Free-For-All In A Forest

By Jeffrey Ressner/Medford With Reporting By Melissa August/Washington

Protect the monument!" shouts "Meadow Woman," an activist who is wearing a 10-ft.-tall body costume of a swamp witch as she heckles a group of flag-waving cowboys on horseback. It's not your typically quiet town meeting here in the old mill community of White City, Ore. Loggers and conservationists, ranchers and artists, small-business owners and hikers, old timers and the newly arrived are packed into an auditorium to discuss the nearby Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, a lush, ecologically diverse region of 52,947 acres established last year by President Bill Clinton.

There's trouble in this verdant paradise 80 miles southwest of Crater Lake. The rules protecting Cascade-Siskiyou were put on hold last March, when new Interior Secretary Gale Norton delayed implementing management plans for 16 of 21 monuments that Clinton created or expanded, until matters ranging from boundary adjustments to vehicle use can be scrutinized by homeowners, local officials and the White House.

National monuments are different from national parks like Yellowstone or wilderness areas such as Washington's Mount Rainier, which can be designated only by Congress. Monuments can be designated by the President, who also sets the rules by which they are run. Typically, development is sharply curtailed.

Tonight's meeting is filled with characters. A young earth mother carrying her newborn in a hip sling hands out oatmeal cookies; moments later, a bunch of yahoos heckles the moderator, asking for equal time. Observing from the sidelines is Dave Hill, vice president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, representing powerful logging interests like Boise Cascade, which hopes to derail the monument. "We'd just like to narrow the area to the significant features that warrant monument designation," says Hill. Contrasting sharply with both the big-money forestry firms and the well-organized Greens, a ragtag crew of ranchers show up to forecast in plain terms how the monument will destroy their way of life. "This is devastating," says cattleman Mike Dauenhauer, who owns a 12,000-acre spread but wants his cows to continue their subsidized grazing on public lands. Also balking, albeit to a lesser extent, are motorcycle riders and ATV enthusiasts, who would be cut off from their favorite trails and meadows.

The most passionate voices belong to homeowners like Paul Martin, a businessman whose hundred or so acres lie within the monument's outer boundaries. "The only people who want to shrink the boundaries are timber companies and cattle owners," he says. "If you don't believe they ruin the land, imagine what your street would look like after a cow or a logger with a chainsaw spent some time there. I don't understand why they insist on ruining this tiny speck on the map when they have millions of acres nearby they're allowed to destroy."

The situation is made even more complex by the gerrymandered layout of the monument. Unlike, say, California's Muir Woods, which is a large, neatly enclosed and protected area, much of the Cascade-Siskiyou resembles a checkerboard. One parcel may be privately held and available for development or clear-cutting while the adjoining one is untouched and public. In fact, nearly 40% of the property within the monument's outer boundaries is privately owned. Timber giant Boise Cascade owns 7.5%, or 6,400 acres. It isn't all primitive wilderness, either--two major highways bisect the monument, as do power lines.

But take a hike up picturesque Soda Mountain, where the Western Cascade Mountains meet the Siskiyou range, and you'll begin to sense what's really at stake here. The place is nothing less than a panoramic Eden, a province where glorious forests of Douglas fir, white oak, sugar pine and rainbow swirls of butterflies abound. Spotted owls and peregrine falcons swoop through the skies, while rare, colorful wildflowers dot the ground below.

A stroll through a nearby clear-cut of ponderosa pine is equally astonishing for its brute efficiency. "This is the future: a war on nature launched in the interest of shareholders," declares environmental activist Dave Willis. A scruffy yet charismatic fellow, Willis lost his fingers and toes to frostbite during a disastrous climbing expedition up Mount McKinley in 1976. Willis and other area residents lobbied the Clinton White House to name Cascade-Siskiyou a national monument; Clinton was captivated by Willis and his perseverance when they later met. "The stumps don't lie," says Willis, as he gives a visitor a tour past the ghostly gray tree snags poking from the ground, the blackened remnants of clear-cutting.

His contempt for logging is reciprocated by the timber industry, which views greens like him as eco-alarmists. "I'm not particularly concerned if the mariposa lily is protected," says Hill, the timber lobbyist. "I'm concerned about private-property owners."

The woodcutter contingent is well connected in its challenge to the monument. After all, Secretary Norton once belonged to several staunch property-rights groups, and she headed the Coalition for Republican Environmental Advocates, which was backed by the American Forest Paper Association. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was once president of International Paper Co. Even the President couldn't resist knocking on wood: last year Bush's campaign became the leading recipient of the forestry and forest-products industry's largess, taking in well more than $300,000 in contributions in the election.

Still, timber's blade may have dulled during the Clinton years. Here in Jackson County it's only the fourth largest private employer. Health care is No. 1, in part because many retirees are moving to the area. It is unlikely that the retirees relish the prospect of clear-cutting or herds of cows munching their fields, but it is also unlikely that the ranchers and loggers will back down from what they see as their fundamental property rights.

As the public meeting ended in White City, the angry ranchers began sounding less like noble John Ford homesteaders and more like Oliver Stone conspiracy theorists convinced the feds are on a land grab. The ranchers and loggers seem outnumbered by monument supporters (people who attended three public hearings seemed to favor the designation by a ratio of 2 to 1). But this week the Jackson County board of commissioners will make recommendations to Interior Secretary Norton, and it is expected that the wide-ranging public support will be tempered with the concerns of businesses.

One thing is certain--if even a single inch is taken away from the monument's boundaries, activists like Dave Willis will give no quarter in their battle to protect the forest.

--With reporting by Melissa August/Washington