Mill City's Bitter Choice

By John Skow

TITLE: SHOWDOWN AT OPAL CREEK

AUTHOR: DAVID SEIDEMAN

PUBLISHER: CARROLL & GRAF; 419 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A sensitive, fascinating look at an Oregon logging town and an endangered stand of big timber nearby.

The spotted owl was never really the issue, despite bumper stickers that squawked I LIKE SPOTTED OWLS -- FRIED and SAVE AN OWL, EDUCATE A LOGGER. But, as David Seideman points out in this thoughtful portrait of an Oregon logging town struggling with the severe decline of its only industry, the U.S. does not have an "Endangered Ecosystem Act." So, to save the last scraps of ancient, old-growth forest in the Northwest, environmentalists used the endangered status of a rare, shy bird that few Americans had heard of and fewer had seen. Timber jobs, however, are being lost less to owl huggers than to automation in the mills. And the timber industry, despite its bull-roar patriotism, senselessly bypasses U.S. mills and mill workers and exports round, unprocessed logs from private forests to Japan.

Old forests are not just tree stands. They are vast, intricate superorganisms; interdependent populations of wildlife; huge, filtering sponges for clear water; great, green lungs breathing out oxygen. Less than ! 10% of the Northwest's old growth is still uncut, and much of this is in patches too small to be ecologically self-sustaining. In 15 years or so, enough second-growth timber will have reached marketable size to allow some logging towns to limp along. But to bridge the years till then, virtually all the old growth not in national parks would have to be cut.

In Mill City, Oregon, two former friends and business partners, now passionate adversaries, wrangle publicly over whether the town is worth the last old trees. Tom Hirons, tough, honest and worn down, runs a small logging company that is starved for work. George Atiyeh is a cocky, down-home environmentalist. His obsession is protecting Opal Creek, a 6,800-acre stand of superb old growth in the western Cascade Mountains. Seideman, a TIME reporter, follows his two feuding guides, and the reader, tagging along, learns, among other things, why loggers tend to hit the bars after a week's work. Though the author is an environmentalist who favors old growth, he can see it is unfair for the government, after pushing big timber cuts for years, to tell these hard-used, self-respecting men abruptly that it's all over.