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

7. The Industry

126 The kind of forestry Jerry Franklin wants to change is best seen from the air, preferably in winter. Snow turns the modern managed forest into a checkerboard of black and white and gray. The clear-cuts are white, and the mature, uncut evergreens black. The regrowing forest is a spectrum of gray, depending on how big the young trees are against the snow. The bigger the trees, the deeper the hue. This early winter day is a bad one for flying over the Cascade Mountains . The big leaf maples and aspens are still golden down in the valleys, but on this afternoon they are already being dusted with powdery snow. I see this from above, perched in the forward plastic bubble of a helicopter chartered by the Plum Creek Timber Company. The transparent envelope that wraps under our feet provides a magic carpet kind of view, but there is little sense of security as the machine ducks around the dark gray dirigibles of snow clouds and bucks in the gusty wind. The mountains look cold, lonely, and hostile. Company biologist Lorin Hicks urges the pilot ahead, however. Poor weather doesn’t deter him much. Hicks once crashed in a light plane while trying to track elk, crawled out of the wreckage, and carried the shocked pilot out to a road through several miles of snow. Then the biologist The indUsTry the induStrY 127 climbed into another plane the next day, so necessary has flight become to the modern biologist trying to traverse and understand rugged country. Animals are strange, Hicks remarks. A spotted owl on Plum Creek land moves only a couple of miles over a year of radio tracking, drifting downslope in winter and back up in spring. An elk, however, can track from the upper reaches of the Missouri River in Montana to St. Louis, its migration seemingly as aimed as a missile but its purpose only guessed at. The more biologists learn about animals, the more they realize how little they understand. We are pushing the weather this November because Hicks is anxious to show what his corporation is doing to modify its logging. More than any other large timber company in Washington State, Plum Creek was lambasted in the media in the late 1980s for its rapid liquidation of old growth. The criticism spilled into the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and one Seattle congressman called Plum Creek the “Darth Vader” of clearcut logging. Its clear-cuts in Montana have been pummeled by environmental groups in the Rockies. Plum Creek’s clear-cuts are no worse than those conducted by any other big timber company over the past century, with two crucial differences: it did not start logging in earnest until most of the region’s other privately owned old growth was gone, and some of the land it inherited from its parent, Burlington Northern Railroad, overlooked Interstate 90 east of Seattle where most of Washington State passed by, sooner or later. By the end of the 1980s, Plum Creek had become a subject for cocktail party condemnation in Seattle. Accordingly, no timber company was doing more in Washington State to salvage its reputation. Early in 1990 Jerry Franklin invited a Plum Creek executive to defend industry cutting practices at one of Franklin’s University of Washington classes. In return, the scientist was invited to explain his New Forestry ideas to the company’s board of directors. David Leland, Plum Creek’s president, was impressed by what he heard. As a result, on 20 percent of its harvest in 1990, Plum Creek experimented with New Forestry ideas at a probable cost of several million dollars. One dirty clearcut at Frost Meadows, south of the Cascades town of Roslyn, is called “The Franklin Cut.” Plum Creek is also unusual because of Hicks. He is one of only four wildlife biologists employed by timber companies in the western United 128 the final foreSt States, and as such is an oddity who tries to straddle two worlds, comparing himself to a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. “I’ve got everything from gophers to grizzlies on a million and a half acres” of timberland stretching from western Washington to western Montana, he explained. He is trying to advise the company on how to protect wildlife at the same time that it is playing catch-up with other large timber firms...