Summary
Paul Harlan remembers how close Lakeview came to dying. In 1996, Harlan closed the sawmill in Paisley, 40 miles north of here, when it became clear that the supply of timber on national forests was drying up. On the "west side" forests in the Cascades and along the coast, environmental lawsuits and the listing of the spotted owl and marbled murrelet had put a kink in the flow of timber from the federal forests -- and eventually led to the Northwest Forest Plan. Here on the "east side," the plan didn't apply, but facing another round of lawsuits, the Forest Service had hastily written up a rule that banned cutting any tree over 21 inches in diameter. In Harlan's words, the agency, "by edict, shut the forests down."
Mike Anderson, a resource analyst for The Wilderness Society in Seattle, says he was skeptical at first, but he's now a regular participant in the stewardship group. "It can't be pigeon-holed as a local control effort," he says. "It doesn't have that county supremacy or wise-use mentality to it. It's much broader than that.""The science we're using makes specialists nervous -- it knocks their intellectual egos around," says [Richard Hart], who spends his summers teaching students how to detect everything from soil compaction to root rot. "They say, `You can't teach college kids this stuff.'" But one faculty member at Washington State University has already offered each of these kids a full-ride scholarship to his forestry program.See the full content of this document
Extract
A Timber Town Learns to Care for the Forest
LAKEVIEW, OREGON -- Perched on the easternmost edge of Oregon timber country, where scattered mountain ranges fade into the high desert, the hamlet of Lakeview is an apparition. All indications suggest that it should be dead and gone, a casualty of its own lust for timber, the global economy and an era of tightened environmental rules.
But arriving in Lakeview on a summer evening, a visitor can immediately sense the town's pulse. Trucks come and go on the main drag. Young couples and Forest Service ...See the full content of this document
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