Fight Over Forests Is Branching Out to the ‘Eastside’ : The war between loggers and environmentalists spreads to east Washington and Oregon, and as far as Montana.

SEATTLE —  Weary of the subject the nation may be, but the Northwest’s epic forestry war is shifting ground rather than subsiding after a presidential decree.

Strife between loggers and preservationists is now headed inland to the vast, publicly held tree-scapes known hereabouts as the “eastside forests” of Washington and Oregon, to the Sierra Nevada of California, and to the forests of Idaho and Montana.

Compared to the “ancient” rain forests of the Northwest’s seashore and coastal mountains, these are more arid woodlands. The conifer trees are not as storied, nor as majestic to the eye. And there are no endangered spotted owls to bring this complex economic and environmental tug-of-war into easy focus.

But there are scattered grizzly bears, sizable roadless spaces, rare mountain caribou, salmon, a fish they call the bull trout, struggling mill towns, angry lumberjacks, contentious environmentalists and the home districts of some of the most powerful politicians in Congress.

Both sides with their heart in these woods are digging in.

Earlier this summer, President Clinton took the extraordinary step of personally seeking to settle a 10 year argument about the towering public forests of coastal Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

He sided neither with conservationists nor loggers, but instead embraced the untested ideas of government forestry overseers. They insisted that public forests can be cut and preserved at the same time with more selective, modern management. Clinton’s plan thus calls for resuming the sale of public forest lumber, but at reduced volume.

Timber interests and environmental crusaders fumed that Clinton proved more an arbiter than a visionary leader and did little except split things down the middle, at a cost of both jobs and wilderness. Courts and Congress have yet to have their say, but at least there is a plan with the power of the White House behind it. That has tempered the fury.

Clinton offered no such settlement for eastside forests.

So confrontation spreads there.

Today, conservationists believe they have at least two things in their favor: an Administration that, down deep, is friendly to their goals, and a public that has increasingly lost faith in the stewardship of federal timber managers.

On the other hand, lumber interests are confident the demand for wood will only increase, even as domestic sources of supply are restricted, and that the public is frustrated with the stalemate tactics of conservationists. Also, through much of these eastside regions, timber jobs are the backbone of the economy and the logger-grazing-mining culture of land users reigns supreme.

Finally, the home district of House Speaker Thomas S. Foley spreads outward from Spokane into the heart of the battleground forests. Foley has been a reliable ally of logging interests. And so have most of the delegation of Old West senators, whose clout in Washington, D.C., is legendary.

One thing everyone seems to agree upon: The condition of eastside forests today is awful.

Recent drought followed decades in which humans suppressed the natural cycle of forest fires. The resulting vast insect infestations and die-offs left the region vulnerable to catastrophic fires and tree disease.

The competing answers:

* Logging interests want to accelerate the harvest immediately and then resume cutting at today’s level for years to come.

“If ever there was a place where we can make the case that forestry management is good, it’s on the eastside,” says Jim Geisenger, president of the Northwest Forestry Assn.

* Conservationists call the region a dying ecosystem and want a halt to the intensive management practices that created today’s conditions.

“People should picture how little old-growth forest remains in the spotted owl forests of the westside and then erase a whole bunch more--that’s the eastside,” says John Osborne, coordinator of the Inland Empire Public Land Council.