| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats Selling Redwoods to Finance Junk Bond Debts "I'm no radical," says photographer Doug Thron. "Fact, I'm about as middle of the road as they get." With his backwards-facing truck driver's cap, hint of a beer belly, and clean-cut, good-looking face, he's closer to the ideal of a logger than to the tie-dyed-in-the-wool tree huggers I saw up here in Honeydew when reporting on Redwood Summer five years ago. Thron describes himself as a photographer: "I just take pictures of what's happening in there," he says. In fact, he has become something of an environmental hero up here in Humboldt County, redwood country. Unless, of course, you work for Pacific Lumber. Then his name is mud. For the last two years Thron has been driven to record on film the last significant chunks of old-growth redwood forest still in private hands...and what's been happening to them. His photographs, of what has come to be called the Headwaters Forest Complex, have appeared in national magazines and newspapers. But his real influence comes from the down-to-Earth slide show he and his wife and partner Lucy Thron have driven around the country, showing wherever people will look and listen. But today Thron is back from his road trip and has agreed to lead me into Owl Creek, an ancient grove of redwoods on the southeast corner of Headwaters. For the last eight years--since its owner's, Pacific Lumber's, intention to cut the old growth became clear--local and national environmental groups have been scrambling to keep the chain saws at bay. Owl Creek is now the site of a legal battle that could have profound consequences for the Endangered Species Act and its power to determine the fate of endangered species habitat located on private property. The questions at Owl Creek aren't only of legal significance, however. Owl Creek is one of only three sites in California where the endangered marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) is known to nest. The fate of this elusive bird, and the fates of other species who rely on this unique ecosystem, may be tied to the destiny of this 485-acre remnant of forest. As I follow Thron down a steep hill from a ridge of the biggest Douglas fir trees I've ever seen (some of them were sprouting at the turn of the last millennium), we pass through a golden patch of one of the world's last remaining upland prairies surrounded by old growth, and then down into Owl Creek's redwood grove itself. As we enter the grove, the barometric pressure seems to drop, the quality of the sound and light are somehow turned inside out. And suddenly we have become midgets in Lilliput. Thron begins to tell me his story. Three years ago, when he came to Arcata from Dallas to study photography at Humboldt State University, he took a roadside job washing cars to help pay for film. "I kept seeing these giant redwood trees cruising by on the backs of trucks," he says. "I started asking people where they were coming from. It was unbelievable to me that they were being cut down." Eventually, Thron found the source. Pacific Lumber, once a family-owned business and a model of responsible restraint in the logging industry, had undergone a radical transformation in 1985 when it was taken over by Texas-based Maxxam Corporation. To finance a huge debt--Maxxam used junk bonds, issued largely by Drexel Burnham Lambert's Michael Milken, to purchase the logging company--the new Pacific Lumber (PL) began clear-cutting old-growth redwood groves that the old PL had kept pretty much in reserve. Two years ago, Thron was led on a hike to see the source of the trees that had been hurtling by him on the highway toward PL's lumber mills. "As soon as I saw this place and what they were doing to it," he says, "I knew what I'd be doing for the next five years." One year shy of his degree, Thron dropped out of school and began spending every moment he could photographing these trees and the wildlife in and around them. It took him about six months to put together a slide show, a work which eventually catapulted him, and the Headwaters Forest, into national attention. At this point in his telling we stop and Thron lets out a loud call: "Who, Whoooo." A moment later I hear what sounds like a distant echo. A spotted owl returning Thron's call. They trade news, the owl's call getting closer and closer with each volley. Thron points to a mighty old tree with a spotted yellow ribbon tied around it. "Their [Pacific Lumber's] biologists mark the trees where the owls are known to nest," Thron says, "so they won't cut them down when they're logging in here." I imagine this place clear cut except for an occasional giant tree. Bright light flooding in. The thin soil exposed and drying. The horizon, after millennia, suddenly dominating again. I don't have to imagine for long. Thron leads me down a creek and out, suddenly, to the edge of the old trees. I've seen photographs and clear cuts from afar, but neither prepared me for this brutal scene. Since 1988, the Garberville-based Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) has been opposing PL's plan to cut Owl Creek. The plan was approved by California's Forestry Board in 1992 on the condition that PL conduct thorough marbled murrelet surveys, suggest mitigations for the protection of the bird, and act in accordance with the Endangered Species Act. On two occasions in the following months PL ignored these requirements and launched logging raids into Owl Creek with defiant enthusiasm. What is laid out beneath Thron and me is part of the result: acres and acres of torn, eroded, lifeless, rocky clear cut. Thron was here photographing during one of these renegade logging expeditions. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 1992, and PL had loggers cutting madly in an attempt, EPIC now claims in Marbled Murrelet v. Pacific Lumber, to destroy as much murrelet habitat in as little time as possible. It seemed to have worked, according to EPIC's lawyer Macon Cowles. "According to PL's own records, there were 75 detections of birds before the logging in 1992. There have been none since," says Cowles. Thron had broken his leg a few days before the Thanksgiving cutting, so when he snuck out to the site with his tripod and camera, he was on crutches and neither inconspicuous nor very mobile. The logging crew spotted him and chased him into a gully. "They were illegally cutting two-thousand-year-old trees where spotted owls and marbled murrelets nest, but I got arrested for taking photographs," Thron says. In early December the Ninth District Court is expected to decide the Marbled Murrelet v. Pacific Lumber case in EPIC's favor. The case will turn on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's rule that it is illegal for landowners to modify their property in ways that may lead (even indirectly) to the death of an endangered animal.The law is clear here in the case of public land, such as Forest Service land, where such modifications are more strictly enforced. Though PL acknowledges they may be harming marbled murrelet nesting habitat by cutting down Owl Creek, they say that's their prerogative as long as they don't kill any murrelets outright. The courts have waffled. If EPIC wins the December ruling, it will in all likelihood be appealed by PL to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that it follows the law of the Ninth Circuit which now conflicts with a 1994 decision handed down by the Washington, D.C., court of appeals, known as "Sweet Home." The Sweet Home ruling suggests a much more limited role for the Fish and Wildlife Service on private land, allowing federal intervention only when it can be proven that members of a species are actually being killed directly, by, say, falling trees, not indirectly, by, say, destruction of irreplaceable nest sites. "If the decision comes down against us," says EPIC lawyer Cowles, "it would be a serious blow to our ability to stop the destruction of species on private land." In addition to court battles, there has also been a legislative effort to protect Owl Creek and the greater Headwaters Forest Complex. Sponsored by Representative Dan Hamburg (Ukiah), the Headwaters Forest Act passed the House late last fall. (Much credit is given to the publicity Thron stirred up with his traveling show, gaining sympathy in congressional districts not generally tuned to forest issues.) The Senate version of the bill failed to make the agenda before adjournment in November. The Headwaters Forest Act called for the federal purchase of 44,000 acres of old- and second-growth forest from PL. The three-thousand-acre Headwaters Forest itself would have become a wilderness reserve, and the rest of the area, including Owl Creek, would have been joined to Six Rivers National Forest to the east. The redwood forests of the Pacific Coast once formed a great river flowing from southern Oregon down to Big Sur. In a century and a half, this river was reduced to small, isolated pools. The hope of the Headwaters legislation was to create an area of old- and second-growth forest large enough, and including enough elevational and geological variation, to preserve something of the diversity the forest brought into this century. In November, Hamburg lost his House seat to Frank Riggs, a strong advocate for the logging industry. Though both California senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, support the bill, without local House support there is little chance the Headwaters bill will come onto the floor this coming year. As we walk along I keep looking up, hoping to see a marbled murrelet. But the chances are slight; the robin- sized birds are notoriously difficult to spot. They zip in and out of the trees, flying at 55 miles an hour. And they usually do their commuting to and from the Pacific at dawn and dusk. Strictly speaking, the murrelet is a seabird, because it feeds on small fish in the Pacific Ocean. But it spends its entire breeding cycle here in the old-growth forest, nesting in the branches of the old-growth redwood trees, the only branches broad and mossy enough to accommodate the murrelet's nesting habits; they don't really build nests, they just create hollows in the abundant moss on these high branches. According to C.J. Ralph, a U.S. Forest Service ornithologist and probably the world's authority on the murrelet, California's total population now hovers at approximately 5,700. "Since at least 90 percent of the bird's historical nesting habitat has been lost, it follows that numbers have declined substantially, though we can't say by how much," Ralph says. The marbled murrelets in the Headwaters Forest Complex, of which there are fewer than 500, are probably a distinct population, says Ralph. This mysterious bird, one of the last American species to have its nesting habitat identified, is dangling by an evolutionary thread. If PL wins its Supreme Court appeal of the Marbled Murrelet v. Pacific Lumber decision, and if no one picks up the Headwaters Forest Act where Hamburg left it, this population's evolutionary thread may be cut. Only EPIC's lawsuits (the group has brought ten against PL in the last ten years) may keep PL from converting these fantastic forests into porch furniture and hot tubs. Thron tells this story with a mixture of sadness and determination. He may not fancy himself a tree hugger, but he loves this place to its roots. As we walk through this endangered grove, he touches each big tree we pass in an unaffected gesture of what seems to be consolation; I'm not sure, though, whether he's drawing consolation from the trees or giving it to them. He is the one who has a tremendous job ahead of him, but the trees are marked on Pacific Lumber's cut list. Gordy Slack is Associate Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 1995
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