ABSTRACT
In July of 1995, President Clinton signed a budget rescissions bill into law that included a salvage-timber rider to remove dead, dying, and diseased trees from forests in the United States for the purpose of restoring forest health and reducing future damage from potential forest fires. The rider, which was a special piece of legislation placed on an unrelated spending bill, originally called for the logging of only diseased and damaged timber stands, but the final version allowed for some pre-1992 timber sales that were blocked by federal courts under the Endangered Species Act to be logged as well. After the rider passed, federal judge Michael Hogan further ruled that the rider would allow other timber sales to go forward even if they did not meet the environmental regulations of what had become known as The Forest Plan, that is, the plan created by President Clinton in 1993. As a result, the rider freed 27 timber sales suspended previously since 1991. Three of the 27 were in Oregon. One of these three was located in the Coastal Range near the small town of Alsea, Oregon, an area called Tobe West. Tobe West stood as an ancient, old-growth forest grove with trees said to be over 400 years old. These trees provided habitat for the threatened marbled murrelet and surrounded what a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) study classified as one of the best spawning grounds for the threatened coho salmon in the entire Alsea River system. When the logging began, environmentalists protested.
