By Greg King – Mendocino Commentary, June 4, 1987
Never has deforestation in the Pacific Northwest been so dire as today. Louisiana-Pacific continues to butcher 35,000 acres yearly in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. Georgia-Pacific, Simpson Timber, Barnum Timber and other producers are carving swaths into steep, fragile terrain; areas are now being logged for the second or third time this century.
Timber companies continue to cut the world’s last unprotected old growth redwood stands and other old growth forests. Pacific Lumber Company (PALCO) is in the process of liquidating over one-fourth of the world’s remaining old growth redwood. The Bureau of Land Management wants to sell Gillam Butte, 2,700 acres of virgin Douglas Fir five miles southwest of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Further south, PG & E may soon log 700 old growth acres on Trout Creek near the Eel River. Eel River Sawmills recently bought the extensive Sanctuary Forest in southern Humboldt County. Nearby, Barnum Timber is also taking final old growth stands.
With little privately held old growth remaining, timber companies are looting the national treasury by means of subsidized logging operations in the National Forests. The Six Rivers, Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity, Rogue River, Klamath and other National Forests in the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion are under attack.
The last unprotected stands of old growth redwood are falling fast with the Maxxam takeover of Pacific Lumber Company in Humboldt County, northwest California. Attempting to meet debt payments of $40,000 per year in 1987-88, Maxxam Corporation changed PALCO’s selective logging policy to one of clearcutting, and more than doubled the acreage to be cut.
Even during winter, six PALCO logging crews worked full-time. On March 17, following one of the season’s heaviest rains, crews used tractors, which caused large expanses of mud to slide down hills into streams. Such massive degradations have gone unchecked by the California Department of Forestry (CDF). PALCO’s seed tree removal cut is a de facto clearcut, taking old growth trees from tracts selectively logged within the past few years. PALCO is clearcutting its untouched stands. Sources close to PALCO say that large portions of the company’s virgin redwood and Doug Fir stands may be sold to other North Coast timber giants—such as Louisiana Pacific, Simpson Timber, and Georgia-Pacific—inciting the elimination of these forests within a few years.
As of last year, PALCO owned 40,000 to 50,000 acres at old growth, equivalent to 70% of that standing in California parks. One of the largest islands of old growth identified by forest defenders, “Headwater(s) Forest” on Salmon Creek, contains 2,800 acres of unroaded habitat.
The California Dept. of Forestry routinely violates the California Forest Practice Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) with rubber-stamp approval of timber harvest plans (THPs) that do not meet the environmental and sociological mandates of these statutes. Blatant collusion between business and state takes many forms, the most prevalent being CDF’s monstrous paper trails choked with lies, designed to smother legal action from critics of forest destruction. Clear examples of this collusion are found in CDF’s handling of PALCO’s liquidation of old growth redwoods.
Nevertheless, Maxxam’s adversaries scored victories in March, when PALCO withdrew a 140-acre clearcut timber harvest plan that was to take the last virgin timber near Elk Head Springs, and when the company eliminated from a Booth’s Run Creek THP roads that would have bisected virgin redwood groves. Under pressure from environmental groups and individuals, PALCO withdrew the 140-acre clearcut THP, and then resubmitted the plan, less half the acreage and two miles of road. Approval of the original plan would have violated the Forest Practice Act and CEQA, likely prompting a lawsuit. The Booth’s Run Creek THP is a currently operating clearcut of virgin redwoods on the edge of a pristine 800-acre stand. Originally, that THP was to include a road system cutting through the heart of this rainforest. The roads constituted a project separate from the THP and therefore violated CEQA since they were not discussed anywhere in the plan except on the map. Letters to CDF illustrating the illegalities of this plan caused PALCO to remove the roads. However, in a recent editorial, Earth First!er Mokai warned that THP withdrawals do not demonstrate the success of democratic input, but rather CDF’s actions as a legal advisor to PALCO, helping them to design THPs to avoid litigation…