The creation of Washington State’s current logging
regulations may have been less spectacular that the infamous spotted owl timber
wars of the early 90s (the President didn’t have to intervene, for instance), but
they were still righteously complicated. Ten years ago, when salmon hit the
endangered species list, stakeholders sat down to create a multi-trick pony: a
plan to protect salmon, fulfill tribal treaty rights to harvest salmon, satisfy
the federal Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts, and preserve the timber economy. They
called it “Forests and Fish.”
The Forests and Fish negotiations
lasted three years, and consensus was only reached after many environmental
groups left the table over complaints that the timber lobby held too much sway.
Key to the eventual compromise was something called ‘adaptive management,’ or a
promise to adjust the rules according to best available science. Tribes and
environmental groups expected that science would lead to stricter logging
regulations to protect water quality, while many in the timber industry held
out hope that science would eventually prove habitat wasn’t as important to
salmon recovery as harvest or oceanic conditions.
In September, a group of forestry
and salmon industry folks met again at the Quinault Lodge, deep in Olympic
National Park, to reassess the timber regulations. Veterans of the original
Forests and Fish negotiations expected to focus on the same old, same old — namely
the under-performing and underfunded adaptive management program. Instead, the
newly-created Forest Ecosystem Collaborative, organized by the Governor’s
office, the association of Indian tribes, and Peter Goldmark, the recently
elected Commissioner of Public Lands, takes a big step back from the old debate. In fact, their effort appears to be as much an attempt to
protect Washington’s forests as it is to preserve its native salmon runs.
In the past decade a lot has
changed: hundreds of thousands of acres of forestland in Western Washington have
been converted to development, and, surely as a Boeing assembly line, the
timber industry has begun to shift industrial production to the southern US. The
industry hasn’t exactly lost its fangs, but it’s not uncommon nowadays to pick
up a local newspaper and read about an environmental group teaming up with a
big timber company to preserve land from developers.
Commisioner Goldmark has expanded the
conversation to include new players, such as county representatives and land
conservancies, and new problems, most notably global climate change. Still in
its infancy, the project faces many challenges, not least the fact that the
timber industry is in an economic tailspin and Washington State Dept. of
Natural Resources has had to lay off more staff members than any other state
agency during the recession due to a decline in timber revenues.
And as far as salmon recovery goes:
it’s now crystal clear that we need to find a way to protect the iconic fish from
toxic storm water runoff, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification, not just muddy
streams and landslides. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the days when
logging was indeed the scariest thing in the room.
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