Cutting Edge An Unlikely Coalition Of Environmentalists, Loggers And Business Owners Comes Together In Hopes Of Bringing Peace And Prosperity Back To An Old Forest Community

They aren’t necessarily tree-huggers but several Spokesman-Review readers have a warm embrace for “community forestry,” the initiative a Priest River coalition hopes will restore their region’s economic viability.

“Praise God!” says Colbert psychiatrist Lynne H. Williams. “Anytime you see people forming new coalitions with new visions you know that new outcomes are possible.”

Outcomes that include educational potential for youngsters, restored hope for stressed timber towns and the revival of community around a shared love of nature.

“If they pull together and pull this off they will be a model for other communities,” says Williams.

The unlikely allies doing the pulling include environmentalists, loggers and business owners.

The idea, says consultant Ted Runberg, Priest River, is to “enhance the sagging local economy by developing employment through new management techniques of the local forest lands.

“Some additional goals are to develop new forest projects, value-added products, intense forest lands rehabilitation activities, community projects, improving tourist facilities and services, thus developing a broader base employment for the local communities.”

“I think this makes tremendous sense,” says Linda Finney, Spokane. “What one generation has used up, another can replace and repair.”

“This is a wonderful way to demonstrate that taking care of forests and the needs of people are not mutually exclusive,” says Mike Fish, Coeur d’Alene, one of several who believe the Priest River initiative can be a nationwide example.

“The idea is to use local knowledge and expertise to improve forest health, enhance aquatic and wildlife habitat, foster outdoor recreation, and help meet the nation’s demand for packaging, newsprint, energy and wood products. A key element of the Priest River group’s plan is to use the value of the excess forest products to fund road maintenance, monitoring, reforestation, stream improvements, and other restoration activities. A minimum of tax dollars is required.”

“The boom-bust cycle of logging and unemployment has run its course and the future is in protecting and restoring the environment,” says The Lands Council’s Mike Petersen, Republic.

“Any time you can get active consensus among people of diverse interests and beliefs, like loggers and environmentalists, it bodes well for a community,” says Jack Poole, Nine Mile Falls. “When cooperation and consensus energize community activity, economic improvement is an inevitable result.”

“Such bottom-up solutions, which involve cooperation and consideration at all levels, and in which everyone has a stake in the outcome, have a better chance of doing the community the most good, whether it is in a dying timber town, downtown Spokane, or most anywhere else,” says Phil Mulligan, Spokane.

The restorative approach is a good idea, but not a new one, says Josh M. Anderson of Vaagen Brothers Lumber Inc. in Colville.

“The many foresters, loggers, and engineers working for governmental agencies, timber companies and small private landowners in the region plan and attempt to implement these practices day in and day out, year after year,” he says.

All these remarks came in response to our invitation for your comments. Some focused on the political divides that make the Priest River collaboration seem so amazing.

Robert Glatzer, Spokane, remembers when Joe King, a Vancouver Democrat and then speaker of the Washington state House, supported a bill to end clearcutting. Loggers, saying it would destroy their livelihoods, showed up to protest.

King told them it was the industry’s clearcutting practices that threatened their jobs, not him.

“I think he was right,” says Glatzer, “and it’s high time — past time — to make those companies help pay for the restoration of the forests they destroyed.”

“Relying on the federal estate for a livelihood will always put one at the mercy of cultural and economic shifts,” says Paul Lindholdt, Spokane. “The Priest River practitioners of community forestry are following a path that other towns will have to follow.”

Don’t blame environmentalists or bureaucrats for dying timber towns, Lindholdt says.

Blame mechanization, suggests Julie Graham, Spokane.

“It used to be that many people were needed to do the most basic of tasks: one feller, one skidder, one bucker, one loader and one truck driver for each load taken from the forest.”

Now, says Graham, giant machinery accomplishes almost all those tasks in a fraction of the time.

If it weren’t for greed-driven profits, she believes, “smaller, more selective, less industrialized logging could sustain the communities indefinitely.”

Larry Armstrong, Spokane, has a more wistful view. Reared in Lincoln City, Ore., where wood pulp supplied the newsprint that was critical to his father’s career in journalism, Armstrong is thankful that the coastal logging industry “sent a lot of `sons of Oregon’ to college and good careers well beyond our roots.”

Nevertheless, as Les Francis, Spokane, notes, Priest River is on the threshold of change.

“Tourism with the Pend Oreille River can be a major focus. Priest River has made some efforts in that direction but it’s not enough to draw the tourists. Building a new community takes a vision of a new community and a letting go of the old economy. It will take a lot of energy, but it can be done.”

The tourism opportunities remind Sally Duffy, Liberty Lake, of Leavenworth, Wash.

“The shutdown of local industries caused them to look for innovative ways to stimulate their economy. I’m glad, too, because I surely enjoy visiting the marvelous display of their ingenuity.”

Perhaps, suggests Fred Glienna, Coeur d’Alene, marketable crops could be planted within a forest, generating near-term income while waiting for new forests to mature.

“Meanwhile,” he says, “towns cannot be allowed to die, because down the road making the forests profitable again will be more difficult if support and services have disappeared.”

“The human species is nothing if not inventive and adaptable,” says David Bray, Spokane.

“In the long run those who survive do so because they adapt to their changing environment. For some, that survival may be success in itself, but I think the spirit of the timber town and its people will be the engine that drives such a sturdy and hardy people to accomplish much more than just survival.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: NEXT MONTH

Idaho’s and Washington’s legislators both convene in a couple of weeks. Both face dilemmas over mixed signals from the public.

Washington voters, who demanded a lid on state spending in 1993, this year approved two initiatives hiking spending for public schools. Idahoans, meanwhile, contend with treacherous highways and crumbling schools, yet lawmakers enter their 2000 session eyeing a huge budget surplus as a source for personal and corporate income tax cuts.

What are your thoughts about these fiscal tensions to be played out in Boise and Olympia?

Send comments to Doug Floyd or Ken Sands at The Spokesman-Review, 999 W. Riverside Ave., Spokane, WA 99201.

You also can fax comments to either writer at (509) 459-3815 or submit email to dougf@spokesman.com or kens@spokesman.com. Please include a daytime telephone number.

Responses will appear on Sunday, Jan. 28. Replies must be received by Jan. 19.