on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

Some say Phil Detrich was a sellout. Others, a savior. He says he was just doing his job.

(March 18, 2010)  Actually, it’s probably safe to say that “Phil Detrich” isn’t one those names bandied about when certain cronies gather around the campfire to talk about the good ol’ days. You know, the heydays of blockading timber roads and sitting in old-growth redwoods to save spotted owls from the cuts of Pacific Lumber. Or the days of climbing hundreds of feet up to haul down treesitters. The days of storming PacifiCorp shareholder meetings in Scotland, or lately Omaha, to urge the demolition of the Klamath dams to save the salmon. Or the days of gathering the red-blooded forces from every Western resource battlefront, past and present, to haul symbolic buckets to Klamath Falls in support of water-starved farmers.

Indeed, Phil Detrich is no Julia Butterfly. Nor is he a Charles Hurwitz. He is a nerdy, good-humored guy with the words “bird” and “fish” in his e-mail address. And he is an agency man. A seasonal wildlife biologist turned full-time bureaucrat — a “biocrat,” as he puts it. Someone who’s had to walk a narrow ledge of law and regulations amid a soupy storm of competing interests, and biological variability, and try to wring some balance out of the mess. And though you might not have heard of Detrich, the 62-year-old’s 30-year career twined intimately through some of our mightiest North Coast battles — including in his recent position, which he just retired from, as Field Supervisor for the Yreka Fish and Wildlife Office, which along with offices in Arcata and Klamath Falls primarily works on fish and wildlife protection and restoration in the Klamath River Basin.

Illustration by Holly Harvey.

GALLERY >

Detrich led the development of state and federal regulations and management for Northern spotted owls in California after they were listed in 1990 as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act.

He advised Fish and Wildlife Service attorneys when it fell upon them to go before Bush the Elder’s God Squad — the Endangered Species Exemption Committee — to defend the agency’s ruling that a Bureau of Land Management logging plan would jeopardize the spotted owl.

He helped Simpson Timber Co. develop a habitat conservation plan for the owl in 1992 — a controversial innovation that allows a non-federal entity to “take” an ESA-listed critter in the course of economic activity, and the first one ever done in forestry.

He was the Fish and Wildlife representative on the team that developed the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, a major shift in species protection strategy.

He was a key player in the five-and-a-half-year negotiations that culminated in the 1999 Headwaters Forest Deal — the public purchase of about 10,000 acres of Pacific Lumber Co. land and the preservation of about 4,000 acres of old-growth redwood stands, and the company’s development of a multi-species habitat conservation plan for its remaining timberlands — the first of its kind.

And, Detrich was the Fish and Wildlife representative in the years-long multi-party settlement talks that led to the two-part Klamath Basin deal, signed last month by the governors of Oregon and California and others, that aims to remove four dams on the Klamath River, restore the fishery and provide guaranteed water to farmers in the upper basin, in Oregon.

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