on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

Working with the Arcata office, he negotiated the first-ever forestry habitat conservation plan, for Simpson Timber Co. It was for spotted owls. He also did a couple for Pacific Lumber Co. — one for the owl, and one for the little-understood marbled murrelet.

By fall 1996, the negotiations over the Headwaters Forest had begun. The Fish and Wildlife Service had stopped Pacific Lumber Co. from logging in a place called Owl Creek, considered habitat for the recently listed marbled murreled, and PL had filed two uncompenstated takings lawsuits, saying the land was useless to them now because it was zoned only for timber harvest. That led to the negotiations, and the deal in 1999; Detrich played the lead role for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the settlement, and in helping the company craft the multi-species habitat conservation plan that was part of the agreement.

Detrich considers these timber HCPs highlights of his career, and real markers of the successful evolution in species protection from single-species management, nest by nest, to sweeping landscape measures designed to protect numerous critters. They heralded an era of “adaptive management,” in which management of HCP lands could be altered as scientific knowledge of the protected species, and their habitats, developed over time.

Frank Bacik, an environmental lawyer who represented numerous timber companies over the years, including PL, and often found himself hashing out details with Detrich, said landowners were wary of HCPs. He said Detrich’s honesty won them over.

“No landowner is ever required by law to obtain an incidental take permit or dedicate part of his land to conservation,” Bacik said. “The government can deny [timber harvest] permits and stop activity, and you can go to war and litigate. But with a cooperative approach, a reasonably flexible approach invoking adaptive management, Phil was able to persuade people to agree to conserve vast acreages of land with the understanding that [new scientific] information might allow different kinds of management later. And it’s a hard pill for a landowner to swallow.”

Critics, on the other hand, complain conversely that HCPs weight things in favor of the landowner.

“I think the first HCP that Green Diamond got, when they were still Simpson, really underscores the concerns that the conservation community has with these things,” said Scott Greacen, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center, in a recent interview. “We cut a deal that may have looked good then, but 20 years later, where is the habitat conservation? We’ve got a landscape that’s converted by clearcuts into timber plantations. Yes, there’s some riparian corridors, but couldn’t we have done more by actually enforcing the Endangered Species Act rather than cutting this lame deal that sticks another generation and a half with whatever we decided in the late ’80s was as much as we were going to get out of them?”

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