Environment: Showdown in The Treetops

The loggers who arrived for work one morning last week in Washington's Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest were greeted by a strange and unexpected sight. Sitting amid the branches of three of the trees they had planned to cut that day, some 60 ft. up in the air, was a form of wildlife they had not previously encountered there: three members of the radical environmental group Earth First. They were perched precariously on narrow plywood platforms with enough food and water to last for at least a week. Dangling from the trees were two banners reading SAVE AMERICA'S FORESTS and FORESTS, NOT FRAGMENTS.

It was not an isolated incident. In New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, four other Earth Firsters climbed trees and chained themselves to machinery, disrupting logging operations on a steep hillside. In Northern California, members of the group blocked a logging road, and a brief brawl broke out between loggers and protesters. Earth Firsters also took to the trees in Oregon, Montana and Colorado. Two protesters in Washington's Colville National Forest who had clambered up into adjoining Douglas fir trees were surprised when the loggers they planned to confront never showed up. Their "occupation" was cut short after 48 hours, but tree-sitter Tim Coleman vowed to "take to the trees again if necessary."

The well-orchestrated protests were more a publicity gesture than a serious attempt to impede lumbering operations. Forest rangers and police largely ignored the climbers. But they did manage to focus renewed public attention on an issue that has been simmering for years: logging of the nation's "old- growth" forests.

These forests are the last untouched remnants of the great woods that once blanketed enormous areas of North America. Only 15% of the country's old- growth forests are left, but some of their ancient trees have survived for 1,000 years. Millions of acres of these forests are protected from logging because they are inaccessible or set aside as national parks or wildlife areas. The issue is how to manage the rest. Even by the U.S. Forest Service's estimate, the current cutting rate of 170 acres a day could wipe out unprotected virgin woodlands within just a few decades. Conservation groups say the end may be no further away than 15 years.

The Forest Service defends the logging on the ground that the timber industry is vital to the Western economy. But conservationists counter that too much of the ancient forest is already gone and the destruction should stop. Thus the forests have become the hottest battleground in a broader war between the forces of economic development and the armies of conservation being waged from the wetlands of the East Coast to the oil-stained shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound.

The current plight of the old-growth forests had its origins in the late 1940s, when a postwar housing boom resulted in the voracious cutting of trees on private lands. The logging industry was forced to turn to public lands, including those with old-growth forests (prized because of the high quality and quantity of their timber). The National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have cooperated, selling rights to new tracts of forest every year. This policy, combined with modern logging machinery that makes cutting on mountain slopes easier, has put vast stands of old-growth trees in the chain saw's path.