Environment: Showdown in The Treetops

• Share

(3 of 3)

The timber industry accepted the plan, but environmentalists rejected it, arguing that they would be giving up their legal rights to fight the logging companies. Nonetheless, Hatfield introduced the plan in Congress. It has already cleared the Senate and is awaiting consideration by a House-Senate conference committee. Notes Andy Kerr, conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resource Council: "The pressures on the politicians are tremendous. The Oregon delegation is having to deal with timber in l989 the way the Mississippi delegation had to deal with civil rights in 1959."

But many Oregonians stand squarely in the conservation camp. Says George Atiyeh, a former logger who became an ardent environmentalist: "The forest is my church. No one has the right to defile it, anymore than I would have the right to desecrate anyone else's church. When you get down to the last of anything -- whales, trees, whatever it is -- then you don't have the right to exploit them anymore."

Some sort of compromise is inevitable. It would be unthinkable to shut down overnight the Northwest's logging industry. But as the area of old-growth forest land dwindles, it is increasingly indefensible to cut down trees that were centuries in the making. Tight limits on logging are necessary so that the Northwest will move faster to diversify its economy.

More is at stake in the logging battle than some spotted owls and old trees. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century. To many people, his words now ring truer than ever.