Pendulum Swings Back For Timber Industry Environmentalists Suffered Setbacks In 1995

In the annals of the Northwest timber wars, 1995 will be remembered as the year the timber industry struck back.

After years of losing to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in one court fight after another over the Northern spotted owl, the timber industry took advantage of the Republican majority in Congress to push through what became known as the salvage rider.

Attached to a major budget-cutting bill that was first vetoed and later signed by President Clinton, the measure suspended environmental laws to speed up logging, primarily for timber killed by fire and insects, but also for healthy timber in western Oregon and Washington. It resulted in repeated court victories for loggers.

Environmentalists went back into the woods to protest increased logging on national forests and organized political action committees to fight back in campaigns for Congress.

The Clinton administration complained that the rider threatened the fragile peace of its Northwest Forest Plan just as it was starting to turn out timber after years of an injunction blocked logging to protect the spotted owl.

But unlike the fight over the spotted owl, in which protesters chained themselves to bulldozers to buy time and win court orders blocking logging in old growth forests, environmentalists found themselves losing time after time.

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan consistently ruled in favor of the timber industry, opening up millions of board feet of green timber for logging that had been set aside by the U.S. Forest Service out of concern for fish and wildlife.

Despite the string of court victories, the timber industry complained that foot-dragging by the Clinton administration prevented loggers from harvesting the timber before winter weather shut them down.

For the most part, “it was a bad year to be a salmon,” said Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

In July, the National Marine Fisheries Service recommended Endangered Species Act protection for coastal runs of coho from California to Washington, but Congress imposed a moratorium against new listings.

Northwest Republicans proposed exempting salmon recovery efforts from environmental laws and consensus eluded the interests fighting over how to manage the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia system to improve the survival of salmon.

Fighting continued, too, over commercial fishing in the ocean off southeast Alaska and the Pacific Salmon Treaty with Canada.