A Speech by James D. Petersen
Writer and Managing Director of the Evergreen Foundation
Publishers of Evergreen Magazine

58th Annual Convention
Western Wood Preservers Institute
Monday, November 14, 2005-10-25
Princeville Resort, Kauai, Hawaii

When Dennis asked me to join you this morning, it unleashed a flood of memory about the distant years when we were comrades in arms, fighting for science-based forestry and those who practiced it on public and private timberlands across the West.

But forestry was really only sub-text for us. Our primary mission was to protect the federal timber sale program: the economic lifeblood for hundreds of family-owned sawmills and their often tiny rural communities.

Despite the legions of loggers and sawmill workers we represented, despite the fact that truth was on our side, we were doomed from Day 1. Such were the enormous political and financial resources of this nation's environmental movement. It had billions to spend destroying us, but we only had thousands to spend in our common defense. In describing how badly outgunned the South was, famed Civil War writer Shelby Foote said that the industrial North could have defeated the agrarian South with one hand tied behind its back. He was describing our plight too. We never had a chance.

Dennis and I were warriors on the front lines in what can best be described as trench warfare; he as executive vice president of the North West Timber Association and me as editor of Evergreen Magazine. NWTA is long gone now, but for reasons I cannot fully explain, Evergreen lives on, despite the astonishing fact that all but two of our 25 founding sponsors - all of them family-owned mills - were forced out of business after the increasingly dysfunctional U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed the northern spotted owl as a threatened species.

I don't miss the fight, but I do miss the comradeship, the dedication, and the fighting spirit of Dennis, Jim Geisinger and Frank Gladics, three warriors gone on to new, more productive endeavors. How nice it is to be here with Dennis, and all of you, on this bright and beautiful Hawaiian morning, amid such peaceful surroundings, so far removed from the sounds of war.

Dennis asked me to talk with you about the Evergreen Foundation, its role in the lost war - and where I think we are all headed in the wider war for science-based forestry, and forest policy. To the extent that forest policy is shaped by political processes that reflect public attitudes, it also functions as a window on seemingly unrelated policies and practices that impact the conduct and profitability of your businesses.

For example, the same organizations that oppose your efforts to extend the useful life of wood products by treating them with chemicals also don't want those who grow the nation's wood fiber to use chemicals to control brush species that invade recently harvested Tree Farms.

Never mind that these preservatives you use have been proven safe in countless peer-reviewed studies. Never mind the environmental value inherent in extending the life of wood products. Never mind my old friend Bill Libby's declaration that genetically superior forest plantations treated with herbicides and pesticides save more endangered species in a single day than most environmentalists save in a lifetime. For the record, Dr. Bill Libby, who taught at Cal Berkeley for many years before he retired, has forgotten more about plantation forestry - and the environmental benefits that accrue in wild forests because of its global growth - than most of us will ever know.

If you take nothing else away from our time together this morning, I hope you will remember these two points:

First, today's environmentalists have transformed legitimate public concern for the environment into a multi-billion-dollar a year conflict industry. They are lining their pockets with your money.

Second, this multi-billion-dollar industry is now the hand maiden of Leftist organizations that exist for only one reason: to destroy capitalism and free enterprise. You are their sworn enemy, and they will fight you to the death, until you have nothing left to fight with.

It took me a long time to come to these conclusions - but when radical environmentalists insist that sawmills should not profit from salvage and restoration work so desperately needed on some 60 million acres of federal land in the West, what other possible conclusion could one draw?

I am reminded of the sage admonition of an old friend who 15 years ago sent me a handwritten note which read, "He who controls access to the natural resources of nations controls the destiny of the world." He was right - and he still is. But I'm getting ahead of myself so let's back up a bit. The Evergreen Foundation, which I direct, exists for only one reason: to help advance public understanding and support for science-based forestry and forest policy. To this end, we publish Evergreen, a periodic journal designed to keep Foundation members and others abreast of issues and events that impact forestry, forest policy and forest communities. If anyone out there has fought harder for forestry over the last 20 years than we have, I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. I do not say this to be boastful, but as a matter of public record. Fighting for forestry is what we do best. We are the cavalry. It is our job.

Our founding sponsors were all members of the now nearly dead Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, a 1940s-era pioneer in the development and marketing of southern Oregon Tree Farms. In fact, SOTIA was originally known as the Southern Oregon Conservation and Tree Farm Association. Such was the membership's dedication to sound forest practices and prompt reforestation after harvest.

By the time I arrived on the scene in 1985 SOTIA was in trouble. Oh, it still had a strong membership and excellent leadership, but with eight federal forest plans soon to be opened to public comment what none of us knew was that the federal government never intended to honor the outcome of the legally-mandated comment periods. If they had some 50,000 loggers and sawmill workers who lost their jobs in the late 80s and early 90s would still be working. But early on it became clear to us that the issues that mattered most were going to be settled by the courts, not public sentiment or the wishes of communities that were to be economically and socially devastated by the slow motion, litigation-driven collapse of the federal timber sale program.

It is all water under the bridge now - though to this day I know of no peer reviewed science that proves that the northern spotted owl is a threatened species. The bird may well be threatened, but the research has been so lacking in veracity, scrutiny and completeness, that there is no way to know. But I can tell you that several scientists who suspected the deck was being stacked against truth had their careers threatened. This from the same out of control federal agency that recently and without apology concluded that perhaps the only way to save spotted owls is to shoot predatory barred owls.

What of the thousands of families who lost jobs, lost homes, lost hope? What does society now say to them? "We made a mistake. Owls don't really need 2,200 acres of old growth per breeding pair. What we should have been doing all along is shooting barred owls; so sorry; toodle-ooh now."

One of the hardest lessons I've learned over the last 15 years is that all those families that lost everything simply don't matter in the big political scheme in the sky. Out of sight out of mind: gone and forgotten. It is a sad, sad commentary on a society that in my view has lost its ethical bearings, if not its moral compass

I got my first inkling of just how bad things were - or were going to get - less than a week after the smoke began to clear from the 1987 Silver Fire, a horrific wildfire that destroyed more than 200,000 acres of mostly old growth Douglas fir and ponderosa pine in southern Oregon's the Siskiyou National Forest. In a well-timed press conference, Oregon Natural Resource Council spokesman Andy Kerr declared "not one black stick" of fire-killed timber would be harvested because salvage logging in the aftermath of fire was - in Andy's words - "like mugging a burn victim."

I cannot begin to describe the anger that swelled inside me. Driving back to southern Oregon from Montana, somewhere near Richland, Washington, I began to mull over an idea that seemed so unattainable to me that I tried to dismiss it; but my soul would not let go. So I talked it over with my two best friends, and together we mapped out a plan to stage a public protest unlike anything any of us had ever witnessed. It became the Silver Fire Roundup, the largest such event of its kind ever staged.

On a beastly hot August afternoon in 1988 some 10,000 rural Americans stood united on the streets of Grant Pass, Oregon. For eight hours, log trucks passed by on their way to the Josephine County Fairgrounds, just west of the downtown area. They came from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and California.

And they were a sight to be behold - all decked out in yellow ribbons, which were to become the symbol of a rural America united against eco-terrorists. Almost every cab held a family: a wife, children, and in some cases, grandchildren and pets. The going was so slow through the downtown area that sidewalk spectators started ferrying water to the truckers and their families - a tip of the hat from fed-up Americans to comrades in arms.

High atop the fairgrounds stadium, in the press box that overlooked the football field, county school superintendent John Mayfield used the electric end zone scoreboards to keep count of trucks entering the stadium. The first truck, driven by Mike Morgidge, architect of Montana's Great Northwest Log Haul, passed by our makeshift reviewing stand at 11:05 in the morning - 55 minutes before we were supposed to start. After Mike finished his Friday shift, he drove 16 hours from Eureka, Montana. "Sorry we're early," was all he could think to say to a capacity crowd that nearly went nuts when they found out who he was.

By 1 pm, the line of southbound log trucks waiting to exit the freeway at Sixth Street stretched 42 miles north on Interstate 5. At 7:55 pm, the last truck - Number 1,526, from Kelso, Washington - passed in review. So far as I could tell, not one person left the grandstand despite nine hours of sweltering heat. What we did not know then was later confirmed for us by American Trucker magazine: the Silver Fire Roundup had been the largest peacetime convoy in U.S. history.

And when it was over Mike Morgidge and the rest of the Montana drivers got back in their trucks and drove home for work Monday morning.

Dennis Hayward had much to do with the success of the Silver Fire Roundup. With his help, we raised $40,000 from his members - money we used to promote the event and feed every trucker and his family - an expression of our appreciation for their daily contribution to this nation's well-being.

Dennis also loaned us a young man who became the star of the show: Greg Miller, a North West Timber Association forester with Tom Sellick good looks who decided to walk from Eugene to Grants Pass to promote the event. It took him three days - and made national news. He later told me he spent as much time waving at honking cars than he spent walking; such was the level of support, not just for him, but for salvaging what had been lost in a terrible wildfire. In the end, about half of what was accessible was salvaged - a far cry from the one percent that has been salvaged in the aftermath of the half-million-acre Biscuit Fire, yet another Siskiyou calamity that fire ecologists predicted in the Silver Fire aftermath.

According to a landmark study done by a team of scientists at Oregon State University, a timely salvage of accessible conifer killed by the Biscuit Fire would have yielded at least $100 million in revenue - two-thirds of the $150 million in suppression costs shelled out by taxpayers.

The failure of the federal government to launch a timely salvage and restoration effort speaks volumes for the enormous damage modern-day environmentalism has done to this nation's conservation ethic. Further evidence of the damage can be found in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, a man often described as our "conservation President." At a 1903 meeting of the Society of American Foresters in Washington, D.C. he described his forest policy in exquisite detail. Here is what he said:

"And now, first and foremost, you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy, for that object is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself; nor is it because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You yourselves have got to keep this practical object before your minds; to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress or safety of the country is of no interest to the Government, and should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as a means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation."

Looking back over the last 25 or so years, can anyone doubt that where our conservation ethic is concerned - indeed where many ethical aspects of our society are concerned - we have fallen a very long way into a very dark abyss?

But every cloud has its silver lining, and this one is no exception. The West's forest health crisis - a monumental event environmentalists have yet to conquer, has given us what may be our last, best hope for restoring forestry's public credibility.

We first featured the forest health crisis on Evergreen pages in 1989, in a special report titled, "Gray Ghosts in the Blue Mountains." Eastern Oregon's Blue Mountains were then the scene of a terrible mountain pine beetle infestation, brought on by drought and the unintended natural consequences of the nation's long standing and still widely supported wildfire policy - a policy rooted in the landmark Clarke-McNary Act, ratified by Congress in 1926. The Act put the Forest Service into the fire-fighting business: a belated response to the national outcry that followed the Great 1910 Fire, a late August monstrosity that incinerated 3 million acres of old growth timber in northern Idaho and western Montana, most of it in a fire storm that last two days and nights. Seventy-eight firefighters died, most of them recruits from Spokane's skid row bars.

"Grey Ghosts" was the first of eight special issues we published over the next decade - each designed to explain and illustrate both the ecological crisis created by overstocked forests and the safe and predictable solution offered by landscape scale thinning programs. Aided by increasingly fearsome forest fires, our reports began to gain traction across the nation. Slowly but surely, this generation of Americans came to the same conclusion their great grandparents had come to in the aftermath of the Great 1910 Fire. Put simply, something has to be done to rescue our forests from fiery death.

And that something - which we featured in three special Evergreen issues - was the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, signed into law in November 2003 by a president I admire very much.

The Healthy Forests Restoration Act is, in my opinion, the most important piece of forestry legislation since Clarke-McNary. But it is a small step in a long journey back to reality. Revisions in the Endangered Species Act, approved this fall in the House, and scheduled for Senate debate in January, constitute another step.

Doomsday press reports to the contrary, the proposed ESA reforms are as follows: Independent, peer-reviewed analysis of all listing proposals, economic analysis of all listing proposals, and immediate implementation of fully-funded recovery plans - unlike the northern spotted owl, for which there is still no recovery plan 15 years after its listing.

Of course, most environmental groups are already expressing "outrage." But most Americans are not. I have seen the polling and focus group work, and much to my amazement ESA reform scores higher with nearly 80 percent of Americans than healthy forests legislation did initially. Early in the healthy forests debate, environmentalists were successful in portraying thinning in at-risk forests as a bonanza for timber companies. But after the Biscuit, Rodeo Chediski and San Diego wildfires opposition vanished. In fact, loggers have been warmly welcomed in resort areas surrounding southern California's Lake Arrowhead. It's about time.

At this juncture, it's hard to say what the Senate will do with ESA reform. Some fear all of the unrelated controversies of the year have poisoned the well, but I remain confident the bi-partisan Senate coalition that's been assembled will get the job done.

But now we face a daunting and unexpected problem: the family-owned mills that survived the collapse of the federal timber sale program no longer have much interest in doing business with the government. Oh sure, they'll buy a Forest Service or BLM sale if wood quality is good and the price is right. But I cannot name for you a single sawmilling family in the entire West willing to invest its capital in government hopes to launch a large-scale thinning program in the West's at risk national forest.

Why have sawmill-owning families that fought so hard for so long exited the stage? Because trust is gone, because - sadly - the federal government's word isn't worth the paper it's written on - and it won't be until someone figures out how to stuff the litigation genie back in the bottle. The billions of dollars in post-war public and private capital that were poured into development of the West's federal forests and sawmills have gone up in smoke, both literally and figuratively.

Save for a handful of federally-dependent mills in Montana and South Dakota's Black Hills, the family mills that survived the collapse of the government's timber sale program now get their logs from others sources: lands they now own, other privately-owned plantations, state lands or tribal lands; a few even import logs from Canada, New Zealand and Chile. How ridiculous is this? We have millions of acres of federal forest land in desperate need of thinning, yet the same government that can't seem to find any dead or dying trees it can harvest without running afoul of a Byzantine regulatory process is now trying to recruit new investment capital from entrepreneurs and their bankers. No lender in his or her right mind is going to lead a good client into this fever swamp - and you can take that to the bank.

Most blame what former Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas calls "the crazy quilt of environmental regulation." Forest Service veteran Sally Fairfax said much the same thing in an article she wrote way back in 1980 when, I believe, she was teaching at Cal Berkeley. Here is what she said about the combined negative influences of the federal Resource Planning Act and the National Forest Management Act:

"Far from achieving a rational decision-making process, RPA and NFMA may well result in stalemate and indecision as the Forest Service turns from managing land to simply overseeing a convoluted, ever more complex set of congressionally mandated procedures. The tradition of land stewardship, if indeed it survived the 1950s and 1960s, may have died in the 1970s. RPA and NFMA take the initiative from experienced land managers - those revered people on the ground, the folks who have lived with the land and their mistakes long enough to have developed wisdom and a capacity for judgment - and gives it to lawyers, computers, economists and politically active special interest groups seeking to protect and enhance their own diverse positions. This shift in initiative will result from the layers of legally binding procedure that RPA and NFMA foist on top of an already complex and overly rigid planning process. Constant procedural tinkering does not, I fear, lead to efficiency or simplicity. Rather it promises a proliferation of steps, sub-steps, appendices and diverticulae that makes the Forest Service susceptible to the ultimate lawyer's malaise: the reification of process over substance."

Maybe Jack and Sally are right, but I fear there is a larger problem imbedded in today's Forest Service: profound cultural change inside an agency that is now knee-deep in "ologists" whose specialties are so narrowly defined that no one seems to see or understand the big picture.

I am reminded of a great wisdom shared with me in 1996 by my wildlife biologist friend, Alan Houston. We were out walking on Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau on a crisp October morning when he turned to me and said something so profound that I can still quote it verbatim. He said, "When we leave forests to nature, as so many people seem to want to do today, we get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times. But with forestry, we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in nature."

Time was when the big publicly-traded outfits - the Weyerhaeuser's and Georgia Pacific's of the world - would have ridden to the rescue; but not anymore. They've given up too. In fact, some of the staunchest opposition we encountered in the debate over the Healthy Forests Restoration Act came from the big outfits. While I felt they should have taken a more socially responsible position than the one they took, I can certainly understand why it is that in today's brutally competitive global marketplace the last thing they want is log market competition from their own federal government.

This situation - disinterest on the part of the family-owned mills, outright opposition from the publicly traded companies and cultural decline inside federal forest management agencies - is not good news for the so-called New West, with its trophy log homes, ski resorts, golf courses, wine shops, art galleries, gated communities and legions of telecommuters. Because minus unsubsidized wood markets, minus the risk capital, creativity, technological genius and commitment private enterprise delivered to the federal government in spades for more than 60 years, restoration forestry will remain a distant dream, and the West's great publicly owned forests will continue to die and burn.

Let's be clear here. Restoration forestry isn't a jobs issue, though it should be. And there is no public mandate to save trophy homes or gated enclaves from firestorms. But there is a public mandate to protect the common ground most of us still share: human life, communities, municipal watersheds, air and water quality, fish and wildlife habitat and the wellspring of year-round recreation opportunity woven so tightly into the fabric of both the Old and New West.

My time with you is nearly up. But before I go I'd like to share a couple of Silver Fire Roundup stories with you. Earlier I mentioned two great friends whom I first approached with my idea: Bob Slagle, a legend among Oregon log truckers and Larry Brown, a forester and 30-year friend in whom the fires of Republican principle burned brightly. Both Larry and RB are gone now, but they remain giants in my life.

Over the years, RB and I traveled more than 150,000 miles in "Old 21," a 1966 Peterbilt log truck that became so famous at rallies that we sold T-shirts that read, "Old 21: Three Million Miles and Still Goin' Strong." He called it his "protest truck," and woe be unto the truck dispatcher who dared send Truck 21 to the woods for a load of logs. It was usually parked inside the shop, washed and ready to go at a moment's notice.

RB and I did not miss many rallies on the West Coast in the 1980s. In fact, "Old 21" became such a fixture on Interstate 5 that folks in passing cars often honked and waved, some with only one finger, a wave we happily returned in kind.

RB knew how much I wanted to learn how to drive log trucks, so he taught me. Then "Old 21" got a new motor, two air-ride seats and two cab-welded flag poles: one for the American flag and another for a Yellow Ribbon Coalition flag hand-stitched by one of his daughters. I think we made quite a sight.

In 1989, we were invited to travel to Montana to a rally at the Missoula County Fairgrounds. By then things weren't going very well in Big Sky Country, and the hope was that RB and I could help buoy sagging spirits. We used CB channels to put out the word we were going and, to our amazement, 100 trucks from Oregon, Washington and California fell in behind us as we headed up I-5. Among them: a fuel tanker driven by a Bakersfield, California distributor whose customers included loggers and farmers. His 10-year-old son was in the cab with him. And when another driver asked why he had brought the boy he said, "Because I want him to learn how to defend his culture and his future."

To my dying breath, I will never forget the sight of mill workers standing on overpasses at Roseburg, Creswell, Albany and Hood River. They had draped banners over the railings reading: "Save Our Sawmills." If only we could have.

We overnighted in Pasco, but with 300 miles still to go, we were back on the road again an hour before daylight. As first light illuminated the golden wheat fields that are eastern Washington's trademark, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw something I can see as clearly in my mind's eye this morning as I saw it then: 100 sets of headlights stretched out over rolling hills, glistening in the rising sun. Up and down the line every driver could see what I saw, yet not a word was spoken. Silence joined us. We knew where we were going and why. We were going to Montana to help Mike Morgidge and all the others who had come to the Silver Fire Roundup to help us.

RB and I answered a long distance call from Indiana that same fall. Joanne and Phil Etienne, downstate sawmill owners fed up with the fact that there had not been a timber sale on the Hoosier National Forest for two years, organized a rally in an open field next to their mill at St. Croix.

It is a long way from Grants Pass to St. Croix, but we still found nine truckers willing to take two weeks out of their lives to defend our culture and our future. Several local sawmills pitched in to help us with travel expenses. When Don Deardorf, one of the plywood industry's legendary tough guys heard we were going, he called RB and asked how much a truck sponsorship cost. "$2,500 bucks," RB said. "I'll take two," was Don's response.

The Midwest Pride Haul was on Saturday. Friday night we rolled across the Indiana state line and were greeted with the news that the governor had granted our trucks free passage. The welcome mat was out. The next morning we rolled south from Indianapolis to St. Croix amid a caravan of news cars, onlookers and log trucks from seven Midwestern states. It seemed as though the whole state knew we were there and why - and loved us for traveling so far to help call attention to the plight of Indiana's logging and sawmilling families.

Sunday after the rally we gathered in a nearby church basement to plot a strategy for unseating an Indiana congressman named Jim Jontz, who was spending more of his time in Oregon campaigning against logging than he was taking care of business in his own district. With the help of organized labor, we got him tossed out on his ear a year later. I suspect it was a chilling moment for members of Congress accustomed to casting their free environmental votes at our expense.

What is most important about these remembrances from Montana, Indiana and the halls of Congress is that it all began in Grants Pass, Oregon on a hot August afternoon in 1988. Because before the Silver Fire Roundup there was no nationwide grass roots coalition to take up the banner for the Healthy Forests Restoration Act or ESA reform or Greg Walden's new bill to speed post-fire salvage and restoration work, or legislation to protect rural school districts and county governments from the god-awful economic fallout that accompanied the collapse of the federal timber sale program.

Fire of a different kind, rising from the ashes of defeat that Dennis and I came to know so well during our years together: good signs all around, though we still have a long way to go in our fight to unlock forestry's full potential.

The Silver Fire Roundup was filmed by another old friend who has gone on: Loren Swearingen, timber manager for many years for the old Medford Corporation. In the last scene on the film, Loren's camera looks down from the roof of the grandstand onto the football field. My old friend Larry Brown - LB for short - had emptied everyone out of the stands onto the field and arranged them to form the letters "U.S.A." A young lady from Roseburg stood among them and sang "God Bless America." Then silence.

LB's booming voice is the last sound you hear on the film. He is yelling a question up to Loren:

"Are we done yet? Are we done?

And so, on this bright and beautiful Hawaiian morning, the spirit of my great friend Larry Brown rises again to ask you the very same question he asked Loren Swearingen 17 years ago: "Are we done yet? Are we done?"

No LB, we're not done yet. In fact, we're just getting started.