Axes Poised on All Sides of Clinton’s Forest Plan : Timber: Loggers, labor and owl lovers are holding their nose over the germinating Northwest proposal. As the President predicted, no one is happy.

SEATTLE —  As his Administration prepares to announce its decision on the future of the Northwest’s public forests, what to cut and what to save--meaning both trees and jobs--President Clinton is finding one promise easy to live up to.

As he predicted, he is making everybody upset.

“And that’s without anybody seeing anything yet--quite a feat. Wait until he puts something on the table,” says Bill Arthur, Northwest Regional Director of the Sierra Club.

Behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., Administration policy-makers are rushing to finish up Clinton’s plan for managing this region’s remaining federal forests.

Middle ground in this economy-vs.-environment fight is scarce. Without action, timber harvesting in the coastal forests of Northern California, Oregon and Washington is about to come to a standstill, but any decision that resumes logging at high levels could drive the northern spotted owl and other forest animals into extinction.

The Administration must meet a series of deadlines this summer if it is to seek the lifting of a federal court injunction holding up future Northwest timber sales.

This week, as rumors, leaks and trial balloons emerged from the policy-making process, environmentalists thought they caught the scent of a rat. They fear their longstanding dream of setting aside remaining old growth trees in preserves to save troubled species is being sacrificed to politics and a futuristic and unproven theory of logging.

They are not the only ones who are uneasy. Labor leaders fret that jobs and the rural logging way of life may lose out to the coldhearted bottom line of biological science.

And the timber industry is complaining that the whole process is becoming a simplistic numbers game and a news media “sporting event.”

In other words, things have only gotten worse since April, when Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and the Administration’s domestic Cabinet officers convened a one-day Northwest forest conference in Portland, Ore. Clinton warned then he would probably make no one happy in the end--though that seemed hard to believe when the President had worked so hard to charm weary combatants on all sides.

Following the summit, the President appointed three working teams, one to focus on the science of the issue, one to look at the economics and one to try to unknot all the complex and intertwined responsibilities among governmental agencies.

This month, after the three groups gave the White House their initial recommendations, major interest groups on all sides reported that Administration officials were not entirely satisfied with the findings, and the unease began to bubble.

Environmentalists are sounding the most nervous. Their goal is to safeguard in preserves all of the remaining 3 million acres or so of this region’s scattered groves of ancient firs, cedars and hemlocks.

Their hopes soared when Clinton chose Jack Ward Thomas, a respected U.S. Forest Service biologist, to head the scientific committee in charge of formulating recommendations for the President. Thomas had directed previous studies which concluded that vast tracts of forest need to be left untouched for the salvation of the spotted owl.

Now, however, environmentalists believe Thomas’ findings are under political assault within the Administration.

In a letter this week to a Clinton aide, the leaders of eight Northwest environmental groups began: “We have been told by sources in the Administration, on the Hill, and in the media that the primary timber industry has launched an eleventh-hour attack on the Jack Ward Thomas task force, charging that the options under consideration would cost too many jobs.”

Leaders of the eight groups, which together call themselves the Ancient Forest Alliance, charged the timber industry was “pressuring the Administration to compromise the law, the science, or both, despite the President’s commitment to do neither.”

Next came a flurry of reports that the Administration was backing away from the biologists in favor of the science of forestry.

According to these accounts, the Administration has embraced an alternative scientific proposal from University of Washington forestry professor Jerry Franklin. He is the father of what is known in the region as “new forestry” but which environmentalists call just another justification to maintain high-volume cutting on public lands.

Franklin believes that better logging techniques can accommodate continued cutting without destroying all wildlife habitat. The new forestry generally intersperses clear-cuts with protective corridors of trees along streams, and leaves behind a few standing and a few fallen trees in each clear-cut for the benefit of animals. Young stands of trees are thinned and selectively logged, as on private timberlands, to increase harvest and to speed up the growth of the forest, which also happens to benefit animals.

Environmentalists, however, argue that new forestry is unproven and would mean continued logging.

Scientists believe that the spotted owl and more than 100 other species of interdependent animals require ancient forests with a complex growth of tall trees and diverse levels of plant life under them. And, as the environmentalists add it up, only 10% of the region’s old growth remains uncut.

In recent days, organized labor interests also have sounded an alarm. In particular, they cringed at unconfirmed reports that the biology team headed by Thomas had concluded that long-term harvest levels could be resumed at only 30% of the historic highs of the 1980s if the owl is to be saved.

“We cannot afford a forest management plan that provides certain protection for wildlife and ignores the realities and needs of human beings and their communities,” said a statement from the Western Council of Industrial Workers. “We must never forget, people count too.”

The timber industry’s Forest and Paper Assn., meanwhile, complained that the news media were turning the policy struggle into “a sporting contest” by focusing on the swirl of numbers about proposed levels of timber harvest.

For lack of solid information, however, a numbers game seemed unavoidable. Back in the early 1980s, timber harvest from federal lands in the Northwest reached about 5.2 billion board feet, or roughly the equivalent of the wood required to construct a half-million homes. Because of environmental lawsuits and an inability of federal agencies to draw up an effective plan to protect the spotted owl, that has been hugely reduced.

Based on leaks and supposition, it has been widely reported that the Administration’s biology working group recommended a preservation plan for old-growth trees to let logging resume at about 1.5 billion board feet a year, the equivalent of 150,000 houses.

Again based on leaks, it subsequently was reported that at least some timber and labor leaders told the Administration they would insist upon a harvest of least 2.5 billion board feet, no matter what the effect on owls or other wildlife.

The industry, however, wants the focus off of this kind of argument over numbers. It is seeking a plan to allow greater harvest now and perhaps less later, when greater volumes of second-growth forest from private tree farms will be ready for market.

The Administration, meanwhile, has sent out all kinds of incomplete signals on the subject. In testimony before Congress this week, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said the President’s plan would probably include a jobs program for displaced timber workers.

And without being specific, he said it also was likely to address demands by environmentalists and labor to remove tax incentives for shipping raw logs from private lands to mills overseas. This presumably would provide more logs for domestic mills that are now facing a shortage of trees from federal forests.

For all this, however, Administration spokeswoman Marla Romash said the public should not confuse the process with the product. “The process is under way, but final decisions have not been made.”

A public airing of the Clinton plan is expected later this month or in early July, Romash said.