Cove-Mallard: A First! Victory?
For years, the forests near Elk City were the scene of protests and angry confrontations over the future of two hotly contested roadless areas. While industry won the battles fought in the legal arena, the court of public opinion and the prevailing winds of politics seem to be shifting in environmentalists' direction
ERIC BARKER
Lewiston Tribune
Sunday; October 24, 1999
When Josh Burnim looks over
the sea of trees in the Cove-Mallard area, 15 miles south of Elk City,
he sees an intact ecosystem where a diversity of species can thrive in
a wild environment. Dick D. Willhite looks over those same trees and 
sees
a dying forest of lodgepole pine -- timber that could feed the hard scrabble
town of Elk City.
Willhite is the resource manager of the Shearer Lumber Co. mill at Elk City. Burnim is a environmental activist with the Cove Mallard Coalition. The forests here have been quiet for the past two years. But not long ago, the Cove and Mallard roadless areas and Elk City bustled with logging trucks stacked high with trees from the Jack, Grouse and Noble timber sales.
The area also saw in influx of outsiders, as Earth First! activists moved in, literally laying themselves in the path of road building equipment. Those days are past. The buzz of chainsaws no longer pierces the air. The rumble of bulldozers is gone and the small but pesky legion of environmental activists has shrunk, focusing its efforts down the road on the Otter-Wing timber sale.
Three of the nine Cove-Mallard timber sales have been sold and cut. But six sales remain untouched. Nez Perce National Forest Supervisor Bruce Bernhardt says it's going to stay that way. Both the Cove and Mallard are inventoried roadless areas, among hundreds now being studied by the U.S. Forest Service under orders from President Bill Clinton for permanent protection from road building and logging. Environmentalists take that as a victory.
The timber industry sees it as reflective of recent years, when the flow of timber from public land has slowed to a trickle. But even before Clinton announced the bold move, environmentalists were declaring victory in the decade-old battle.
Robert Amon was thrilled when he learned the remaining cuts would go unsold. Amon, better known as Ramon, was the 60ish spokesman for a rag-tag band of environmental activists who used civil disobedience tactics to protest road building and timber cutting in the Cove-Mallard area. "My first reaction was just to say Yahoo!," says Amon in a phone interview from New Jersey, where he is helping a friend battle cancer.
But even if the day is theirs, many enviros refuse to rest until the war is won. The victory is fragile, they say, and could vanish if George W. Bush or another Republican wins the White House. Ramon thinks his fellow "greenies" need to loosen up and celebrate the moment. "At the end of October someone is going to win the World Series.
Are they going to say 'Oh we just have to come back next year and play more baseball?' No. They are going to say 'Yahoo!' and that is what we're going to do." Ramon has spent the past two years writing a book chronicling his transition from an insurance executive to tree hugger. "It will have the advantage of being the first humorous environmental book," he says. "Think Paul Bunyon meets Dave Barry. "I think the way to get to the audience we don't normally get to is to use humor. I haven't met a logger yet who doesn't like to laugh." But despite the seeming victory, he says, the coalition will not disband. Other areas need protection and he says the coalition is interested in getting involved with forest restoration.
"We don't think we can retire just yet. The day all eco-bozos could retire would be a good thing," he says. "On big pensions," he adds. Bernhardt, the Nez Perce National Forest supervisor, says the remaining timber cuts won't go forward because they go against the grain of the Forest Service chief's stated emphasis on restoration. "It's an intact ecosystem and in terms of ecosystem restoration, there are so many other ecosystems that need to be restored."
Road building in roadless areas also conflicts with regional orders to stay out.
He notes not building roads doesn't mean no trees will be cut. Logging and thinning could continue. But he says the decision not to build roads is final. Presidential politics could reshuffle the top brass of the Forest Service, but the environmental concerns that stopped logging are not going away, he says. "The need to restore salmon habitat and fish numbers and the expectation of the public in general about more environmentally sensitive management of public lands -- that's not going to change over time."
The director of the Idaho Sporting Congress, the first group to challenge the logging plans in the Cove-Mallard, isn't so confident the saga is over. The group filed two lawsuits and two appeals over logging in the area. Though unsuccessful, Ron Mitchell of Boise says the legal action was instrumental in preserving what is left today. "It definitely slowed them down. They had to wait." He also gives credit to the protesters for putting a spotlight on the issue. "It put a lot of public pressure on the Forest Service to defend its actions."
Mitchell got involved in Cove-Mallard fearing logging and road building would ruin prime elk habitat. Though the Idaho Sporting Congress spends most of its time and resources battling timber sales, Mitchell insists it is a sportsmen's group. "We totally support killing things. We hunt and we fish." Cove-Mallard is important to elk because it's remote and has gentle rolling topography. Like the Chamberlin Basin across the Salmon River, Cove-Mallard is excellent summer range in close proximity to the Salmon River breaks, where elk winter in large numbers.
But elk took a back seat to fish in the fight over logging. Listed species like steelhead, chinook and bull trout caused the Forest Service to take a hard look at the roads they would have to build to move forward with the remaining sales. Mitchell says the agencies change of direction is more talk than walk. But at the same time, he fears even the talk will disappear if a Republican is elected president. "If George Bush is elected, (Forest Service Chief Mike) Dombeck will be kicked out and logging will continue."
Burnim, of the Cove Mallard Coalition, says the area between the Gospel Hump and Selway- Bitterroot Wilderness serves as a critical migration corridor for wolves, bears, big game animals and even wolverines. "I don't think anybody really believed when this all started in 1992 that six of the sales could be stopped," he says, standing in a clear-cut in the Jack timber sale area. "You can see how important it is, just how huge it is. " Burnim thinks a variety of efforts, including the lawsuits and protests, stopped the sales. "I don't think they usually like to admit that. It would encourage more of that stuff to go on."
Chris Wood, Dombeck's assistant, says there has been a shift both within and outside the Forest Service. "I think public values and public sentiment have shifted, and frankly the sentiment of the Forest Service shifted from the days of big road projects in roadless areas. "I just don't think we're going to see that anymore." Although the effect of the roadless moratorium has been acute in some areas, Wood says, nationwide it has affected only 100 to 200 million board feet of timber sales out of a 3.6 billion board feet timber program.
The timber program in Region One, which includes Montana and northern Idaho, was once 80 to 90 percent commodity-oriented, according to Wood. Now about half the sales use timber extraction as a tool to improve wildlife habitat. "The 70 percent decline (in timber sales on national forests) is well documented. Less well covered is the change in composition of the program."
The program used to aim for big sawlogs -- what Wood called "big old pumpkins." Now the program aims at smaller trees and thinning to improve forest health. From Willhite's perspective, whatever the size, not enough trees are coming off national forests, particularly the Nez Perce. "It's a tragedy. It really is. But once the Forest Service makes up their mind not to do something it's hard to make them. "It's a lot easier stopping them than to make them motivate. Have you ever tried to push the Forest Service?"
He blames the pull-out of Cove-Mallard on Bernhardt as well as the Forest Service leadership higher up. He says the environmental activists had little effect. "I don't think the Earth First!ers had any real impact. But on a national basis, I think Al Gore, Dombeck and (Undersecretary of Agriculture) Jim Lyons did the politically expedient thing, and that is to shut down the timber program on the national forests. All of them."
He notes the Forest Service has won every court case pertaining to Cove-Mallard --proof in his eyes and theirs that the cuts where environmentally sound. Shearer Lumber Co. would have bid on the remaining six sales, he says, and the strategic location of its mill at Elk City would have given it a good chance at winning the cuts. Most of the timber in Cove-Mallard is mature lodgepole pine near the end of its life cycle. If it's not cut, it will die standing, he says. "In the next 20 years they'll lose three-fourths of the lodgepole. It's just at that stage."
Just as Cove-Mallard's gentle topography favors elk, it's also an area ideal for logging and road building. Willhite says using modern road building and logging practices, logging would produce no measurable effect on the wildlife or water quality. If the Forest Service stays on its present course and the drought of trees coming off its land continues, he says, the Elk City mill could be in trouble. "It's really tough. It's hard to run a sawmill in the middle of the Nez Perce forest when the Nez Perce forest doesn't sell any timber." Stewardship contracts -- a new way of doing business that links timber harvest to forest restoration projects -- may be a silver lining. "If it comes to fruition it's a good way of doing things," Willhite says.
There's enough dying timber on the Nez Perce to feed three mills, he says. "This forest is dying. It's mature and overmature and its dying as we speak." The Forest Service did a good job preparing the cuts and the scientific analysis, according to Willhite. Although the lawsuits were annoying, he says, they did little to stop the logging.
The manager of Highland Enterprises of Grangeville, the company that built the roads in the Cove-Mallard area, gives no credit to the activists for stopping the work. "I don't attribute one iota of it to Earth First!," says Andy Hairston. But he says the group did cost his company money. "It's a hindrance and it's a costly hindrance. They held up production, which costs Highland Enterprises money." The company won a $1 million verdict against 12 of the activists. Although it may never see the bulk of the money, Hairston says it is at least a moral victory.
But now some of the activists have sued Highland, the Forest Service and the Idaho County Sheriff's Department for violating their civil rights at another timber sale, Otter-Wing. Nez Perce forest staff officer Ihor Mereszczak, who was there from the beginning of the protests, says the decision to pull out of Cove-Mallard was based on the agency's backlog of road maintenance.
The forest and the Forest
Service aren't interested in building more roads when there's not enough
money to maintain the system already in place, he says. "We've realized
we have a lot of road we need to manage, so in the foreseeable future
it's hard to visualize we're going to build any more road. It goes hand
and hand -- if we can't manage our roads, we can't maintain the environment.
It's a holistic process." He agrees with Willhite, that the area needs
some sort of treatment to avoid disease and fire. Although disease and
fire are natural in a mature lodgepole forest, Mereszczack says, it would
be ideal to reduce the risk of a large fire and be able to take advantage
of the trees as timber.
The protesters may have delayed the cutting in Cove-Mallard, says Mereszczack, by polarizing the issue. "The judges found hands down we were doing what we were supposed to be doing, not only environmentally but legally, and we take a great deal of pride in that. "We still are: that is why we don't want to build any more roads until we can take care of (the ones we have).