Tree-huggin' lumberjacks

THERE WAS A TIME when logging was an environmental scourge, the symbol of everything hateful to green activists. But now, a number of environmental groups and green-minded politicians are coming round to a new attitude. They're looking at ways to keep the timber industry operating in King County—and even making plans to get into the timber "harvesting" trade themselves.

"We see this as a possible niche business," says Charlie Raines, a longtime forest activist for the Sierra Club. His newest project aims to buy up land in the Cascade foothills and then pay for it by selling off some of the timber. "We want to form forestry companies that would go more lightly on the land," says Maryanne Tagney Jones, a veteran environmental campaigner who is working with Raines.

Ex-Microsoft attorney Bill Pope, another prominent Northwest environmental leader, is working on a similar venture that would borrow money from Wall Street for huge land purchases and then use tree revenues to pay off the debt. "We're going to have to be a timber company, in the low-level sense of that term," Pope says.

These new efforts reflect "a kind of sea-change among Seattle greens," says Tagney Jones, who lives in Preston. "They're seeing that commercial logging is not the wicked awful thing we thought it was."

"Even environmentalists have come to believe that it's better to have active forestry than shopping malls everywhere," says Nancy Keith, executive director of the Mountains to Sound Greenway, which has championed this idea for a decade.

Indeed, as Fred Meyers and four-car Microsoft mansions continue their steady eastward advance from Bellevue into the Cascades, logging is starting to look better and better. From the standpoint of water quality, salmon, or clean air, even a clear-cut may be preferable to pavement. And these new lumberjacks intend to use far gentler methods.

IN KEEPING WITH this outlook, King County Executive Ron Sims has launched a new effort to keep today's timber companies in the timber-cutting business and deter them from selling off their land for subdivisions. He recently traveled to Olympia to speak at a "Private Forest Summit," where he pledged to create policies and "economic incentives" that would help make the private forestry business viable.

Sims recently invited executives from the county's two biggest private forest owners—Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek—for private meetings with him and his staff to hear the industry's concerns. "They made it clear they were looking for some new and innovative ways to maintain commercial forestry," says Mike Yeager, Plum Creek's director of land management. "They said they recognized that we were a business. And we appreciated that."

In his Olympia speech, Sims described the forestland that covers two-thirds of King County as "the lungs of our region" and said that maintaining forests is "the single most effective solution to most of the environmental issues we are facing"—including the problem of endangered salmon.

"Most people think of forestry as a salmon culprit," says Kathy Creahan, of the county's natural resources division. "Our view is that forestry is about the best land use you can have for preserving fish."

"Working forest" also provides open space and recreation. Mike Munson of the Washington Forest Protection Association, a timber industry trade group, notes, "Only 2 percent of working forest is being harvested at any one time. That means 98 percent is green and growing."

And at least along the I-90 corridor, "the timber companies have started using practices that have less impact," says Nancy Keith.

THE NEW ENTHUSIASM for the timber biz does not extend across all terrain. Just last week, leaders of an ambitious new venture called the Cascades Conservation Partnership kicked off a three-year, $125 million campaign to rescue 75,000 acres of privately held central Cascades forestland from timber company ownership and preserve them as wilderness. These lands, which include roadless areas and tens of thousands of acres of old growth, are all under threat of being logged by Plum Creek, and the Partnership is counting on federal grants and private donors to save these trees from the ax.

But the forests of the Cascade foothills (which, along I-90, begin near Issaquah) are far from virgin. "The majority of the land is on its second or third cutting," says the Sierra Club's Charlie Raines. The greatest threat facing these low-elevation habitats is not another tree harvest, but being plowed under for a Cucina!Cucina!.

The one million acres of foothills forests, which stretch across three counties, are "still very consolidated and very valuable from a wildlife perspective," says Kathy Creahan of Sims' staff. But as the Eastside explodes with new growth and fast money, "they are in serious jeopardy of being lost," argues King County Council Member Larry Phillips. "I don't think the public knows this."

As Raines observes, "there's not enough money—or enough willing sellers—to just buy it all and preserve it." So Raines, together with the Land Conservancy of Seattle and King County, is starting up an initiative to keep the foothills forested by taking advantage of their money-making potential. "We want to use timber revenues to help defray the cost of preservation," says Gene Duvernoy of the Conservancy.