The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

262 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
by the Jack Ward Thomas committee would cost the region 32,000 jobs.
He unveiled a “balanced” alternative he said would be only half as onerous.
Owl biologists dismissed it as “a recipe for extinction” and said the
32,000 job-loss estimate was greatly exaggerated. “I am not going to let
anyone rape the earth,” Lujan promised. As a creationist, he unapologetically
believed, however, “that man is at the top of the pecking order. I
think that God gave us dominion over these creatures . . . I just look at an
armadillo or a skunk or a squirrel or an owl or a chicken, whatever it is,
and I consider the human being on a higher scale. Maybe that’s because
a chicken doesn’t talk.” Conceding that his alternative owl recovery plan
violated the Endangered Species Act, Lujan said Congress had the power
to implement it through a special act. Gorton introduced the legislation
but was thwarted at every turn. 25
Brian Boyle, the Republican commissioner of public lands in Washington
State, where timber sales produced millions for public schools,
was angry that Lujan and other federal officials had misled the public by
downplaying the impact on state and private lands. The new rules meant
that on the Olympic Peninsula, for instance, no old-growth could be
logged within a 2.2-mile radius of each pair of spotted owls, or at least
where one of their nests was found. That added up to 4,000 acres of forest
per pair. 26
At gRound zeRo, Jim Carlson felt as if he couldn’t win for trying. The
years to come brought even more frustration. He had survived the brutal
recession of the early 1980s and was doing his best to find life after the
spotted owl when the economy tanked all over again in 1992. With Kellie’s
help, he was making another comeback when 2008 made 1992 seem
like a walk in the woods. A natural-born storyteller, Carlson is a connoisseur
of irony. “When we first got the news about the reduction in the
harvest, they told us the future would be about diversification and valueadded
products. Even though I was startled at the reduction, I figured,
‘Well, we’re a small company. We’re agile and able to adapt. We’ll downsize;
invest in remanufacturing operations, buy a dry kiln. We’ll do more
with less—get more miles per gallon from the reduced supply.’ I went for
that one hook, line and sinker. So I spent a few million. Invariably the
government forwards a solution that requires spending more money to
fix the problem. What they didn’t tell us was that the harvest reality was
going to be approximately zero. I recall standing there after the smoke
had cleared asking myself the now obvious question, ‘Add jobs and
value to what?’ Shortly after this revelation I called some of my friends