The Final Forest: Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

13. A Name for the Trees

223 In 1988 the leaders of a notoriously unyielding and effective environmental group called the Oregon Natural Resources Council gathered in the Portland office of Andy Kerr, the group’s conservation director. Combative and witty, Kerr thrived on controversy and reflected back the heat aimed his way by antagonists as if he were wrapped in aluminum foil. He would practice his one-liners in the shower, honing them for sting and pithiness. “World War III is the war against the environment,” Kerr liked to quip. “The bad news is, the humans are winning.” By the time of the meeting, the ONRC had made as much noise about the disappearance of old-growth forest as any environmental group in the Pacific Northwest. It would soon threaten to bring a great deal of logging to a temporary halt by filing appeals against 220 U.S. Forest Service timber sales in a single month. The legal tactic was so costly to the timber industry that Kerr was summoned to a special congressional hearing and lambasted by Oregon lawmakers. This, of course, simply guaranteed environmentalists additional exposure of what had been a somewhat obscure, distant environmental issue that revolved around complex, subtle ideas of ecosystem survival and biodiversity. Kerr loved the notoriety. “Our power and influence was our ability to a name For The Trees 224 the final foreSt always get headlines and sound bites,” he said later. Despite the periodic threatening telephone calls and bumper stickers that read, kiss my ax, andy, he called his job as environmentalist lightning rod “a great job, and somebody’s got to do it.” Then he’d grin. The confrontational tactics drew support. Between 1988 and 1990, the ONRC doubled in size to 6,000 dues-paying members, and its annual budget hit $500,000. Nor did the organization worry about enraging the opposition. “I’m glad they’re upset about me,” Kerr said. “The more they lambaste me, the less time they have to realistically assess their position.” The Natural Resources Council’s persistence drew Oregonians into a debate they had long deferred. “ONRC has a reputation as being careless and radical,” Kerr would note. “I would prefer bold and innovative. . . . We have been like guerrillas: big enough to start trouble but not to finish it.” The ONRC strategists reasoned that in the long run they could win the old-growth fight only through public opinion, not through the courts. The voters, through Congress, ultimately made the law. The people most likely to be persuaded were those who did not depend on the forests for their income. Thus, environmentalists had to bring the forest issue to national, not just regional, attention. “We knew the battle should not be fought in Oregon and Washington,” Kerr said. Timber was Oregon’s biggest, most basic industry. As for its northern neighbor, “The massive urbanization of Washington and the fact it was addicted more to Boeing was helpful, but we knew we had to make it a national issue there, too.” The environmentalists outside the Pacific Northwest were certain that most Americans had little idea of the scale of logging going on in their national forests. Outside the West, they suspected , many were confused by such basics as the differences between a national forest, where logging is encouraged to produce money for the federal treasury, and a national park. Still, the question was how to get people excited about certain kinds of trees in a landscape that had the image of being all trees. The immediate problem was the name. “Old-growth forest. That’s a jargon term,” Kerr assessed. It had been coined by forestry scientists but was difficult to explain because old-growth is not simply synonymous with virgin forest or forest that has never been cut. Not all uncut forest land is oldgrowth —fire, wind, and terrain ensured that only about 60 to 70 percent a naMe for the treeS 225 of the virgin forest pioneers found would meet the biological definition —and it is possible for regrown forest to develop into old growth, given enough time. In fact, there was no scientific consensus on what old growth even was: how big the trees had to be, or how many, or what kind and shape, or how many snags and logs. The Forest Service changed definitions on two different studies that estimated how much old growth there was and came up with totals more than...