PORT ANGELES—Defense of legacy forests in Clallam County has become a burning issue with nature lovers, here, working to elect Dave Upthegrove Commissioner of Public Lands in the November 5 general election.
On August 25, I was one of eight activists who joined a civil disobedience action, initiated by “Troublemakers,” hiking into the Doc Holiday Unit 5 timber parcel to strip pink plastic boundary markers from trees slated to be logged in the 76-acre parcel owned by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
The parcel is located 22 miles west of the town of Joyce on highway 112, a dense, dark, mossy forest of cedars, hemlock, Douglas fir, spruce and alders—many of the trees 100 years old. We were accompanied by Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times reporter and by a Times videographer and photographer. The Seattle Times article by Lynda Mapes was featured in their Sunday, Oct. 13 edition.
I told the Times I grew up in Clallam County and have known since my youth loggers and millworkers and know well the value of lumber and paper. But these legacy forests are ten-times more valuable left standing, absorbing millions of tons of CO-2, helping combat global climate change, preserving rivers and streams where salmon used to abound, home to the marbled murrelter and spotted owl, a source of beauty and recuperation for human beings.
“My great grandfather, George Shaw, was a timber cruiser for the Simpson Timber Company right here on the Olympic Peninsula and I can assure you the forest was much deeper and denser than now. The new jobs here must be tending and extending these legacy forests.
“Some things are more important than obeying a law when they are violating the sacred principle of preserving our forests….They can’t speak for themselves. We have to speak for them or they will be cut down.”
We did not know if we would be arrested on the spot, jailed, or fined. Or arrested the next day when we delivered hundreds of the boundary markers to DNR headquarters in Olympia.
Instead, we were greeted by dead silence. No arrests, jail-time, fines. Meanwhile, sale of the Doc Holiday parcel raced ahead.
It left us thinking that Hilary Franz, Public Lands Commissioner, and the DNR, did not want any publicity. They are racing ahead, quietly, to sell as many timber parcels as possible before the Nov. 5 election fearing the election of Dave Upthegrove, now King County Councilman.
Upthegrove has pledged that, if elected the new Public Lands Commissioner, his first action will be a decree halting all legacy forest timber sales.
This was not our first sojourn in Clallam County’s magnificent legacy forests. It was on the World River Day of Sept. 2023 that a crowd of environmentalists, led by Elizabeth Dunne, Legal Director of Earthlaw, marched to the banks of the Elwha River demanding cancellation of the Power Plant Unit 3 timber parcel right adjacent to the Elwha River.
Franz had already approved that sale. Yet ultimately she bowed to pressure and cancelled the sale. Yet later we learned that this parcel was returned to the pool of parcels for future sale—a stab in the back!
Among those in the powerful grassroots coalition to stop logging in the Elwha River Watershed is the Port Angeles City Council that voted unanimously for a resolution pointing out that all the drinking water for Port Angeles is drawn from the Elwha.
“Please stop the logging and protect our drinking water,” the City Council wrote.
On Oct. 16, Orca Recovery Day, 55 citizens of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe sent a letter to Franz urging her to declare a total ban on logging in the Elwha Watershed. “We welcomed DNR’s decision to cancel the “Power Plant” timber sale in December 2023 and to protect 69 acres of critical forest along the Elwha River. Now we are alarmed to learn of four planned timber sales in the Elwha Watershed—‘Tree Well’, ‘Parched’, ‘Alley Cat,’ and ‘Bread and Butter,’ totaling 555 acres and currently slated for auction to timber companies by the end of this year.
“If these proposed sales are allowed to go through we would lose nearly half the remaining mature structurally complex forests in the watershed. This logging, some of it on steep slopes near the Elwha and its major tributaries, disrespects a decade’s worth of restoration efforts threatening our salmon and our way of life.”
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