You can do something like go fishing?
Exactly. It would have been total disingenuous for us to go to the loggers and say “Just go along with this and we’ll let you cut some old growth.” We couldn’t say that. But we can say to the fisherman “Go along with listing the coho salmon and we’ll get ’em back some day and you can catch them.” So what’s the difference? The difference is animal populations can be sustained in the shorter rotation [period]. In other words, if you cut down an eight foot diameter tree and grew it back in five years, you’d probably say “okay.” But it takes 500 years (laughs), so it’s how
long are you willing to wait for the resource to be renewed after it’s been exploited. Nobody really articulates it that way, but that’s what it is about. You can view salmon a lot more easily as a renewable resource than you can ancient forest.
Isn’t there sort of a generational problem, like once the ancient forest is gone it takes so long for it to come back that the memory of the big trees standing is erased?
Exactly. That’s my general point. It’s so easy for the Forest Service to tell members of Congress how easily that the forest can be regenerated. You have to see the forest that they regenerate to recognize that it’s not the same thing. They’ll say we’re growing these trees at so many feet a year and in the congressman’s mind the Forest Service is doing what they said they would do. [With that sort of logic] it’s easy to mislead the public with “Oregon will never grow out of trees.” Well, we’ll always have plantations, but the plantations do not a forest make.
How did you get to D.C.? I know ONRC is always strapped for cash.
In the early days it was any way we could. I went back with James [Monteith] for the first time in 1982 and I remember
