On December 21, 1994, President Bill Clinton announces the Northwest Forest Plan has met legal standards. "The plan approved today will provide for a sustainable level of timber harvesting, while protecting the environment," Clinton says in a statement. The conflict that has characterized West Coast forests for a decade eases with the Northwest Forest Plan, which ends logging on millions of acres of federal old-growth forest to protect endangered species and vital habitat while allowing logging to proceed in other areas. It ends a legal injunction that has stalled the industry for years. The Northwest Forest Plan implements ecosystem management across federal lands while also investing in local communities. In subsequent decades, the Northwest Forest Plan will dramatically reorient federal timber programs, which in turn will change many communities’ economic bases and identities but not solve biodiversity harms.
Logging in Old-Growth Forests
The timber industry had been a centerpiece of the Washington economy from the establishment of Henry Yesler’s sawmill in Seattle in 1853. Logging produced wealth and helped support many communities, but it also disrupted ecosystems and undermined species viability. In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed legislation, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973, that aimed to end or ameliorate these harms. Legislation including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the National Forest Management Act of 1976 also changed how the federal government managed its lands and activities. Both laws allowed the public a greater role in developing and challenging federal management practices, including by initiating lawsuits. Both the timber industry and environmentalists used this tool.
Meanwhile, conservation biology emerged as a discipline that allowed scientists to understand better ecological relationships in places such as Washington’s old-growth forests. These trends set the stage for ongoing conflict often called the Timber Wars in Northwest woods in the 1980s. In a series of federal court cases, environmental litigants mostly prevailed. Because of their work, a judge issued injunctions against 140 timber sales in one case. In another, a judge chastised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for ignoring science and failing to follow laws. In 1990, the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species; the marbled murrelet joined it two years later. Both birds depend on old-growth forests for their survival. Federal courts stopped logging on the region’s federal lands until federal agencies met their obligations, after judging that current actions represented a "deliberate and systematic refusal by the Forest Service and the FWS to comply with the laws protecting wildlife" (Audubon v. Evans).
The Timber Summit
The standoff in Northwest forests appeared in the 1992 presidential election where President George H. W. Bush proposed revising endangered-species laws and Bill Clinton promised to meet with all sides and devise a solution with economic and environmental benefits. After his election victory, Clinton headed to Portland, Oregon, for the Pacific Northwest Forest Conference, better known as the Timber Summit, on April 2, 1993.
Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, and a significant portion of Clinton's cabinet listened for eight hours to more than 50 representatives of various parts of the Northwest’s timber and environmental communities, including two tribal representatives. Clinton asked the participants at the Timber Summit to "find common ground ... If we don’t give up or give in to deadlock or divisiveness or despair, I think we can build a more prosperous and a more secure future for our communities and for our children" (Clinton, "Remarks").
At the summit’s conclusion, Clinton created the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) to devise a set of options to guide federal forest management. U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist Jack Ward Thomas was put in charge. The president directed Thomas and FEMAT to follow several principles that emphasized sustainable economic opportunity, long-term forest health, sound science, and intergovernmental collaboration. FEMAT got straight to work to meet the deadline Clinton imposed, a mere 90 days.
Option 9
FEMAT, which included almost 100 scientists, produced 10 options in its Northwest Forest Plan. To meet legal obligations, Option 9 was chosen to be the Northwest Forest Plan. Option 9 divided the land – some 24 million acres in Washington, Oregon, and northwestern California – into different categories. Logging would be excluded from 18.8 million acres. Across the remaining forests, the plan set a target of 1.2 billion board feet for annual timber production, encouraging local communities to find innovative ways to manage forests without devastating threatened or endangered-species habitat.
Even this reduced target seemed unacceptably high to some environmentalists who aimed to end old-growth logging entirely, but it amounted to only about 25 percent of what had been typical during the 1980s, a massive reduction that hit timber communities hard. FEMAT expected this to eliminate 5,000 jobs and reduce tax revenues received by local communities by 75 percent. To help offset these costs, the administration dedicated more than $1 billion in its Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative to assist in economic transitions, including money for job retraining and some short-term jobs working in the woods. Congress also passed a law banning the export of raw logs, something that had been a leading cause in declining mill employment.
Two other elements of the plan offered innovations. One was a survey-and-manage requirement. Before any timber sale, scientists would have to survey the site, looking for any species on a list of 400 that were rare or threatened. If any were found, the sale would be canceled. The other novel approach was the plan’s aquatic-conservation strategy. Aquatic and riparian habitat were especially vulnerable to logging and associated activities in federal forests. On 164 watersheds across more than 9 million acres, scientists were required to analyze aquatic conditions before any timber sales.
The shift in management came from moving beyond a single species and looking more broadly at protecting biodiversity on a landscape scale. Thomas understood this significance, writing in his journal the day the Northwest Forest Plan received the court’s approval that, "I think that historians may write of these efforts and this five-year period as a turning point in forest management and conservation in the United States at least, and perhaps the world" (Steen, ed., 138).
Initial Results
Although lawsuits continued to touch the timber industry, causing occasional starts and stops, the Northwest Forest Plan ended the longstanding stalemate when U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer determined it met legal requirements in December 1994. Its impacts have been both dramatic and disappointing.
The Northwest Forest Plan reduced old-growth logging considerably, even more than expected. Timber production on federal lands did not meet the targets initially established. Monitoring programs revealed more areas where threatened species depended on old growth. This hurt timber-dependent communities, which had been struggling with technological, economic, and policy changes already.
In the meantime, the birds whose listings provided the main impetus for this history continued to struggle. Barred owls spread into northern spotted owl habitat and have aggressively outcompeted the spotted owls. In addition, during the plan’s first five years, the FWS added 18 more species to the list of threatened or endangered species in old-growth forests.
If species protection has not improved as hoped, the Northwest Forest Plan did help reorient Forest Service management practices, launching something of a culture change within the agency. Observers frequently cite the Northwest Forest Plan as the most enduring example of ecosystem management in the federal government. The Northwest Forest Plan protected old-growth forest from logging and disrupted Washington’s timber economy, but has not improved species survival. In that, it helped reveal just how complex managing old-growth forest ecosystems can be.
