The Past Is Present

Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-in-Chief, Timber Processing May 2017

I am excited to hear about Bruce Vincent’s new book, “Against The Odds,” about which there’s more detail on page 72. If you’ve been around this industry for a couple of decades or more, especially in the Northwest, you’re probably familiar with Vincent, mainly because of the protests he was involved in on behalf of the wood products industry.

Vincent, who worked in the family logging business in Montana, while picking up an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a master’s in business administration at Gonzaga University, came to the forefront in May 1988 as one of the chief organizers of the Libby Rally and Great Northwest Log Haul.

Those demonstrations stemmed from disenchantment over the continuing timber shortage caused by delays in Forest Service timber sales on national forests due to mounting appeals from preservationists and over proposed additional withdrawal of timberland for setaside into the National Wilderness Preservation System. More specifically, the protests arose out of a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that said a Forest Service plan to improve the Yaak road in the Kootenai National Forest in northwestern Montana did not adequately address impact on wildlife. The road provided access to multimillion board feet of sales. While the Forest Service went back to work on the environmental impact statement, sales were put on hold.

All of this prompted about 3,000 people from Montana and Idaho to convene in Libby for a pro-timber industry rally. Some days later, in what was called the Great Northwest Log Haul, trucks loaded with logs pulled out of Eureka and rolled 250 miles south, picking up more trucks along the way, until more than 300 of them pulled into Darby Lumber in Darby, Mont. in support of the sawmill, which had regressed from two shifts to periodic shutdowns because of lack of timber.

Vincent was one of the coordinators and thereafter he organized other events and became a leading spokesman for rural America through all of the northwest spotted owl “wars” that caused millions of acres more to be taken out of forest management. During this period, as he continued to challenge industry people to be heard, Vincent came up with and delivered the classic line: “The world is run by those who show up.”

How fitting it is then that about the time I heard of Vincent’s book, I also heard the news that a U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with an American Forest Resource Council appeal on behalf of many sawmill companies, which had challenged a lower court’s decision not to hear AFRC’s lawsuit to overturn the designation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of more than 9 million acres in the Northwest as critical habitat for the northern spotted owl.

The lower court had said that AFRC and the timber industry didn’t have “standing” to challenge the critical habitat designation. But the Court of Appeals judge blew off the lower court and said the industry definitely had “standing” because the FWS ruling could make it more difficult to harvest timber, cause a loss of timber supply and inflict economic harm to the industry. In other words, if that’s not “standing,” what is? The Court of Appeals ordered the lower court to hear the AFRC lawsuit.

Nearly 30 years after the Great Northwest Log Haul, we still need to show up.