In Washington: Lighthawk Counts the Clear-Cuts

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Want to see the big trees of Washington and Oregon, the great Douglas firs and red cedars? Stay in your car. Keep to the main roads. Avoid high, distant views. In the national forests here, the policy of the U.S. Forest Service has been to leave buffer zones of uncut trees along the tourist highways. It is prettier that way. It is also easier for the Forest Service, which has fewer letters of outrage to answer about the scarification that used to be a coastal rain forest.

On the other hand, if you want to see what is really happening, get in touch with Michael Stewartt, the chief pilot, troublemaker, idea man and fund raiser of an extraordinary environmental flying service called Project Lighthawk. Just now a couple of local environmentalists, a journalist and Stewartt are aboard one of Lighthawk's two Cessna 210s. Stewartt, a lean, relaxed fellow of 38, with a bushy light brown mustache and hair to match, radios his plane's identification to the control tower at Seattle's Boeing Field.

We take off to the south, then head west. Below is the Hood Canal, an arm of Puget Sound, and the Navy shipyard at Bremerton. Ahead, partly obscured by clouds, are the Olympic Peninsula and the huge trees and muscular ridges and peaks of Olympic National Park. What we want to see from the air is the Shelton sustained-yield area, a heavily logged region just short of the park, most of it in the Olympic National Forest.

Stewartt and Forestry Consultant Peter Morrison, working with the help of the Wilderness Society, have just nailed down what is either a very large bureaucratic fraud or a conveniently jumbled process of long-term fudging. Environmentalists had suspected for a long time that the Forest Service had vastly overestimated the amount of old growth -- virgin forest -- still left in the Northwest. Traditionally, the Forest Service has disapproved of messy, tangled old-growth forests, whose dank, rotting understory and ancient trees it has referred to as "overmature" and "decadent." It has preferred to clear-cut the old growth, and then treat trees as if they were very large soybean plants that could be "harvested" for timber on a rotation basis every 60 or 80 or 100 years in "sustained-yield" areas.

Overestimating the amount of old growth still standing, by underreporting clear-cuts or by counting mature second growth as primal forest, is convenient because it reduces the urgency of squawks from environmentalists. But Stewartt and Morrison (a Forest Service employee moonlighting on his days off) drew circles in red pencil around old-growth areas on the Forest Service's own aerial maps. Then they flew off to find the trees.