from convictions to acquittal. Several young women and men are doing time, including Kim Starr, a lockdowner in for five months after refusing probation. Right now there are two treesits in the Mattole on current THPs. The company has filed SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) against dozens of people, opening a whole new arena in its attempts to shake off protesters.
"But the struggle continues," say resident activists Elen Taylor and Jane Lapiner, "on the next, and the next plans."
In a recent twist on monitoring, a golden eagle chick was found by a logger, who stopped work and brought it to the Arcata Bird Refuge. Now strong enough to fly, the fledgling has been returned to the area. While its survival is fortunate, its rescue during active logging speaks poorly of P-L's wildlife experts who signed off on the plan, stating it was "unsuitable habitat" for raptors.
Has the HCP been good for Redway? Not particularly. But "back-at-ya" protests by local forest defenders, (tree sits and gate vigils) against Maxxam/P-L's "in-your-face" THP 00-044, which would remove the old growth redwoods from the southern Humboldt town's skyline and rip a road through nearby Whitmore Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park on its way to access other plans, seem to have elicited a different response than the usual corporate cold shoulder. Redway Forest Defense first sued to overturn the plan, then began settlement talks with company officials. The lawsuit was dropped on certain conditions, including a "...willingness to work in a spirit of cooperation and trust" outside the courtroom. Surprisingly, the company said it might use selection silviculture to log the steep, unstable slopes facing town, and would not submit more THPs until a watershed analysis and management plan could be completed (at least eighteen months). But, "Whoa," warns Cynthia Elkins, around the corner at EPIC in Garberville. "A completed watershed analysis is P-L's ticket to adaptive management, a clause in the HCP that allows the company to change, and most likely weaken, the rules," she says.
In one public meeting P-L's Resource Manager, Craig Anthony, let slip on the record the company's intent to finish cutting all its old growth, not in fifteen, ten or five years, but as soon as possible, he hopes. Here too, the company intends to convert every acre to even-aged management, using clearcuts and herbicides to extract timber and profits.
Sometimes, it seems like the only thing left to do is buy the forests. Both the Mattole and Redway communities have set up committees to work on the possibility of acquiring P-L properties. And just like with Headwaters (the redwood one) Maxxam coyly claims it's not a willing seller. But there the similarity ends. The outcome on THP 044's 138 acres will not necessarily affect the rest of P-L's 581-acre ownership above Redway, nor change its high impact practices elsewhere, notes Richard Gienger, southern Humboldt's godfather of forestry reform.
"Management of Maxxam holdings in the...Mattole is the keystone to survival of the old growth dependent species," Freeman House points out. The proposed acquisition of some 7,500 acres of Douglas fir forest is almost the same size as Headwaters (the redwood forest), and would dedicate the old growth as a reserve, practice ecologically responsible forestry in the second growth, and maintain good stewardship of its rangeland.
Acquisitionists have had their eyes on 13 million dollars left over from the state's post-deal purchase of Owl Creek, administered by the Wildlife Conservation Board and earmarked for either the "Hole" or the Mattole. Maxxam tried to grab these funds, too, in addition to 20 million dollars it had already been paid for Grizzly Creek, at the end of 2000. But its blatant greed finally disgusted even the board so much, it finally said no, only to see the funds raided recently to pay off the energy pirates.
In Humboldt County, it's hard to see how the HCP has been good for much, except Huge Corporate Profits, as the protest signs used to say. And like trading one "national treasure" for another, to quote Thunder's eloquent testimony on the stand, Headwaters Forest may turn out to be the most magnificent mother of all mitigations.
On the other hand, Gabrielle Roach of the Middle Mattole Conservancy sees the recent redwoods-to-the-sea acquisition of Gilham Butte from Eel River Sawmills as a "...shining example of what people can accomplish." Above nearby Fox Camp Gate, where Maxxam/P-L has cut 15 acres of old growth bordering Humboldt State Redwoods Park, which links up with Rainbow Ridge, a billboard-sized banner strung between two ancient firs faces the public road with the message: "Local Control of the Mattole! Scram MaxxamÑStop HCP Scam!"
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2001
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited