California: The Redwoods Weep

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Conservationists hoped for more: not just Headwaters, but 60,000 acres of mostly scarred and bulldozed land that could be rehabilitated. There is a dim hope, still, that they will get it. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is slowly pursuing an old case against Hurwitz, having to do with a savings and loan collapse. A settlement of $250 million from Hurwitz was spoken of. So was a swap: debt for nature, maybe involving Pacific Lumber land.

Maybe. In any case, for environmentalists, "tree museum" is a phrase uttered with a shrug. The 3,500 acres of Headwaters don't really amount to a forest. Large redwood forests create their own microclimates. They are rainmakers. And the other 4,000 acres paid for by the Deal, though they have some big trees, are too fragmented to be an effective wildlife habitat for murrelets, Pacific giant salamanders and the spotted owls that loggers love to hate. In particular, they offer little protection for coho salmon, listed as threatened in the state. Salmon need cool, shaded, clear streams for spawning. Aggressive, steep-slope logging cuts shade and pours down sediment. This is no secret, but the state has not enforced regulations to protect salmon streams, and the new Headwaters legislation, say critics, stipulates buffer zones too narrow to be effective.

The U.S. Department of the Interior is also lax, and the enforcement record of the state and federal departments, charges activist Elyssa Rosen of the Sierra Club, ranges from "incompetent to complicit." But it is federal nonfeasance that has allowed a part of the Deal that may be worse than the gush of dollars. This is the "incidental takings" provision of the misnamed "Habitat Conservation Plan." HCPS were invented in the Reagan Administration, but they have flourished like mushrooms in the timid Clinton years. They are intended to mollify the rage of landowners against the Endangered Species Act. Well, they might, because they immunize loggers, miners and the like against ESA violations. It is illegal to kill a marbled murrelet or wreck its habitat, but if you should do so while conducting your rightful business, that is an incidental taking. The "Oops!" factor takes over, and you are in the clear. The HCP filed by Pacific Lumber will immunize the company for 50 years.

The plan might work if the landowner respected the land. This appears to have been the case with Pacific Lumber before Hurwitz bought it in a hostile takeover in 1985. But since then, on the evidence of a passionate new book by activist Doug Thron, a photographer and lecturer, and reporter Joan Dunning, accelerated logging has devastated the land and the streams that flow through it. From the Redwood Forest (Chelsea Green; $24.95) relates a brutal progression. Pacific Lumber, under Maxxam and Hurwitz, started widespread clear-cutting, a practice that leaves no tree standing and works against natural regrowth. Then Pacific Lumber began cutting through the winter months, and on dangerously steep slopes, giving the impacted ground and the silted streams no respite.