Redwoods: The Last Stand

By JOHN SKOW/FORTUNA

Two unusually stubborn men from Texas -- one rich, the other never quite sure of having gas money or whether his truck's head gasket will last till the next interstate exit -- are locked in a battle over the last of California's privately owned ancient redwoods. Doug Thron, 24, a nature photographer, became an environmentalist after he saw the wild land in Richardson, Texas, he had hiked as a boy paved with malls and condos. Charles Hurwitz, 54, raided and leveraged his way to an '80s-style fortune, acquiring a random bag of companies, including Kaiser Aluminum and the Pacific Lumber Co. From his Houston headquarters, Hurwitz seems puzzled that other people care about some big trees Pacific owns in Humboldt County, California.

Humboldt is a region of hardscrabble logging towns along Highway 101 on the foggy coast of northern California. Here it is still possible to see a big truck grinding toward the Pacific Lumber mill at Scotia with a single, monstrous redwood log, 15 ft. in diameter. A tree that can produce logs this size is worth upwards of $150,000.

Take your pick, dreamer or dealmaker. Here is Thron, a sturdy, straightforward fellow who looks like one of those happy, hey-no-prob guys in the beer commercials. But he's an activist who gave up his senior year at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, to rumble around the country in a beat-up truck, presenting some 80 slide shows of his logging photos to environmental groups. It's all in support of a bill now in Congress, the Headwaters Forest Act, that would preserve most of the remaining old-growth redwood groves, which contain trees that have survived uncut, some of them, since before Rome fell. The bill, introduced by Congressman Dan Hamburg, a Democrat from Humboldt County, has 123 co-sponsors and the support of the Clinton Administration.

Most of the 5,000 to 6,000 acres of privately owned old growth that remain can be seen in five minutes from a small plane circling inland near Humboldt Bay. Thron and pilot Lew Nash, a volunteer for the environmental flying service Lighthawk, point out fragments of what was an enormous woodland. There is one intact 3,000-acre forest called Headwaters -- the largest uncut stand anywhere still in private hands -- and smaller clusters surviving around Owl Creek, Allen Creek and Shaw Creek. All are listed for cutting. "They want to turn all that into lawn furniture and hot-tub decking," Thron yells over the Cessna's intercom. A much larger area of nearly 40,000 acres is scarred and scraped by bulldozers, its salmon-spawning streams choked with silt. Some of this is healthy second growth (redwoods reach marketable size in 50 to 80 years), but the recently logged areas look as if they had been fought over by an armored division. This is a tree farm, not a forest; viable commercially but useless to creatures who had lived here. Congressman Hamburg wants the government to buy the combined 44,000-acre tract, old growth and new, from Pacific Lumber.

Not long after the Lighthawk flight, for perhaps the 30th time in two years, Thron broke the law by ignoring a no-trespassing sign in the tiny town of Fortuna and hiking up one of Pacific Lumber's logging roads. It was 10 p.m. and misting when he started, and 3 a.m., with a light rain falling, when he set up his tent. Two hours later, before first light, Thron was standing outside the tent, rain running down the back of his neck. After perhaps five minutes, he heard a short, musical, descending call -- the "keer" of a marbled murrelet. Huge, dark shapes began to coalesce in the lightening gray: the enormous trunks of redwoods and Douglas firs. By full light, Thron had tallied 23 calls from murrelets. In this April nesting season, these smallish, fast-flying seabirds trade chores in a quick exchange at dawn. The parent freed of egg-sitting duty arrows off at 55 m.p.h. for Humboldt Bay to fish for breakfast. Thron was pleased; the murrelets are endangered because they need redwood canopies to shield their nest sites from crows and ravens. He had not checked his birds since Thanksgiving because he had been touring the U.S. with his slide show, buying gas and burgers with freewill offerings, often camping in the truck with his fiancee and co-lecturer, Lucy Ingrey.

The great redwoods here, 300 ft. tall and more, would have been cut five years ago if a local group, the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), had not used the Endangered Species Act to entangle Pacific Lumber in a web of lawsuits. The web may be fragile; Pacific's executives were crowing over the recent "Sweet Home" decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington that could weaken U.S. rules on the modification or degradation of wildlife habitat.

For now, the Headwaters forest has an astonishing presence, and whatever city meaning there is to the notion of anyone's owning such a place loses force among the trees. Here the concept of unregulated private property, much admired by logging outfits, is an empty legalism.But the fact is that Headwaters and miles beyond it are owned, as is Pacific Lumber, by Hurwitz's Houston-based Maxxam company. After he grabbed Pacific in a 1986 hostile takeover, paid for largely with junk bonds issued by Drexel Burnham Lambert's Michael Milken, Hurwitz visited Pacific's mills at Scotia. "There's a story about the golden rule," he told employees. "He who has the gold rules." Then he drained $55 million from the firm's $93 million pension fund and, with the remaining $38 million, bought annuities from an insurance company that collapsed. (The U.S. Labor Department is suing; so far, Pacific has made good on retirees' pensions; two weeks ago, Maxxam agreed to a $52 million settlement of a suit by shareholders dissatisfied with the takeover of Pacific.) Hurwitz also boosted the rate of old-growth logging; as Congressman Pete Stark, a California Democrat, put it, "looting the forest, meeting monthly interest payments by cutting thousand-year-old trees." Is there a moral issue here? A Maxxam spokesman dismisses the question, saying, "Our position is that sufficient redwoods are protected and that our trees are private property." (Redwood National Park, 50 miles to the north, has 38,000 acres of ancient redwoods.)

Hero or villain? Hurwitz didn't fire anybody; he hired more workers and added a fourth mill. He continued a Pacific Lumber practice of giving a college scholarship to every employee's child who finished high school. Top hourly pay runs about $15 to $16 an hour, in an area of high unemployment. When he refinanced Pacific's debt a year ago, issuing $620 million in high-interest bonds to pay off $510 million in junkers, the fact that he also paid Maxxam a $25 million dividend from the new debt raised only murmurs. That was how the big boys did things.

Pacific Lumber has been logging for 125 years and is accustomed to indulgent treatment by state forestry officials. Now several local creatures are on endangered-species lists: not only the murrelets but also the spotted owl, the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle and a couple of humble amphibians, the Pacific giant salamander and the tailed frog. While Coho salmon still spawn in Headwaters streams, stocks of this once plentiful game fish have crashed so sharply off California -- in part because of logging erosion -- that all sport and commercial fishing was banned recently. Environmentalists gripe that wildlife-survey regulations are a joke because logging companies do their own surveys. But regulations have slowed log production, and Pacific has fought back. In 1990 the company reamed a broad, mile-and-a-half corridor into the middle of the Headwaters forest and called it, with a wink and a snicker, "our wildlife-biologist study trail."

Two years later, in 1992, the logging firm defied state and federal regulations more directly. Over a frenzied Thanksgiving weekend of what environmentalists called "renegade logging," Pacific broke off negotiations with state officials and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and sent loggers into a prized old-growth stand called Owl Creek. Though Pacific claimed that the state board of forestry and the office of Governor Pete Wilson had approved the Thanksgiving cut, it was stopped after five days by a state appeals court. John Campbell, Pacific's combative president, shrugs off legal entanglements that have tied up virtually all the firm's old-growth stands since then. Campbell dismisses concern over spotted-owl habitat as "a hoax" and thinks research will show that the murrelet's old-growth needs are exaggerated. But he is proud of an industry award for a model project, done with the state, for rehabilitating erosion damage caused by the firm's logging at Shaw Creek.

A federal-court lawsuit on the Owl Creek logging, due for trial in July, may determine how seriously logging firms must take endangered-species regulations. Mark Harris, a young lawyer for EPIC, which brought the suit, is bitter about Pacific Lumber and Maxxam. "They're hosing this county," he says. "If they've got a new Blazer in the driveway, that's their environment." In April EPIC also sued the California Department of Forestry for "failing to lawfully respond to environmental issues" in approving old- growth cutting. Lasting protection of the old-growth redwoods, however, depends on Congressman Hamburg's Headwaters bill. The catch is price. Maxxam doesn't want to sell the whole 44,000 acres -- about one-fifth of Pacific's holdings -- on which fast-growing second- and third-generation redwoods are reaching market size. But it is willing, perhaps eager, to sell Headwaters and a logged-over 1,500-acre buffer zone for something more than $500 million, the Forest Service estimate of the value of the timber. Hamburg thinks the figure % is far too high.

Deep in the Headwaters forest, as these matters simmered, activist Thron spent his day making photos, then hiked back down the trail after dark. Last fall Hurwitz's lawyers threatened to sue Thron unless he ceased his photographic raids and stopped giving the Headwaters show. He and Ingrey kept on trucking. The two were married last week in Arcata and plan to hit the road with fresh slides.

Hurwitz, in the meantime, regards the world contentedly from the cover of a magazine called Leaders, which flatters CEOS with softball interviews. (Sample question: "You see opportunities where others may not see them?" Hurwitz's reply: "Yes.") He tells Leaders that his lumber people are looking into operations in New Zealand, South America, Mexico and Russia.