Timber and Town

In the spring of 1983, a small band of militant environmental activists buried themselves in the ground up to their necks to halt extension of a logging road in the Siskiyou National Forest of southwestern Oregon. The protesters, most of them young men from nearby back-to-the-land hippie communities, were members of Earth First!, the vanguard of an emerging direct action campaign attempting to halt industrial logging in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Slope. ¹ Though it took place in a remote location far from Oregon’s media, population, and political centers, the protest was nevertheless of considerable significance, not least in pointing to the emergence of a political movement that would remake the regulation of industrial forestry in the region and beyond. Among the first salvos in an escalating campaign of civil disobedience, the protest highlighted not only opposition to industrial logging but also the declining political legitimacy of a policy regime that had underpinned management of federal forests for most of the post-World War II era. This policy regime, based most centrally on the idea of maximum sustained-yield forest management, entailed the application of forest science to yield maximum harvests of timber volume every year in nondeclining amounts. ² Despite entrenchment of the sustained-yield doctrine in American forest policy dating to the late 1930s, and its apparent success in regulating capitalist appropriation of public forests, in the 1980s escalating opposition to sustained-yield orthodoxy led to its downfall. When the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in June 1990, a bubbling crisis boiled over. The listing catalyzed displacement of the regime of sustained-yield forest management, to be replaced by the New Forestry and the rise of ecosystem management.