August 5, 2004
IN THE NEWS | GARDEN | THE HUM | PREVIEW | CALENDAR
2004 CNPA
Award
Environmental Reporting - Second Place
Cover photo: Andrea Tuttle,
former director of the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Photo by Bob Doran.
by EMILY
GURNON
ANDREA TUTTLE HAD SOME PRETTY
HEFTY ENVIRO credentials when she became director of the California
Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in March of 1999.
A natural resources consultant
based in Arcata, Tuttle possesses a doctorate in environmental
planning from UC Berkeley. She had also served on the California
Coastal Commission during the two years previous, winning rave
reviews from the California League of Conservation Voters and
the California Coastal Protection Network.
Even so, she wasn't particularly
surprised when, as CDF director, she got a hostile visit from
Earth First! activists at her Arcata home one early Sunday morning
in April 2000. Tuttle was in Sacramento when the group of several
protesters arrived on her front lawn with buckets of Elk River
mud, which they said was scooped downstream from Pacific Lumber
Co. clearcuts.
The group was "delivering
an early-morning wakeup call" to Tuttle and other CDF officials
to hold them accountable "for rubber-stamping the extinction
of our salmon and killing our rivers," Earth First! member
Josh Brown said in a written statement on the group's Web site.
They climbed onto her roof to hang a banner, dumped the mud on
her porch and smeared it on her front door.
Though Tuttle was concerned
for her safety and that of her husband, then Humboldt County
Public Works Director Don Tuttle, she was prepared to be seen
as the enemy.
"That is what every [CDF]
director faces. You know when you step into that job and accept
the responsibilities that you need to develop a thick skin and
be ready for it."
Tuttle, 58, reflected this week on her five-plus
years at the helm of the CDF, which ended in June when Gov. Schwarzenegger
appointed Republican Dale Geldert to take her place. (See also
"The Politics of Science," an earlier Journal profile
of Tuttle, Dec. 10, 1998.) During her tenure in the $123,000-a-year
post, she presided over some of the worst wildland fires in California
history, which last fall resulted in 24 deaths in six Southern
California counties -- and sparked criticism of the CDF for its
decisions regarding fire response and coordination with other
fire agencies. Tuttle also was responsible for ironing out the
contentious permit process for Pacific Lumber's Habitat Conservation
Plan (HCP), which governs logging on the company's 211,000 acres
as part of the 1999 Headwaters Agreement.
Lightning
rod
Though the firefighting role
comprises the vast majority of CDF's work and uses about 85 percent
of its $500 million budget, it was the agency's governance of
private forestlands that made Tuttle a lightning rod for Humboldt
County timber activists, whom she came to see as naive, narrow-minded
crusaders who failed to recognize that the issue they were fighting
over had largely been won.
"We still need to make
sure that the forest practice rules are well-administered, enforced
and monitored, and there may be some places where we still need
improvements," she said. "But, by and large, the industry
is so different than it used to be -- they're restoring stream
channels and fixing roads, increasing coho and wildlife protections,
and now have staffs of biologists and watershed analysts. It's
not the same industry, and we shouldn't keep beating them up
as we used to."
Moreover, the activists are
ignoring the real threat -- one that has superseded that of bad
forest practices, Tuttle said: Owners of timberland are breaking
up their parcels and selling them off for development because
they are fed up with government regulations they see as expensive
and burdensome, and they're facing competition from cheaper lumber
from areas with far less environmental protection.
"We are losing our forestland
through conversion," Tuttle said. When that happens, the
land becomes host to ranchettes and "starter castles,"
each with its own roads, culverts, street lights, septic tanks
and pets that pollute streams and destroy wildlife habitat.
"This permanently destroys
those very forest values that we all care about," such as
broad expanses of open space, streams clear enough for fish to
thrive in, and an environment that counters global warming, Tuttle
said. By refusing to work hand-in-hand with timber companies,
hard-core activists risk seeing what they care about the most
disappear.
"The alternative to good,
sustainable forest management is no forests. The private forestlands
will become subdivisions. And until our forest advocates recognize
that, they're going to lose."
Some companies are looking right
now at rolling their lands out of timber production, Tuttle said,
though she declined to name names.
"I want to keep them here.
These lands are zoned for timber production, and sustainable
management into the future is a good use for California."
'Walking
the asphalt path'
Tuttle has a certain portion
of the conservation community on her side.
Laurie Wayburn is the co-author of America's
Private Forests and president of the Santa Rosa-based Pacific
Forest Trust, which works to preserve privately owned timberland.
She echoes what Tuttle says about what's happening to forestland
both here and nationally.
[photo at left courtesy of Pacific Forest Trust]
"We are losing forests
at an absolutely unprecedented rate," Wayburn said. Half
of the state's forests are in private hands, and California alone
loses 60,000 acres every year, she said. "That's a huge
amount of land."
The reason? Owners who aren't
getting enough bang for their timber buck, or for whom the "competition
for using that land for something else is awfully hard to resist."
Instead of remaining as forests,
the land is cleared for homes, air fields or shopping malls,
or turned over to agriculture; witness the transformation of
the Anderson Valley -- considered at one time as a possible addition
to the distant Redwood National Park -- into vineyards.
The solution, Wayburn said,
is to meet private forestland owners halfway -- to reward them
for good timber practices while keeping the regulations strong.
"We don't always want to
be on the side of punishing people for doing the wrong thing,"
she said. "We've got a third left of the forests we had
when the Europeans arrived in California. Unless we act constructively,
we're just going to keep walking down the asphalt path.
"I think Andrea understands
that, and frankly, I think that she was bringing a new conversation
to the table, to the state and private [land] owners as well
as environmental activists. She was trying to lift the vision
of the agency beyond the more detailed fight about whether a
particular silvicultural method was the best one. She wanted
people to understand the situation of the forest rather than
just individual trees. You need to do both."
But the environmentalists who
see themselves as watchdogs for the timber industry view Tuttle's
let's-work-together approach with suspicion, to say the least.
Cynthia Elkins of the Garberville-based
Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) said the 1973
Forest Practice Act, which overhauled California's forest regulation,
was prompted, in part, because the industry had been policing
itself -- and doing a miserable job. But in reality, she said,
corporate interests continue to dominate state policy.
"It's beyond the fox guarding
the henhouse. It's the fox's friend guarding the henhouse,"
Elkins said. "That's the sad truth about Andrea Tuttle:
She only continued that legacy of CDF.
"When she first was appointed,
conservationists had high hopes that she was going to direct
CDF in a way that would reform the terrible policies the agency
had had for so many years. Unfortunately, we didn't really see
very much of that. Under her direction, we saw continued clear
cuts, we saw our forests continue to be completely devastated
and no positive reforms in Sacramento."
The agency's implementation
of Pacific Lumber's Habitat Conservation Plan is a continual
sore point among activists like Elkins.
The idea behind the HCP was
that Pacific Lumber -- in addition to selling 7,500 acres of
ancient redwoods to the state and federal government in the Headwaters
deal -- would work with government officials to comply with restrictions
on logging in its remaining property, which serves as vital habitat
for species like the marbled murrelet and the coho salmon.
Tuttle said it took two or three
years of meetings to agree on the fine points of how the HCP
would work in real life, but its basic provisions were decided
before she even set eyes on it.
"The federal government
had signed it and the state government had signed it. It was
handed to me to implement. The CDF director has very little discretion
to require mitigations that are different from the HCP."
As for Elkins, her disappointment
is focused at the wrong target, Tuttle said, since the HCP was
drafted by three wildlife agencies and several politicians. But
Elkins' comments come as no surprise. "I know that there
is a group in Humboldt that is passionately anti-PALCO, and they
view the world through that lens," Tuttle said.
Paul Mason, a former EPIC staffer
who now works for the Sierra Club in Sacramento, said he now
has a better sense of the "power dynamics" around state
timber policy.
Tuttle's was "an extremely
difficult position," Mason said. "I seriously doubt
she ever would have been allowed to or was politically able to
do the things that really need to happen. The political power
of the timber industry is overwhelming."
It has the money and the connections
to get what it wants, Mason said. It's well-organized -- partly
because "you can fit the owners of half of the private forests
in California in an SUV," there are so few of them. And
it knows how to get the pols on its side: As was widely reported,
in 1999 Archie "Red" Emmerson, owner of Sierra Pacific
Industries, held a major fund-raiser for then-Gov. Gray Davis
at company headquarters.
Mason said the CDF made a number
of "unethical" moves while Tuttle was at the helm,
such as stalling the Sierra Club and EPIC's 1999 lawsuit against
Pacific Lumber and the CDF until the company had accomplished
a huge amount of the logging that the suit had intended to halt.
(In 2003, the environmental groups won -- Humboldt County Superior
Court Judge John Golden struck down key logging permits issued
by the state as part of the Headwaters deal -- but it was a Pyrrhic
victory, Mason said.)
Mason added that although he
and Tuttle were often at opposite sides of issues, he respected
her. And he suspects that her job was made more difficult by
virtue of the fact that she is a woman.
"The Department of Forestry
is very much a command and control, paramilitary-type operation,"
with some 90 percent men, Mason said. "I think if Andrea
had all the same skills and was not a woman, she would have had
an easier time of it."
Tuttle responded that, with
regard to the lawsuit, the CDF "never has any reason to
deliberately obstruct providing information." She also said
that, while some of the men within the agency were undoubtedly
surprised to see a woman take the helm, they were professional
and welcoming. "It's not the job of a director to sit on
a fire engine. The job of a director is to defend the budget.
I was successful, and gender was not an issue."
As for her dealings with big
timber, one industry head said Tuttle was fair.
"What Andrea tried to do
was to recognize that we ought to do this profession properly
rather than creating a situation where we're regulated out of
existence," said Neal Ewald of Green Diamond Resources,
formerly Simpson Resource Co. "That doesn't mean we always
saw eye-to-eye with her, but I believe she was supportive of
the fact that there ought to be an industry here."
With 450,000 acres in California,
Green Diamond is among the five biggest timber companies. Ewald
said it, like other companies, has changed over the years.
"We're trying to manage
the whole forest nowadays and not simply harvest trees. Our company
had no biologists in 1989 and now we have up to 26, half full-time
and half seasonal, collecting data. Our mantra here is we want
to know more about our forest than anyone else. I think [Tuttle]
appreciated the fact that we were investing this energy and money
and time and talent. I think she was encouraged by it."
Tuttle said she was proud to
serve as head of the CDF and that she believes she made a number
of positive changes there. Under her leadership, the CDF pushed
for and got a civil penalties authority so that timber companies
did not have to meet the much-higher criminal threshold to be
punished. The department worked to strengthen coho protections
after the salmon was listed as threatened. And it helped campaign
for the 2000 and 2002 park and water bonds.
She also worked on the forest
conversion issue, an issue "that had not been well explained
or developed or even recognized. I spent a lot of time with the
non-industrial [landowners] trying to find regulatory processes
to help them restore their land and keep their land. Very early
on we set up a timberlands incentive task force. And this fall,
one of the proposals that came out of that effort is going to
come before the Board of Forestry: a regulatory relief proposal
for non-industrials that would simplify the permit process for
them if they agree to provide certain additional protections."
And Tuttle said she tried to
be the voice of reason in what her friend Wayburn called "a
bit of a buzz saw" of a job.
"There are people who don't
understand the timber industry, and they have a passion that
no tree should ever be cut," Tuttle said. "On the other
side are the people who say, `Every tree here is my property
and, government, stay out of my business.' I saw my role as the
one to bring facts into the hyperbole from both sides."
Above: Andrea Tuttle and Gov.
Gray Davis view dead and dying trees while
flying over the Lake Arrowhead area in 2003.
Below: Tuttle with Jack Blackwell, regional forester for the
U.S. Forest Service,
during a San Bernardino County briefing on severe fire hazard
in July 2003.
Back
home
Now that she's back in Arcata,
Tuttle said she plans to spend time at home with her husband,
who has recently retired. Beginning in January, she'll teach
a course in California forest and fire policy at UC Berkeley.
She'll get back to some of the international forestry issues
she was involved with before becoming CDF director. And she'll
continue her focus on the conversion issue, working on incentives
to reward good stewardship of forestland.
"This is really the new
wave of forestry," she said. "That's where the real
action is."
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