The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

266 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
tal laws and regulations except for those suspending appeals and legal
challenges,” Northwest historian Kathie Durbin wrote in Tree Huggers,
her chronicle of the old-growth wars. Gore and other members of Clinton’s
environmental brain trust were adamant that the rider was political
and environmental poison. But the president signed the budget bill, salvage
rider largely intact, on July 27, 1995. It went into effect immediately.
The next day, environmental leaders mourned the capitulation with a
“21-chainsaw salute” outside the White House. Looking back, Gore said
surrendering to Gorton was the worst mistake the administration made
during its first term. 35
Seven months later, Gorton and Hatfield rebuffed an attempt to weaken
the salvage plan. Patty Murray, Brock Adams’ successor, was proposing a
compromise that would have suspended sales of old-growth and allowed
salvage sales to be appealed in court. Murray and Clinton warned that a
lot of healthy ancient timber was being harvested under the loophole.
Environmentalists called it “logging without laws.” Gorton’s rejoinder
was that only 16,000 acres of green timber out of the 24 million protected
by the Clinton forest plan was being expedited for sale. The Senate
chopped Murray’s plan, 54-42. The rider expired at the end of 1996. The
best Clinton could do was truncate it by two weeks. From then on, Gorton’s
efforts to unlock more timber were repeatedly blocked. 36
Twenty years after it was declared threatened, the spotted owl’s numbers
were still in decline, despite the dramatic cutbacks. To the bitter
amusement of surviving loggers, the barred owl—a bigger, meaner nonnative
interloper—started horning in on its more docile cousin, kicking
the spotties out of their nests or slamming “into their breasts like feathery
missiles” before mating with the females. 37
Mother Nature has always been fickle, Babbitt observed in 2010.
“Though the owl triggered it, what was at stake was the survival of the
old-growth ecosystem.” The Clinton plan represented a landmark in conservation
planning, the former Interior secretary added, with foresters
examining entire ecosystems rather than just drawing lines on a map.
The Washington Forest Protection Association protested that ignoring
owl conservation efforts on 2.1 million acres of state and private land was
hardly an entire ecosystem approach. 38
in the gLoRy dAys of logging, they’d tried to cut it all. Now Jim Carlson
had nearly lost it all, although his droll sense of humor survived intact.
Kellie had made him a proud grandfather. After several years on Gorton’s
staff, she was back home, helping her father regroup and heading the