Traveling to a meeting in Crescent City recently, I paused near Prairie Creek, in Redwood National and State Park—one of the most beautiful places on earth—for a brief hike. Seeing soft afternoon light filtering through the branches of towering redwoods never fails to inspire. And I was sorely in need of inspiration, for I was headed to a meeting that promised to be contentious.

The topic was the proposed purchase of 25,000 acres of industrial timberland on Mill Creek, in the Smith River watershed, from the Stimson Lumber Company for addition to the state park system. To conservationists the prospect of protecting this land for the public and wildlife was an unparalleled opportunity. The Save-the-Redwoods League had raised most of the money required and was working hard to raise the remainder of the purchase price. But many Del Norte County residents were angrily opposed. To them the proposed park expansion did not look like a blessing; they saw a potential loss of jobs and economic opportunities.

Life has been difficult in and around Crescent City ever since the timber industry began a steady decline nearly three decades ago. Among those expected to attend the meeting at the firehouse that evening, February 21, 2002, were many who either had worked on, or knew people who had worked on, the Stimson property and were now unemployed.

Never mind that the company had closed its mill and largely stopped logging this land in the mid-1990s, thereby ceasing to be a major employer in the county. In fact, this forest land had been harvested so vigorously that at least 40 years would be required before it could be expected to yield much timber again.

Never mind either that Stimson wanted to sell, and the Save-the-Redwoods League stood ready to buy. Or that a diversity of rare salmon and steelhead unparalleled in California survives in the Smith River and its tributaries, providing a picture of a healthy watershed for the rest of the state.

The County of Del Norte—already facing a $1.7 million budget deficit, chronic unemployment, crumbling schools, and high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and other poverty-associated problems—looked at ancient redwoods in expansive parks and saw not raindrops glistening on needles but a declining tax base and a departing employer. Already, most of the county’s land was in federal, state, or local public ownership; the proposed acquisition would bring the figure to 75 percent.

Not long ago, Del Norte County Supervisor Chuck Blackburn said that he believed his county had been “targeted” for an expansion of parkland. “It concerns me greatly,” he told the Del Norte Triplicate. “It seems like there are more and more bond measures for parks—how much more can we take in this county?” Feelings ran so high that the County had taken steps to launch a lawsuit to stop the sale—unless the Save-the-Redwoods League paid it $10 million to compensate for potentially lost taxes.

Needless to say, I was not looking forward to the hostility I expected to encounter at the meeting. But the Conservancy exists to seek creative solutions to vexing land use conflicts in the coastal zone.

That detour into the redwoods turned out to be valuable. Not only did it lift my spirits, but it helped me to grasp more fully what North Coasters were up against. Walking along a well-maintained creekside trail, I realized I was alone: no other human was in sight. There had been no cars in the parking lot when I arrived. Yes, it was a midweek winter day in a remote location, but this was a world-famous place, so why was no one else here? On another occasion, I might simply have relished the solitude. Now I saw an economic reality: The park was empty. It was devoid of visitors who might have bought gas at the local gas stations, eaten at local restaurants, shopped a bit, spent the night—brought some dollars and jobs to this region.

There has been a lot of talk about a new economy based on ecotourism and recreation coming in to fill the void left by the decline of the timber industry—but where was it? Instead of an infusion of new income, what many North Coasters are experiencing is an economic tailspin, as first timber and then fishing—also once a major source of livelihood—struggle to survive against worsening odds. Declining stocks of groundfish and salmon and steelhead have led to increasingly severe fishing restrictions. Fierce competition and a shrinkage in the number of buyers have forced crab fishermen into an unaffordable, self-destructive crab derby (see Crab Fishermen Trapped in a Bind).

“We have a real changing economy,” Del Norte County Supervisor David Finigan told me. “We were in the boom and bust cycle for a long time; it just isn’t there anymore and hasn’t been for some time.”

Diane Mutchie, city planner for Crescent City, pointed out that “for those who have been able to make the choice of where they live and work this is a wonderful place.” However, “there is a strong component of the population who are economically and educationally immobile.”

Supervisor Finigan is among those who see nature tourism, along with sportfishing, as a keystone to the county’s future. “Instead of complaining about open space and parks,” he said, “we need to use tourists as the number one motivator of our economy.”

What Is Happening to Our Timberlands?

Coastal timberlands are in an unprecedented state of flux and many private holdings are changing hands, sold either in large parcels or broken into smaller subdivisions. The buyers are either other timber companies or entities that intend to convert the land to other uses, especially residential development and vineyards.

Chris Nance, public relations coordinator for the California Forestry Association, a timber industry trade association, says environmental regulations are driving these changes: “It’s getting to the point where it’s no longer fiscally possible to keep forest lands forested,” he said. “Timber Harvest Plan costs are prohibitively high.”

The profitability of timberlands was significantly affected by the Forest Practices Act of 1973, which required more stringent regulation of harvest practices. That legislation required that Timber Harvest Plans be submitted to and approved by the California Department of Forestry before logging begins. More recently, regulations to protect endangered species and water quality added to the landowners’ legal and financial obligations.

These increasingly tough regulatory standards likely lowered the bottom lines of companies that had invested in coastal timberlands. Greater profits may now be had from the sale of forest land—especially logged-over land—for subdivision into country estates or conversion into other uses, such as vineyards. With the escalation of land prices in the wine-growing regions of Napa County and the Alexander and Anderson Valleys, vineyard developers are expanding their horizons. In the Gualala River watershed, hundreds of acres of land have been converted to vineyards, mostly within the last ten years.

Changing standards for land stewardship are not, however, the only reason for recent timberland sales. Shareholder pressure is another, as is a drive for greater management efficiency.

Connie Best of the Pacific Forest Trust explains that standard accounting procedures require corporations to carry timberland on books at cost. If land was bought many years ago, the appreciation of its value does not show on the balance sheet. Therefore, from a shareholder’s perspective, the company has a dramatically undervalued asset and may sell to bring it to market value. Some lands are also sold because the owner wants to avoid having to manage widely scattered islands of timber.

Whatever the reason, “prior to sale, owners tend to convert resources to cash to the greatest extent possible,” according to Richard Geinger, environmental advocate for the Environmental Protection Information Center. “This is accounting-speak for harvesting as much standing timber as will be legally allowed prior to relinquishing title.”

As large timber holdings have come onto the market, park and wildlife advocates and resource agencies have seized on opportunities to buy them. State Proposition 12, the 2000 bond measure, and Proposition 40, passed by voters in March, have made funds available for conservation purchases. At least two industrial timberland owners have sold partial or entire holdings in a mutually beneficial arrangement that enlarges state parks while enabling timber companies to increase efficiency, post higher assets, consolidate landholdings, or all of the above.

While Stimson Lumber is in the process of selling to the Save-the-Redwoods League 25,000 acres near the Smith River, in Del Norte County the Campbell Hawthorne Timber group is selling 7,400 acres on the Big River, near the town of Mendocino, to the Mendocino Land Trust, also for addition to the state park system. Louisiana-Pacific (LP) has also liquidated its holdings in Mendocino County, selling to Mendocino Redwood Company, a new company formed expressly for the purchase. LP, a behemoth industrial timber landowner, had a corporate sense that their operations on the North Coast were not a core part of their business, and a desire to satisfy shareholder concerns about booked assets; it therefore acted on a previously established exit strategy to shed this heavily logged land base.

Jobs vs. Environment?

The writing was on the wall long ago for timber-based economies, and not because parks were expanding. History belies the timber industry’s and timber workers’ contention that the spotted owl and overzealous environmental regulators have destroyed their livelihoods.

In fact, the greatest decline in timber employment in the Pacific Northwest occurred between 1947 and 1964—decades before the Forest Practices Act and other environmental laws. The main cause was reckless logging practices, followed by automation of the industry.

The number of mills in California declined substantially between 1969 and 1993. According to “The Forest Products Industries in California: Their Impact on the State Economy,” a 1994 report produced by the College of Natural Resources, University of California, Berkeley, “Newer sawmills are more efficient and have greater capacity than old mills. As the reliance on the logging of large, old-growth trees was reduced, older mills that were unable to handle smaller logs were phased out.” In addition, explained Eric Niemi, vice president and project manager of ECONorthwest, the Pacific Northwest’s largest economic consulting firm, “By the 1980s, as the supply of old-growth logs dwindled and new automated technologies emerged, the industry broke the unions, laid off thousands of workers and cut wages,”

After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1991, and the late Justice William Dwyer of the U.S. District Court for Western Washingon placed a temporary injunction against logging some 24 million acres of national forest, industry analysts predicted a massive economic dislocation and loss of jobs. President George Bush warned in 1992: “We’ll be up to our neck in owls, and every millworker will be out of a job.”

Timber communities already deep in economic decline were outraged by the spotted owl rules. Their anger only rose with the listing of Coho salmon and the marbled murrelet, followed by yet more stringent regulations on the management of timberlands, particularly on public lands. Bumper stickers reading “Earth First! Log the Rest Later” appeared, and bartenders throughout the Northwest placed boxes of “Spotted Owl Helper” above their bars, coaxing a bitter laugh from unemployed loggers stretching their meals with Hamburger Helper.

Niemi, however, does not buy the “jobs vs. environment” argument. “Old myths die hard,” he commented. In his keynote address to the American Fisheries Society’s 2001 annual meeting, he put it this way: “The long-term health of the economy appears to be compatible with—and probably depends on—the long-term health of our environment.” According to Niemi, “By 1988, when the spotted owl lawsuits were just starting, timber jobs accounted for only 3.6 percent of total employment in Oregon and Washington.” An estimated loss of 6,000–9,000 jobs has been attributed to the spotted owl restrictions—far short of the 150,000 industry analysts had predicted. Some of the unemployed timber workers were later hired for natural resource restoration work under President Clinton’s “Jobs in the Woods” program, but most of those jobs proved to be temporary.

All Economics Are Local

In the 1990s and 2000, while the electronics and service industries were growing and California’s economy was booming, the North Coast and other rural economies suffered. Timber was not a major economic power statewide, representing only 1.7 percent of total income and 1.9 percent of all jobs in the state, but in 1992, 36 percent of the timber industry and its jobs were on the North Coast. While young dot-commers ate at pricey new restaurants in San Francisco and luxury mansions sprouted on San Mateo County hilltops, in Humboldt County Maxxam’s Pacific Lumber Company sacked 140 workers just in time for Christmas 2001.

Beyond the North Coast’s current hardships, however, the discerning eye might notice a brightening glimmer, a movement toward a better future based on sustainable use of the region’s natural resources and scenic assets. Environmental laws and regulations are generating significant new economic growth.

In Humboldt County, timber harvest in 2001 was 500 million board feet, 33 percent of its 1.5 billion feet peak in the late 1950s. Only 5.96 percent of the county’s workforce was employed in timber, down from 50 percent five decades before. Meanwhile, service-based employment had increased from 10 to 23 percent.

An entirely new industry, environmental restoration, has taken root. Restoration-oriented consulting work and small businesses have materialized in erosion control, creek revegetation, fish habitat improvement, and native plant cultivation. Some of this work is on public lands, some on private lands, including timber properties that must meet environmental requirements such as soil retention above creeks. Practically unknown before the 1980s, the environmental restoration job sector in Humboldt County has grown from 135 jobs in 1990 to 300 today.

Non-lumber manufacturing has risen from next to nothing in the 1950s to 3.68 percent of the local economy today. In Arcata, energy-efficient and solar-compatible refrigerators have been manufactured since 1984 by Sun Frost, employing about 20 people. According to an economic analysis by Gabriela Carvalho, a graduate student in economics at Humboldt State University, and Associate Professor Steven C. Hackett, “most of Sun Frost’s materials are imported and most of its customers are outside of Humboldt County.” When Carvalho asked why the company is located in Humboldt County, the founder, Larry Schlussler, told her that “his first customers consisted of homeowners that were off the grid, and there were a lot of these homeowners in Humboldt County. He also said that he loves the area.”

Del Norte County has another profitable icebox: Pelican Bay State Prison, built in 1989, is now the largest service industry employer in the county. It employs 1,317, at relatively high wages.

Ecotourism provides some seasonal income not only to motels, hotels, bed and breakfast businesses, and restaurants, but also to nature guides, ornithologists, and artists. A promising sign that ecotourism is growing is the success of Godwit Days in Arcata and the Aleutian Goose Festival in Crescent City.

The Arcata festival, celebrating the marbled godwit (Limosa fedoa beringiae), a migrating shorebird that overwinters in Arcata Marsh before heading to its summer breeding grounds on the tundra near Ugashik Bay, Alaska, has been attracting a growing number of visitors since it began seven years ago. This year’s event, April 19–22, includes over 80 events, and was expected to draw 300 paid registrants and 1,000 or more to free events (see Wildlife Festivals, Tours & Hikes).

The Aleutian Goose Festival, launched four years ago and featuring some 75 scheduled events, was held March 23–25 this year, attracting 251 paying visitors from a dozen states. In addition, more than 1,000 adults and children participated in free events. This festival celebrates the amazing recovery of this subspecies of Canada goose, Branta canadensis leucopareaia, one of the first species to be listed (in 1967) under the Endangered Species Act. By 1974, when a formal recovery program was begun, only 800 individuals were known to exist, their population devastated by foxes that were brought into their nesting grounds, the Aleutian Islands, for the fur trade in the 1800s. After the foxes were removed and other measures were taken to sustain the geese, the species rebounded; now deemed “fully recovered,” it was delisted on March 20, 2001. The current population is upwards of 40,000—more than five times the original goal of the recovery plan.

Almost the entire population of this goose arrives near Crescent City in March to rest and feed en route from its wintering grounds near Modesto to the Aleutian breeding grounds. The dawn flight of this bird is awesome to behold.

Rick Hiser, one of the goose festival’s founders, said that the first time he spoke to the local Rotary Club promoting the event, “people in the back of the room were pretty much asleep—until I started talking about how many visitors the festival was starting to draw; that’s when their ears perked up.”

A few hundred people may not sound like a big crowd to anyone living in an urban area, but Del Norte County’s entire population is only about 40,000. The festival’s growth is a clue to what might be possible as one element of a diversifying new economy.

Richard Geinger has given considerable thought to balancing the needs of rural economies with environmental needs: “The industrial extractive model hasn’t really worked out from a resource protection standpoint because self-esteem and worth were all tied to how effectively we could convert natural resources to dollars . . . regardless of what happened to the landscape,” he said. “Nor has complete ‘protection’ of landscapes without any provision for economic sustainability worked very well, as poor rural communities demonstrate. In the best of both worlds, we would provide plans for rural areas that achieve consensus on sustainable livelihoods in conjunction with the protection of our public trust resources. It’s a challenge, but it’s where we need to be.”

The shape of such a possible future is outlined in Prosperity—The North Coast Strategy, an economic blueprint developed by Humboldt County’s Office of Economic Development and recently adopted by the County as its Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy. It calls for the timber industry, tourism, fisheries, and manufacturing to stand side by side, with due regard for sustainability, while commercial and residential development, marked by “compact, multidimensional land use,” are undertaken in such ways as maintain or improve public health and the environment.

Plans and Promises

The North Coast is a country of legend, sometimes thought of as being hidden behind a Redwood Curtain. The Eureka-Arcata airport is often fogged in, and the one in Crescent City has extremely limited service. There is no rail access from the San Francisco Bay Area, nor is any likely in the near future. A drive from San Francisco to Crescent City takes seven hours. A lot of people who live here appreciate the isolation and don’t particularly want to see crowds of outsiders.

Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park gets many visitors in the summer months, and the Smith River is a steelhead angler’s mecca in winter. In fact, the Smith is the last river in California where anglers are allowed to harvest wild steelhead. “Sportfishing is a vibrant part of the economy, but people almost want to keep it secret,” said Del Norte County Supervisor Finigan. “We knew we needed tourism but we don’t embrace it. Every time we’d get on the freeway and there was a Winnebago in front of us, we’d curse it. Few recognized that tourism is where the money is.”

That is changing, he said. “The County is in the middle of an economic strategic planning process, and I hope that this process will allow the old business community to come together with the new community, parks and others, and formulate a strategy based on the fact that our greatest asset is land—not only in the renewable way of timber harvest, nor in the harvesting mode of fisheries, but also in the enjoyment of tourism. The necessary mental transition is a difficult one, however,” Finigan said. “A lot of that is due to the unfulfilled promises from when the [Redwood National and State] Parks expanded by 48,000 acres in 1978. They said visitor-use days would rise, money would pour in, and it didn’t and that created some real negativity.” There had been talk of building an ecotourist lodge. Twenty-four years later, it’s still in the talking stage.

Toward Consensus

All of which brings me back to the meeting I was headed to. If the Mill Creek property were purchased, the Coastal Conservancy and the Save-the-Redwoods League wanted to make sure that the public would not be denied access to the land while State Parks developed plans for its long-term management, a process that could take years. The League had therefore applied to the Coastal Conservancy for funding to prepare an Interim Management Plan, which would enable the local community and visitors to start using and enjoying this landscape as soon as possible. The Conservancy had approved $100,000 for this project. My task at the meeting was to help inform the community of the project and invite participation in it.

Much to my surprise, this meeting I had feared turned out to be a friendly gathering of some 30 to 40 citizens who had foregone a local candidates’ forum and even the Winter Olympics so they could participate in shaping an interim use plan for the old Stimson property. The suggestions they offered were as varied as the people in the room. A horse enthusiast urged that equestrian use be promoted, and she volunteered her fellow trail riders for trail patrols. Someone else suggested that the old mill site be used for a new sewage treatment plant for Crescent City. A man dressed head-to-toe in green moleskin, looking as if he’d just come back from hiking the Austrian Alps, spoke at some length about the use and abuse of public land and offered suggestions on a variety of topics, ranging from fishery protection to highway bypasses. Many urged that fish continue to be monitored, as Stimson Lumber had done quite thoroughly, to ensure that salmon and steelhead received the protection they needed. In the end, approval for an interim plan was unaminous.

As Diane Mutchie later pointed out, “We have a pretty independent bunch up here—which is one of the aspects of a rural lifestyle that keeps us here.”

On March 11, the Save-the-Redwoods League and Stimson Lumber Company announced that they would provide the County a $5 million mitigation fund to ease the transition from private industrial timberland to public ownership. According to Andrew Miller, owner of Stimson, “the amount of private dollars offered in mitigation is unprecedented in this type of case.” The funds are to be invested to create a growing source of income for the County budget, making up for potential lost tax revenue. In exchange, the County agreed to drop its legal challenge to the sale of the Mill Creek property.

Chuck Blackburn, chairman of the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors and one of the most outspoken opponents to the land purchase until now, said: “I think overall it will be a good deal for us.” The sale is expected to be completed before summer.

Michael Bowen is a project manager for the Coastal Conservancy. He works on the North Coast.