When the federal government listed nine stocks of Northwest salmon and steelhead as threatened or endangered last March, media attention focused on the densely populated Puget Sound basin, 3 million people strong and growing. It was the first time an endangered species listing affected a large metropolitan area. Washington’s governor, King County’s executive officer and Seattle’s mayor all expressed optimism for salmon recovery and pledged resources and support. State and federal agencies vowed cooperation. Even Senator Slade Gorton, an archenemy of the Endangered Species Act, pledged $300 million in federal assistance.

Less attention was given to the fact that 60,000 miles of forested streams in Washington are also critical salmon habitat. The listing promised significant changes in the way timber companies conduct business on some 8 million acres of nonfederal forestland. But in sharp contrast to its reaction to earlier spotted owl and marbled murrelet listings, the state’s timber industry greeted the announcement with a thundering silence.

The absence of doomsday rhetoric from industry spokesmen was no mystery to the state’s environmental leaders. They knew the timber industry had cut its deal months before.

In January 1999, Governor Gary Locke released his salmon recovery plan. Its forestry component, a negotiated agreement called the Forests and Fish Report, was worked out by timber industry representatives and state and federal officials well away from the public eye. The agreement called for a modest increase in forested buffers along fish-bearing streams, from a minimum of twenty-five feet to eighty feet (with cutting still allowed within them); restrictions on logging excessively steep slopes; and a requirement that timber companies repair deteriorating logging roads that wash sediment into salmon streams. Landowners of smaller parcels were exempted from some of the requirements. As an added incentive, the state would compensate forest landowners an estimated $1 billion over the fifty-year life of the agreement.

Once the deal was blessed by federal agencies charged with protecting threatened species and water quality (the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency), the timber industry mounted a well-funded lobbying campaign to enact it into law. Despite strong opposition from state environmentalists, a number of Indian tribes, commercial fishers and the League of Women Voters, SHB2091 passed both houses of the legislature. It was signed into law by Locke last spring. Rules based on the agreement are to be in place by summer 2001.

As one lobbyist succinctly put it, the environmental community got rolled. Dave Mann, president of the Washington Environmental Council, was more blunt: “This bill is a sellout to the timber industry, pure and simple.” It also is a classic example of how the Endangered Species Act can be subverted at the state level.

Critics of the agreement point to a growing body of scientific evidence showing that salmon and steelhead require forested stream buffers of at least 250 feet. Cutting within them, scientists agree, should be allowed only when proven it will not harm fish. Tributaries upstream of spawning areas also need protection. Riparian areas (streamside habitats) must remain intact and functional across the landscape for salmon and steelhead to thrive.

It’s well known that forested buffers are a critical component of salmon habitat. Trees shade salmon streams, keeping water cool for eggs and fry, and overhanging limbs and roots offer obstacles to predatory birds. Trees also stabilize stream banks and filter out pollution and silt deadly to salmon eggs. Large trees fall into streams and lodge there, regulating flows and creating pools and riffles where salmon can feed and take cover. And fallen leaf litter and detritus nourish many of the instream invertebrates upon which young salmon depend.

The Forests and Fish Report recognizes this, critics agree, but sets buffer widths that are too narrow to provide those benefits, and it does little for upper tributaries. In an op-ed piece in the Seattle Times, noted scientists James Karr, David Montgomery and Reed Noss wrote that the agreement lacks key elements critical for any study serving as a basis for public policy: It lacks data that might have led to its conclusions and references that would support them, it contains no discussions of contradictory research and it received no independent scientific review.

Most alarming to the scientists, regulations resulting from the agreement would be locked in for fifty years, and any future changes in forestry practices needed to protect fish would have to be approved by the timber industry.

Karr, Montgomery and Noss, along with twenty-five other leading scientists, signed a letter to Locke, citing substantial research linking adequate stream buffers with salmon health. They pointed out that the plan “deviates substantially from findings of readily available scientific literature.” It was not, they maintained, “a scientifically credible strategy to recover endangered salmon.”

The scientists requested an independent peer review. But in the headlong rush to nail down a deal and avert a “train wreck” of Endangered Species Act lawsuits and injunctions, the review never happened.

To understand how a state that prides itself on its natural environment could sanction such a risky approach to salmon recovery, it’s useful to look at the history of forest regulation in Washington. Like most western states, Washington came late and begrudgingly to resource protection. The state’s Forest Practices Act, passed in 1974 by a strongly pro-timber legislature, did little to protect salmon—or any nongame wildlife species. It required only twenty-five- to fifty-foot buffers along salmon streams, and loggers were allowed to remove 50 percent or more of the standing shade (usually all the merchantable trees) within them. The trees that remained were often vulnerable to being toppled in windstorms.

That same year, in a move that would add a small degree of balance to forest practices, Judge George Boldt upheld tribal treaty rights to 50 percent of the state’s salmon and steelhead harvest. A later court decision confirmed the tribes’ right to protect salmon habitat as well.

This new legal clout on the part of the tribes was a key factor leading to the Timber, Fish and Wildlife Agreement of 1987, which increased protection along streams and gave tribes, environmental groups, resource agencies and timber companies an opportunity to work toward resolving logging disputes out of court. In its first decade, the agreement had limited success. It was poorly funded, badly understaffed and able to review only a fraction of the 10,000 to 15,000 logging permit applications filed each year. Enforcement of existing rules remained a chronic problem, and little effort was made to evaluate the effectiveness of the rules.

The 1987 pact, combined with existing regulations, have “failed miserably” in protecting salmon habitat, according to Jill Silver, habitat biologist for the Hoh Tribe on the western Olympic Peninsula. “Outside of Olympic National Park, there isn’t a tributary in the Hoh River system that has healthy pools or riffles, healthy spawning gravels or large woody debris,” she says. “Riparian zones have been destroyed, and miles and miles of once productive salmon habitat are choked with logging debris.” The tribe fields a ten-person crew full time to restore habitat destroyed by logging in the watershed. With no casino, timber base or ocean fishery, Silver points out, the tribe is dependent on its river salmon fishery, which has declined by nearly two-thirds since the 1987 agreement was signed.

Late in 1996, with salmon listings looming on the horizon, those who participated in that agreement decided to negotiate new forest practice rules that would comply with the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, provide treaty-assured harvestable levels of fish and ensure economic viability for the timber industry. Toby Thaler negotiated for the Washington Environmental Council, an organization with a twenty-five-year history of working to reform forestry laws in the state, and one of two environmental organizations participating in the talks.

“Negotiations went nowhere,” Thaler says.

According to Thaler, the timber industry’s proposal became the sole basis for negotiation, and discussions never approached a scientifically sound plan that would guarantee salmon survival. “Deadline after deadline passed and we weren’t even getting close to what was needed for salmon,” he says. “Meanwhile, destructive logging practices continued and the [salmon] runs continued to decline.”

Thaler had some tough opponents at the bargaining table. Bill Wilkerson represented the industry lobbying group Washington Forest Protection Association. A seasoned political operative well connected in Olympia, Wilkerson formerly headed the state’s Department of Fisheries. Overseeing the process for the governor’s office was Curt Smitch, who worked with Wilkerson at Fisheries. Negotiating for the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency that had to give its blessing to the deal, was Bob Turner. Turner had also headed up the Department of Fisheries and has long-standing ties to both Wilkerson and Smitch. These, in fact, were the same managers who presided over the salmon’s decline.

“We knew the odds were stacked heavily toward the industry going in,” Thaler says, “but we didn’t know how steeply.”

In September 1998, after twenty-two months of missed deadlines and with major issues such as stream buffers, logging on steep slopes and funding still unresolved, the environmental caucus elected to leave the negotiations and take its recommendations directly to the Forest Practices Board, the state entity charged with regulating forestry in the state.

“At that point,” says Thaler, “the [negotiating] process was over.”

According to the ground rules that had been set up, when a consensus cannot be reached, participants can take issues to other forums for resolution. The obvious body for resolving forestry issues in Washington is the Forest Practices Board. In what Thaler considers a breach of trust, Wilkerson continued to push negotiations in the absence of environmental participation. He then took the resulting agreement directly to the legislature, an “end run around the Forest Practices Board” in Thaler’s view, and with state and federal approval he lobbied it through.

Wilkerson doesn’t see it that way.

“Turning negotiations over to the Forest Practices Board wasn’t what the caucuses agreed to do,” he says. “We all wanted to continue the good work that was done up to then.” Wilkerson considers the environmentalists’ proposals extreme and unnecessary. In his view, the science behind the Forests and Fish Report is sound. “Every negotiator was supported by a science team, and every scientist in the room was in agreement,” he says. “When they said, ŒThis will work,’ we stopped negotiating.”

One scientist in the room was Bob Bilby. Bilby, a former fisheries biologist for the Weyerhauser timber company, is manager of science and research for the regional National Marine Fisheries Service and is Bob Turner’s chief science adviser. Asked if the agreement will save threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in Washington, Bilby couldn’t say. “A lot of pieces of the agreement are experimental,” he says, adding that nothing like this has been attempted before. “We won’t be able to see if they work until we implement them on the ground.”

Prospects seem less than promising. A preliminary assessment commissioned by the Pacific Rivers Council found that 75 percent of two Cascade stream systems, largely upper tributaries, received no protection under the plan. The study noted that this is less riparian protection than was afforded by Option 8 of Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan; that option provided only a 28 percent chance that salmon would be “well distributed” across federal lands. In fact, the study showed that the Forests and Fish Report offered less streamside protection than any state or federal salmon habitat protection plan in the Northwest, including the National Marine Fisheries Service’s recommendations for salmon recovery in Oregon and the Washington Department of Natural Resources’ recently approved habitat conservation plan.

“The reason those small streams are not protected is because of the economics,” Bilby admits. “There are lots of them; and if buffers were placed on all of them, the economic consequences for the industry would be severe.” Phil Millam of the regional EPA office stated as much in a bulletin issued last May. “Clearly,” he summed up, “this is not a scientific judgment, but a political one.” Nonetheless, Bilby feels comfortable with the agreement as long as adequate research and monitoring is maintained and if additional restrictions are put in place as needed to protect salmon.

Neither the agreement nor the bill makes provision for adequate funding, however. That part of the package remains in doubt. Senator Gorton later balked at his promised $300 million, for example, and instead delivered $50 million. And if adequate funding is not forthcoming? “Then,” Bilby concedes, “we’re back at square one five years from now, arguing about the same things.”

Critics cite other major problems with the agreement: It circumvents environmental review by the Forest Practices Board, and although it gives the timber industry fifty years of certainty regarding harvests, it provides no comparable guarantee for salmon. That the deal requires timber industry approval of any new regulations is unwise at best, critics say, and is a terrible precedent for endangered species recovery elsewhere in the West.

A more immediate problem with the agreement may be the ability of foresters to enforce it on the ground.

As manager of the state Department of Natural Resources Forest Practices Division, John Edwards helped draft rules to protect spotted owls and marbled murrelets, and he dealt with appeals and legal challenges on 12 million acres of nonfederal forestlands in Washington. He sees the new rules as largely unenforceable. “The agreement is extremely complex and requires numerous visits to a riparian site,” he says, noting that each step is subject to errors that compound as the process moves forward. Foresters need regulations they can enforce consistently across the state, he explains. “[Under this agreement], I don’t think you could take two foresters to the same site on two different days and come up with the same numbers.” Edwards, who retired last June after thirty years with the department, thinks that this ambiguity plays directly into the hands of timber companies. In his view, it’s in the industry’s best interest to have a complex rule that is difficult to enforce. Then, once a sensitive area has been logged, “who’s to say they did it wrong?”

With the very agencies charged with enforcing provisions of the Endangered Species Act blessing the agreement, who’s to say anyone did it wrong? Wilkerson points out that logging rules are only one part of the state’s salmon recovery package. There’s the urban component with its pollution from parking lots and lawn chemicals; there’s agricultural pollution, hydroelectric dams and irrigation, not to mention overharvest at sea. All true. But forest streams are critical habitats for salmon.

Salmon are forest animals, as much a part of forest ecosystems as the bears, the ravens, the bald eagles—and the people—that eat them. It was only with the return of salmon to the postglacial landscape that human cultures flourished in the Northwest. Many believe that the presence of salmon is an indicator, not just of ecosystem health, but of whether humans have truly learned to live in this place. If Northwesterners care as deeply about the natural environment as they let on, salmon supporters say, they should make the kinds of sacrifices necessary to ensure the survival of a species that more than any other symbolizes the region. If the Forests and Fish Report is the best that politicians and bureaucrats can do, then this remarkable wild creature is likely to remain in jeopardy.