'Darth Vader' vs. Native Fish:

Three years ago Plum Creek Timber Co. -- second largest private land owner in the United States (after International Paper), with 8.1 million acres of forests and stumpfields in 19 states - signed a management agreement with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. In this habitat conservation plan (HCP), as it is called, the feds provided a guarantee against prosecution under the Endangered Species Act for 30 years on almost 1.4 million acres in Montana and 40,000 acres in Idaho. In exchange they got Plum Creek's promise to mitigate for "take" (i.e., harassing, harming or killing) of eight threatened and nine non-listed but troubled native fish: bull trout, rainbows, redband rainbows, coastal cutthroats, westslope cutthroats, mountain whitefish, coho salmon, chums, five races of chinooks and three races of steelhead.

It was big news - the timber industry's first major HCP exclusively for fish. Plum Creek deserves credit for it, yet even today, enviros call Plum Creek "the Darth Vader of the timber industry." Is this a fair moniker? And is the HCP any good? In an effort to find out I interviewed everyone I could who knew something or seemed to -- state and federal land managers, fisheries biologists, foresters, environmentalists, sportsmen and Plum Creek executives. Everyone had passionate opinions. And virtually everyone - including all the people I know and respect and who, by anyone's standards, have the best credentials to comment - fell into two groups: Those who love the HCP and appreciate Plum Creek and those who detest both.

Apparently, I am the only member of a third group. I'll admit up front to detesting Plum Creek; and, while I'm still making up my mind about this particular HCP, I love HCPs in general. In fact, they represent the only hope of saving threatened and endangered species on private land. If the Conservation and Reinvestment Act becomes law, substantial funding from federal offshore oil-and-gas royalties would go to wildlife management and conservation.

You can't understand this HCP or even HCPs in general without understanding Plum Creek, so first, some background. I have seen (and gasped in horror at) the work of Plum Creek -- most notably in the upper Lochsa drainage in northern Idaho. At Fish Creek one may view no less than eight logging roads at different elevations crossing a single denuded slope. Declares Charles Spoon, a forester for 40 years and former assistant to the supervisor of the Lolo National Forest: "This is the first time I've witnessed such dense roading since the days of 'jammer' logging. Then there is the actual cutting of all the 'good' trees, leaving the deformed and stagnant understory firs to provide the minimum illusion of a still-treed hillside." But was this worse than what I've seen on land tended by, say, Champion International in New England, Irving Paper in Canada or any major timber company anywhere? Well, that's like ladling a dozen decomposed mackerel from the bilge and asking which is deader.

While it is difficult to think of George Lucas' heavy breather with the radiator face as a kindly old gent, recall that Darth renounced his evil ways and embraced goodness and light. Plum Creek claims to have done just this. "First, we changed management practices on the ground," says Lorin Hicks, the company's director of fish and wildlife resources. "For instance, in the Rockies we moved away from clearcutting and more into partial cutting and working with natural regeneration of stands. We began saving some of the defective trees and downed logs for fish and wildlife." Supposedly, this has happened since 1990 when the company spun off from its corporate parent, Burlington Northern Railroad.

"In 1999 we became the first company in the US to have all its lands certified by the Sustainable Forest Initiative," offers Bob Jirsa, Plum Creek's director for corporate affairs, referring to the American Forest & Paper Association's pretend green certification process designed to distract consumers from the genuine item - provided by the independent Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) - and thereby legitimize firms that jeopardize endangered fish and wildlife, strip old growth, convert natural forests to sterile, chemical-dependent plantations and cut timber faster than it regenerates.

According to Plum Creek ads, the company engages in "environmental forestry." It's not clear from the copy what this is, but it includes the annual planting of "15 million seedlings specifically grown to maximize growth and resist diseases." This is neither environmental nor forestry, and it is not, as the company claims, "regeneration." In fact, it is worse than clearcutting and walking away because it replaces natural, diverse forests with genetically tweaked monocultures -- row crops every bit as useless to wildlife as a field of soybeans. If you have to replant trees instead of letting nature do it, you shouldn't have cut there in the first place.

But again, such activities don't make Plum Creek unique. Replacing native forests with tree farms and then convincing an ignorant, gullible public that you've made the world a better place is the modus operandi of Big Timber. What does make the company unique is that, reorganized into a real estate investment trust, it is now selling off its property, frequently after it has removed the trees. "Highest and best use," it calls this land allocation; and it targets lakeshores and riverbanks. As hideous as they are, clearcuts and roads heal. Houses, strip malls, parking lots and the like do not. And yet Jirsa accurately observes that 90 percent of the lands or easements Plum Creek has hawked have gone into conservation - 80,000 acres along the Thompson and Fisher rivers in northwest Montana, for example, 16,000 acres along the Blackfoot. Part of the reason, of course, is that Plum Creek's "cut-and-run" policy has scared the bejesus out of environmentalists, sportsmen and state and federal resource agencies.

Consider Montana's 200,000-acre Swan River Valley. Tucked between the Bob Marshall Wilderness on the east and the Mission Mountain Wilderness on the west, it is a haven for grizzlies, lynx, wolverine, elk, moose, goshawks, eagles and threatened bull trout, the most temperature and silt sensitive of the West's imperiled salmonids. Plum Creek owns 80,000 acres here, and in the next five to seven years it plans to unload 20,000 -- 10,000 for private real estate. "Home sites so big, you won't have any neighbors. Except, of course, Bob," shout the ads in The Wall Street Journal. One of the first victims will be Metcalf Lake, famous for its trophy rainbows. Plum Creek is offering the 163 acres around the shore for $2.9 million or about $18,000 per acre. The Montana Dept. of Fish, Wildlife and Parks thought it had a public foot easement to the lake, but a survey has just shown that this missed by nine feet. As a result the agency will cease stocking the trout on which the put-grow-and-take fishery depended. Plum Creek had offered the land to the state and the Forest Service, but both declined.

Jirsa says his company hopes to sell the other half of the 20,000 acres (most of it anyway) to the Flathead National Forest. But money is tight and, even if it weren't, land acquisition is a low priority with the Bush Administration.