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High above the Feather River Canyon, the early morning sun
touches the tips of ancient red firs towering over Chips Creek. The dense canopy basks in the light before sending
beams down through a filter of needles to the pines, white firs, and dogwoods growing in thick stands near the
stream. At the edge of a boulder-sized opening, a fire scar stretches 50 feet up the trunk of a hollowed-out incense
cedar. It is a mark of survival, one of hundreds of signs of the cycles of fire and wind storm, drought and insect
attack this tranquil canyon has weathered.
Today, this pristine stand, a five-hour drive northeast of San Francisco but eight miles from any road, is in the eye of another storm--this one political. How Chips Creek Canyon and hundreds of thousands of acres of neighboring roadless areas in the northern Sierra Nevada will survive this turmoil depends on decisions made far away by people inside the Beltway who have never seen a fire scar.
This forest is part of an ambitious land management proposal by the Quincy Library Group (QLG), a grassroots coalition of timber industry, civic, and local environmental leaders who have taken their case to Congress. The group aims to revive both the local, rickety, timber-based economy and the federal forests surrounding these rural communities.
But the group's plan to log over a million acres of U.S. Forest Service land between Lake Tahoe and Lassen Volcanic National Park has provoked a bitter brawl. Ferocious opposition from local and national environmentalists has drawn scientists into the political controversy. The QLG has sparked a passionate debate over how much and where to log in California's national forests, how they should be managed, and who gets to decide.
No one disputes that the forest is worth saving. Rising eastward from grass
and oak-covered foothills to bald granite peaks topping 8,000 feet, the 2.5 million acres encompassed by the Quincy
plan include some of the West's most productive forests. The Feather River streams through it, flowing into the
Sacramento Valley to provide 50 percent of California's developed municipal water supply. Quiet pools and spawning
gravels in Deer and Mill creeks are the last refuge for the state's endangered, spring-run chinook salmon. Rare
pitcher plants thrive in secluded wetlands and Douglas-firs flourish on the mountain slopes. The area, twice the
size of Delaware, is remote enough for wilderness yet gentle enough to support 50,000 people scattered through
a dozen small towns, including Quincy.
Quincy Library Group members want to save both the forest and the communities. Their proposal will protect vast tracts of roadless and environmentally sensitive areas on the Plumas and Lassen national forests and the Sierraville District of the Tahoe National Forest. Around 500,000 acres, including Chips Creek, would be off-limits to logging and road building during the plan's five-year demonstration period. In exchange, some 1.6 million acres of the three national forests would be made available to loggers.
The plan allows traditional green-tree timber harvests on 9,300 acres a year. Only trees under 30 inches in diameter would be felled, sometimes one tree at a time, but often in three-acre clearcuts. To protect watersheds and riparian areas, no logging or firewood cutting could occur within 300 feet of fish-bearing streams. Ponds and wetlands larger than an acre would have 150-foot buffer zones around them.
Along with this conventional cutting for lumber, the Quincy proposal includes experimental logging of up to 60,000 acres a year in a network of fuelbreaks. This system of quarter-mile-wide strips is the heart of the group's comprehensive yet controversial strategy to reduce the threat of wildfire. Each strip would be thinned from the ground up to defuse the fire ladders that conduct flames to the treetops. The resulting forest canopy, according to the plan, would be sparse enough to prevent crown fires yet thick enough to retard the growth of brush and other flammable ground cover.
The combined logging could produce as much as 300 million board feet of timber a year, Library Group members say, enough to build 30,000 two-bedroom houses and keep the area's local sawmills running. At least half of the timber would be chips and pieces too small for cutting into standard boards.
The QLG has been toasted from the Sierra Nevada to Pennsylvania Avenue as a national model for local land use planning. Officials from California Governor Pete Wilson to Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck have hailed it as an example for communities trying to solve natural resource problems. A congressional bill to mandate the group's plan for a five-year demonstration period sailed through the House of Representatives last July on a rare 429-1 vote. Depending on how a similar bill fares in the Senate, President Clinton could sign the QLG Plan into law sometime this spring.
Resisting the legislation, however, are opponents who fear the plan will damage watersheds and decimate the few old-growth stands remaining in the northern third of the Sierra Nevada. With high-powered politics and scientific data, opponents have lobbied against the plan for over a year and have denounced it in full-page ads in the New York Times and editorials in major national dailies.
Environmentalists' arguments citing inadequate protections for old-growth forests convinced California Senator Barbara Boxer to withdraw support from the bill she had co-sponsored with Senator Dianne Feinstein. Although QLG members remain confident that their bill will pass the Senate, they have renewed their own lobbying efforts in Washington.
The members who gather each month in the county library's community room include a range of rural Western personalities: loggers in plaid wool shirts and leather boots, environmentalists in L.L. Bean boots and REI hats, school officials in coats and ties, business owners, a retired airline pilot, and a woman who was named California's Young Republican of 1996.
They are self-appointed, impelled by conflicting interests yet sustained by the promise of improving national forest management. Bill Coates, a former Plumas County supervisor and coalition co-founder, chairs the day-long meetings, maneuvering lengthy agendas through free-wheeling discussions which can be affectionately contentious or aggressively bombastic.
"It's like riding a mustang," says Coates, a good-natured tire shop owner and former county supervisor. "You never know when you're going to end up in the ditch."
Most sessions include at least one angry outburst, usually from Michael Jackson, a Quincy attorney and group co-founder. Jackson, a self-described environmental wacko, admits that he's hot-headed and impatient. "I don't like backsliding. We've all got to go forward for this to work."
Dissension is endemic to the QLG. The alliance grew out of its members' deep distrust of one another. Dramatic drops in federal timber harvests in the 1980s were slowly strangling timber-dependent communities throughout the West. Struggling against the specter of economic disaster, town after placid small town turned against anyone--local or not--who sided with the environmentalists that most people blamed for their community's demise.
Quincy was no different. Dominated for a decade by Sierra Pacific Industries, the town 80 miles north of Lake Tahoe waged its particular jobs-versus-owls battle against the Friends of Plumas Wilderness, a local conservation group. Along with general hostility, Plumas Wilderness members endured face-to-face and anonymous threats that included a bullet fired into the window of Jackson's office.
The animosity only made it easier to demonize the town's timber industry, says Jackson. "And I did," he says. "I wrote them all off as Cro-Magnons."
The Plumas County town started down its path into the national spotlight the moment Coates walked into Jackson's law office with Tom Nelson, Sierra Pacific Industries' timberlands director. Archenemies with cavernous philosophical differences, Coates and Jackson had hardly exchanged a civil word. But on this day late in 1992, they agreed to work together for the community they both call home. Coates, Jackson, and Nelson formed the QLG, named for the only neutral territory where they could initially agree to meet.
Nelson and Coates, a staunch timber industry advocate during his 19 years as a county supervisor, were propelled by the threat of too few federal logs to sustain local sawmills. The timber industry was on its knees, says Jackson. "We let it up to do the right thing. These people are our neighbors."
But the Quincy environmentalists also saw an opportunity to protect old-growth forests and roadless areas. They dusted off their 1986 Conservationist Alternative to the Plumas National Forest Plan, twice rejected by the Forest Service. This document, which allowed harvesting up to 170 million board feet of timber without large-scale clearcutting, became the basis for the QLG's land management plan. Over the next three years the coalition expanded the territory and added federal regulations to protect the California spotted owl, guidelines to safeguard riparian areas, a fuel reduction program, and annual scientific monitoring.
The roadless areas off-limits to loggers include nearly 350,000 acres already identified by the Forest Service, as well as around 150,000 acres available for logging under current national forest plans. Although the north side of Chips Creek Canyon is not part of the Forest Service's potential timber inventory, the pristine area south of the stream is. So are the ponderosa pines of Polk Springs near Deer Creek, the Jeffrey pines near Thompson Peak on the Sierra Nevada escarpment, and an untouched stand of pines, firs, and cedars along the Feather River's Middle Fork.
Despite its unofficial status, the QLG proposal has already halted logging in at least six roadless areas. The Barkley timber sale, near Deer Creek in Lassen National Forest, was advertised twice before Regional Forester Lynn Sprague withdrew it under pressure from the QLG. While national forests around the West are losing roadless areas at rates as high as eleven acres an hour, the area covered by the Quincy plan has lost none.
"Were it not for us, we could have logging in Chips Creek," says Linda Blum, a former Audubon Society habitat specialist and Quincy group member. "All those areas might be lost to road construction, logging trucks--the whole destructive scenario."
But the forest protections have not won the QLG support from America's environmental community. On the contrary, it is The Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and other national organizations that have waged the most vitriolic campaign against the legislation. They have called it everything from a timber industry plot to green timber giveaway.
While skeptical about the scale of the QLG project, most environmentalists were initially willing to set aside their doubts out of respect for a local coalition and curiosity about how the experiment would affect forests. "We were hoping for something that would warrant widespread support," says David Edelson, an NRDC attorney who worked with Friends of Plumas Wilderness on the 1986 alternative to the Plumas Forest plan.
Disagreements over the level of logging and the fuelbreak strategy might have fed a healthy debate leading to better national forest management. But by circumventing that process and pursuing federal legislation directly, the QLG soured these once-supportive skeptics and turned them into outspoken opponents of the coalition. Former friends suddenly became enemies. Whether it is their tendency toward arrogance or their audacity to offer a solution without the sanction of national organizations, the QLG has been criticized for excluding all but a handful of locals willing to pledge blind support.
The legislation drafted by the group, known as the QLG Forest Recovery and Economic Stability Act, was introduced to Congress last year by Representative Wally Herger. The bill mandates a pace to the experimental logging which the Forest Service must follow, but critics argue that this imposes a top-down system for making local resource decisions and replaces on-the-ground management flexibility with fixed policies set in Washington.
Opponents also fear setting a precedent for local influence on national forest management. Grassroots environmental groups throughout the Sierra Nevada and from as far away as Iowa fear Congress will begin legislating the forests piecemeal, wherever a group claims to represent all interests--a process former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas called "brokering" public land.
"If Congress... gives the Quincy and Sierra Pacific Industries people their chance, what will Congress say to these other groups and the tens or even hundreds who also come forward?" says Felice Pace, executive director of the Klamath Forest Alliance, an environmental group in Etna, California. "Will passage of this bill herald a process of "balkanization" of national forest management?"
According to Coates, few QLG members wanted to turn to legislation. It's an expensive, time-consuming process that sacrifices local flexibility, he says. But after years of "promises and more promises" from high-level Forest Service officials, the group lost hope of ever gaining official approval. Frustration with the agency's pace led Jackson to dub it "the U.S. Lip Service."
Legislation is "the American way of doing things," not a pernicious power play, says Jackson. "No one can withdraw our right to redress our grievances just because we're rural."
But the question looming over every debate about the Quincy group's proposal is whether it will be good for forests. The federal land has without doubt been abused by decades of free-wheeling timber sales sanctioned by the Forest Service. Hillsides have been stripped of vegetation, meadows destroyed, and streams turned into silt-clogged gully-washes. In the remaining stands, the old trees are nearly gone and the young ones often left in unproductive, fire-prone thickets.
Logging restrictions imposed in 1993 under the California spotted owl guidelines offered a respite for watersheds, meadows, and old-growth forests. Combined with Forest Service budget and personnel cuts, timber harvests on the Plumas, Lassen, and Tahoe national forests plummeted from 640 million board feet in 1988 to 211 million in 1995. What rankles most opponents of the Library Group is that Jackson, Blum, and other Quincy environmentalists agreed to a scheme that not only endorses logging at whatever rate beleaguered Forest Service officials could put up the sales, but also increases the volume beyond the agency's highest estimates.
The agreement, says Jackson, is not the timber industry sell-out its opponents claim. It is based on scientific data Friends of Plumas Wilderness collected for their 1986 conservation alternative plan. Jackson is confident that the three national forests can sustain up to 300 million board feet of annual cuts without compromising roadless areas or the health of the ecosystem. When Nelson and Coates appealed for their help, the Quincy environmentalists saw no reason to "get greedy," Jackson says, "just because we suddenly found ourselves winners over the timber industry."
Jackson's new-found partnership with loggers is not unique. Timber-based communities across the country are forming coalitions of former enemies who demand more participation in the management of resources in their own back yards. Like the QLG, they are driven by the twin goals of healthy forests and healthy communities and by a conviction that those goals are inseparably linked.
"If we take care of our forests, our forests will take care of us," says Lynn Jungwirth, director of the Watershed Research and Training Center in Hayfork, California. As chair of the Seventh American Forest Communities Committee, Jungwirth works with dozens of community groups to establish local jobs based on the long-term health of local natural resources.
Jungwirth believes that the QLG's plan might be more defensible as a community health proposal if it included economic diversification. Some members are exploring the feasibility of establishing an ethanol plant to produce a gasoline additive from underbrush and wood debris thinned from the forest fuelbreaks. Aside from that, the coalition is preoccupied with maintaining the operation of its five local sawmills, three of them owned by Sierra Pacific. This makes it vulnerable to the frequent criticism that the group's fabled consensus is simply sugarcoating on "boondoggle" legislation which will reap massive profits for the timber industry at taxpayer expense.
As the QLG proposal has moved closer to becoming law, scientists have become involved in the debate over its impact on the forest. Many are enthusiastic. The plan to protect old-growth stands meets most of the goals for late successional forests defined in 1996 by scientists in the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), a federally funded study of the entire mountain range. Forest Service Chief Dombeck, a former fisheries biologist who introduced a watersheds-first approach to national forest management, has endorsed the Quincy coalition's treatment of forests.
Others, however, remain extremely wary of the plan's long-term effects. The legislation includes no scientific documentation to demonstrate that it would be good for ecosystems, says SNEP science team leader Don Erman of the University of California at Davis. "There's almost no science in it, just back-of-the-envelope calculations," says Erman. "That isn't what we normally think of as good science."
The argument among scientists has focused on the system of fuelbreaks proposed to reduce high-intensity wildfires. Phil Weatherspoon, a Forest Service fire ecologist who served on the SNEP team, views it as a sound strategy with great potential. In his assessment of forest fuel management, Weatherspoon identified fire as the greatest single threat to the integrity and sustainability of these forests. He views the Quincy fuel reduction plan as a good start to treating the fuel buildup.
Even if the fuelbreaks don't stop wildfires, some scientists would not consider them failures. Thinning the density of wood in the canopy will reduce the severity of fires, lessening the damage they cause and allowing forests to attain a more natural state.
Most scientists think the reintroduction of fire into the forest ecosystem is long overdue. John Menke, a U.C. Davis range ecologist and SNEP participant, welcomes the Quincy project as an opportunity to assess the economic feasibility of fuelbreaks on a landscape scale.
Erman agrees that the fuelbreaks are worth trying. But the area proposed--300,000 acres--is far too vast for the five-year experiment, he says. Erman also criticizes the lack of scientific criteria for selecting fuelbreak locations. The long-term forest health priorities are not spelled out, making the fuelbreak strategy little more than a tool to limit fuel for future fires.
"Do we just thin the bejesus out of a riparian zone because we're afraid of burning people up?" says Erman. "The plan offers no resolution for that."
Behind most of the criticism of the QLG legislation is its drive to "get the timber out." Once the commercial trees have been removed, there will be little incentive and no consistent funding to maintain the fuelbreak strips, says Timothy Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology Center in Eugene, Oregon. Under the guise of fire hazard reduction, streams may be fouled, wildlife habitat lost, and ancient forests sacrificed. The losses from logging will be the timber industry's gain.
Sierra Pacific will no doubt make money because of the QLG plan. The process, however, has forced company officials to honor environmental protections and see the land in a new way. These are the changes most likely to bring long-term improvements in forest management throughout the West.
"We're not talking about a Road to Damascus conversion experience," says Linda Blum, "but industry officials are behaving correctly in the way they treat natural resources. What's important is that they have a better understanding and acceptance of environmental values."
The values generated by the Quincy coalition may not actually improve forest health until their experiment can be tried. By then it may be too late for the woods. In the meantime, as arguments rage from town halls in the Sierra to the halls of Congress, the forest is safe for now. It cycles from the heavy snows of winter to the wildfires of summer, growing and dying and regenerating again. In Chips Creek Canyon, the pine and fir trees warm under morning sun. Wet trunks glisten with steam. Mushrooms push through the thick carpet of leaves and the faint scent of cinnamon wafts from a clump of Washington lilies. In the branches above, Clark's nutcrackers begin their daily clatter.
Jane Braxton Little is a freelance writer in Greenville, California.
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