In Washington: Lighthawk Counts the Clear-Cuts

By John Skow

Want to see the big trees of Washington and Oregon, the great Douglas firs and red cedars? Stay in your car. Keep to the main roads. Avoid high, distant views. In the national forests here, the policy of the U.S. Forest Service has been to leave buffer zones of uncut trees along the tourist highways. It is prettier that way. It is also easier for the Forest Service, which has fewer letters of outrage to answer about the scarification that used to be a coastal rain forest.

On the other hand, if you want to see what is really happening, get in touch with Michael Stewartt, the chief pilot, troublemaker, idea man and fund raiser of an extraordinary environmental flying service called Project Lighthawk. Just now a couple of local environmentalists, a journalist and Stewartt are aboard one of Lighthawk's two Cessna 210s. Stewartt, a lean, relaxed fellow of 38, with a bushy light brown mustache and hair to match, radios his plane's identification to the control tower at Seattle's Boeing Field.

We take off to the south, then head west. Below is the Hood Canal, an arm of Puget Sound, and the Navy shipyard at Bremerton. Ahead, partly obscured by clouds, are the Olympic Peninsula and the huge trees and muscular ridges and peaks of Olympic National Park. What we want to see from the air is the Shelton sustained-yield area, a heavily logged region just short of the park, most of it in the Olympic National Forest.

Stewartt and Forestry Consultant Peter Morrison, working with the help of the Wilderness Society, have just nailed down what is either a very large bureaucratic fraud or a conveniently jumbled process of long-term fudging. Environmentalists had suspected for a long time that the Forest Service had vastly overestimated the amount of old growth -- virgin forest -- still left in the Northwest. Traditionally, the Forest Service has disapproved of messy, tangled old-growth forests, whose dank, rotting understory and ancient trees it has referred to as "overmature" and "decadent." It has preferred to clear-cut the old growth, and then treat trees as if they were very large soybean plants that could be "harvested" for timber on a rotation basis every 60 or 80 or 100 years in "sustained-yield" areas.

Overestimating the amount of old growth still standing, by underreporting clear-cuts or by counting mature second growth as primal forest, is convenient because it reduces the urgency of squawks from environmentalists. But Stewartt and Morrison (a Forest Service employee moonlighting on his days off) drew circles in red pencil around old-growth areas on the Forest Service's own aerial maps. Then they flew off to find the trees.

Most of them, it turned out, had already been sold, clear-cut and trucked off. In six national forests in Oregon and Washington, they found that only about 33% to 50% of the sample tracts listed as old growth were still forested. "Several years of clear-cutting simply are not accounted for," says Morrison. In the Olympic National Forest below us, only 106,000 acres remain of the 217,000 claimed by the Forest Service. In Oregon's Siskiyou, 142,000 acres remain of a claimed 433,000. Much of what was still uncut was broken into tracts too small to serve as habitats for those species -- the spotted owl, for instance -- whose presence indicates a healthy old-growth forest ecology. In some areas, the remaining old forest, that continent of trees that colonists began cutting in Virginia in the 17th century, will last only about 20 more years at present rates of logging.

A hawk's-eye view makes the case unforgettable. Stewartt finds a break in the clouds, and we circle over logging operations in high, steep valleys. A huge Sikorsky helicopter is pulling logs out of a narrow canyon. What is going on is not just clear-cutting, which a widely ignored provision of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 permits on national forest land only when it is the optimum cutting method. This, says Stewartt, is really "a mining operation, a one-time extraction of resources." Valley walls too steep to walk on have been scraped to bare earth. Acreage bulldozed for shopping malls looks like this. Until these ravaged uplands reseed themselves -- which on the steepest slopes simply may not happen -- erosion is inevitable, and the most reliable yield, says Forester Morrison in disgust, will be "sustained sediment" in the streams that drain them. We head eastward to a landing field near Mount Rainier National Park.

Michael Stewartt began his flying career 2,000 ft. underground, in a copper mine near Tucson. That was in 1969. He was 19, short on cash and certainties, too restless for college, already back from a year of wandering that had taken him as far as Australia. The mine taught him what he wanted: out. He spent his wages on flying lessons and became a bush pilot in Alaska, the state with the bushiest piloting of all.

He had begun to think hard about the scars and stains of prosperity that he was seeing from the air. "I have no grudge against wealth or business," he says these days. But around 1975 he had an idea: "It would help if more people could get a pilot's view of the damage that was being done." He spent most of the next four years trying to get Lighthawk started.

We touch down on a rough landing strip on Forest Service land near Mount Rainier National Park. There is a campground nearby, and a tract of huge trees, each about 12 ft. or 15 ft. in diameter and 175 ft. or more high, reserved from cutting to show visitors what the forest used to be like. Old logging roads lace through this damp, shaded museum tract. Huge stumps rot here and there among the living trees. These are significant: it is obvious that a sizable number of trees can be cut without killing the forest. Saplings and a complex tangle of undergrowth spring up to use the sunlight.

Such selective cutting, however, which allowed forests to regenerate species that had no commercial value as well as the highly prized Douglas fir, seemed too inefficient to the Government foresters. Now, perhaps too late, research has shown that clear-cuts tend to break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely to be successful, and it now seems possible that sustained-yield forests based on clear-cutting simply may not work.

So the conversation goes on one of Project Lighthawk's flights this summer. The nine-year-old, nonprofit flying service, which operates on a budget of about $200,000 a year, has tracked radio-collared wolves in Montana and rare porpoises in the Sea of Cortes. Last winter Stewartt and Volunteer Pilot Jerry Hoogerwerf flew for several weeks over the Costa Rican rain forest and discovered and helped stop illegal gold mining and logging near a park on the Osa Peninsula.

On a typical Saturday a few weeks ago, Lighthawk had four planes in the air -- the two Cessnas it owns, the second flown by Staff Pilot Bruce Gordon, and two planes supplied by volunteer pilots -- over endangered areas in four Western states. The charge to journalists, biologists, legislators and environmental groups ranges from nothing to $40 an hour.

At first Stewartt had a tough job explaining to earthbound environmentalists how Lighthawk might be useful. That changed after a successful four-year fight that led to the shutdown of the smoke-belching Phelps Dodge copper smelter at Douglas, Ariz., a notorious contributor to the West's airborne sulphur-dioxide levels. Now Stewartt, with five salaries to guarantee, two planes to maintain and the costly prospect of buying three more, spends half his time raising money. He has no house, no wife and lives out of a flight bag.

Sometimes he broods about these lacks, but as we approach Boeing Field, he is fizzing with good spirits. "Awright, awright!" he yells. The control tower is holding up the takeoff of Boeing's newest 747, a monstrous silver machine with upturned wing tips, to let us land. This amuses Stewartt, who looks astonished when asked whether he ever thought of piloting such an ark. "Nah," he says, "those guys are bus drivers."