Martin Litton is maneuvering his 1985 Dodge van down a winding washboard road in the Sequoia National Forest. Clutching a carton of buttermilk in one beefy hand, he points with the other to a clear-cut slashed into the mountainside. Four sequoia trees spared the chain saw tower over a tangled field of brush and bracken fern.

“Your tax dollars at work. We call these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Litton says between swigs of buttermilk.

The Four Horsemen comprise one of thirty-four groves that President Clinton designated for protection when he created the Giant Sequoia National Monument last spring. Most environmentalists welcome the new monument as an immense step toward preserving the few remaining ancient sequoias. It adds “a new crown jewel” to America’s treasury of parks and preserves, says Niel Lawrence, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney.

So why isn’t Litton happy? He, as well as some other environmentalists, say the Sequoia Monument designation entails much less than meets the eye. Those critics have raised a host of concerns.

As of late summer, the Sequoia Monument had no management plan and no budget. Its science advisory board had no appointees. More significant, under the terms of the monument designation, as much as 30 million board feet of timber can be cut within the monument’s boundaries over the next three years through logging contracts already in the works. The U.S. Forest Service, the agency charged with managing the monument, chose a former timber sale planner to coordinate the effort to draft a management plan. And the head of the Sequoia National Forest claims that more commercial timber sales could be undertaken within the monument’s boundaries in the future in the name of fire prevention.

Litton is wondering if the monument amounts to anything more than a boundary on a map. “It’s a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house,” he says. “Hell, yes, I’m skeptical.”

Over the past year, Clinton and his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, have announced a series of national monument designations that have, for the most part, delighted conservationists. Clinton created the Sequoia National Monument on April 15, signing a proclamation that identifies 328,000 acres on the western slopes of the southern Sierra Nevada as a permanent sequoia refuge. Using the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906, Clinton safeguarded a landscape that in addition to the sequoias includes granitic domes, heart-stopping spires and plunging gorges that harbor Pacific fisher and American marten, northern goshawk, peregrine falcons and golden eagles.

The monument designation allows continued public access for hiking, camping, river rafting and other nonmotorized recreation activities. Several youth camps will continue to operate under Forest Service permits. But the president’s proclamation limits off-road vehicles, including snowmobiles, to recognized roads and prohibits any new mining activity. And it requires a transportation plan that will almost certainly require the closure of numerous logging roads.

It is the current logging that raises the most immediate concern among environmentalists. None of the ongoing timber sales is in sequoia groves, but several are within 500 feet of them. Litton is livid. During more than a decade of relentless advocacy on behalf of the giant trees, his goal has been to end logging throughout the sequoia ecosystem.

“And in they brought it—right to the very groves the president says he’s protecting,” Litton growls, killing what’s left of the buttermilk. He has vowed to stop the remaining timber sales through litigation. Litton credits past lawsuits with reducing Sequoia National Forest logging from 85.7 million board feet in 1991 to 7 million last year. “We were making headway,” he fumes. “Now everyone is complacent. We’re in a worse place than if we didn’t have the monument.”

Joe Fontaine, former Sierra Club national president who is now vice chair of the club’s sequoia task force, is less worried about the logging already in process than the future logging designed to protect the sequoia habitat from catastrophic fire by removing underbrush and small trees from the sequoia groves and surrounding forests. The president’s proclamation cites the problems caused by decades of fire suppression and the “excellent opportunity” the monument offers for studying “different approaches to forest restoration.” Decoded, the proclamation allows logging within the monument if it is done for the purpose of reducing the fire hazard.

Fontaine says that the Forest Service’s first tool to lessen fire danger should be prescribed burning, not logging. Controlled burns, when done carefully, mimic natural processes, clearing vegetation without incurring impacts, such as road building and soil compaction, that logging brings.

The timber industry and its supporters, however, have other ideas. Burning alone won’t do the job, says J. Steven Worthley, a member of the Tulare County Board of Supervisors and attorney who has represented local sawmills. The buildup of unnaturally dense, dry vegetation in and around the sequoia groves is so extensive that mechanical harvesting is needed before prescribed burning can be undertaken, he says. And, he’s quick to add, there’s another advantage to the chain saw approach: logging to thin fire-prone thickets and to remove small trees could generate a million board feet of timber and help keep the local timber industry alive.

This controversy over fire is a microcosm of the tempest raging throughout the West, and it promises to dominate the debate over a long-term management plan for the new monument. Sequoia National Forest Supervisor Art Gaffrey, whose staff has three years to complete the plan, has done nothing to quell the storm.

Although the president’s proclamation removes the monument from the commercial timber base, it does not prohibit commercial timber sales, Gaffrey insists. The Forest Service is free to use any activity that protects “the objects of interest” and contributes to “the betterment of the monument,” he says.

“All tools are available,” Gaffrey says. “Trees can be removed commercially.”

California Senator Dianne Feinstein has provided potential funding through a $2.4 million addition to this year’s Interior Appropriations bill earmarked for fuel reduction activities in the sequoia monument. It specifically directs the Forest Service to give local timber companies priority in awarding the work, which Feinstein says will compensate for the economic harm caused by designation of the national monument.

This timber industry “coddling” does not surprise Litton. After battling federal officials over a dam proposed for the Grand Canyon, a Disney resort planned for Mineral King in the Sierra and opposition to creating Redwood National Park, Litton, a legendary environmental activist, has come to expect the worst. The way the Forest Service has managed the giant sequoias in the past inspires no hope for the future, he says.

Chris Wood, senior policy aide to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, promises the “cut it to save it” mentality will not be used at the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The agency intends to manage the area as a fire-adapted ecosystem, not a forest that needs to be logged to prevent fire. “This is a very special place—some of the most ecologically significant land found anywhere in America,” Wood says. “We welcome the opportunity to expand the Forest Service portfolio to include sequoia preservation.”

One-third of the seventy-five giant sequoia groves that remain in North America are protected in national parks. The other two-thirds are on Sequoia National Forest land. Although private forest owners began logging sequoias in the 1890s, the Forest Service avoided them, apparently out of respect for their size, beauty and antiquity.

The agency abandoned that long-standing policy in the early 1980s, when Sequoia National Forest officials quietly initiated commercial logging of its signature trees. In addition to dropping and trucking out sequoias, they raided more than 1,000 acres of the pines and firs, incense cedars and dogwoods that comprise a crucial part of the sequoia ecosystem. Several of the giants left in forlorn isolation have fallen, the victims of wind.

Forest Service officials said at the time that all of the logging was done for the good of the sequoia groves. The pines and firs were crowding out young giant sequoias and posed a wildfire threat. They called the clear-cutting, bulldozing and ground churning “grove enhancement.”

In light of these practices, conservationists launched a bitter legal battle that eventually resulted in a 1990 out-of-court settlement. In 1992, President Bush sanctified the agreement by banning the logging of most giant sequoia trees and ordering a 500-foot buffer around individual groves.

Not satisfied with those safeguards, Fontaine, Litton and others began developing a sequoia preserve proposal to permanently protect and restore the sequoia ecosystem. When legislation failed in 1994, Representative George Brown, a California Democrat, introduced the Sequoia Ecosystem and Recreation Preserve Act in 1995, 1997 and 1999. All those efforts failed, too.

Despite these legislative disappointments, Brown’s bill provided the basis for Clinton’s national monument. Forest Service officials used it and a petition developed by the Natural Resources Defense Council to draft the proposal that the president eventually signed. Standing in a grove of sequoias near a tributary to the Kern River, Clinton said the new monument “is not about locking up lands” but “freeing them up for all Americans and for all time.”

It was a beautiful speech, says Litton, “one of the best sermons I ever heard. And it doesn’t mean a thing.”

But Fontaine remains optimistic. Despite its limitations, the president’s proclamation serves notice to the nation that the sequoia groves are precious. It gives conservationists the tools to protect them in the future. “It’s up to us to use the tools,” he says. “You never win a victory forever. You win a little, and you just have to keep working.”

Like Fontaine, Litton is not about to quit. Driving slowly away from the Four Horsemen, he glances back at the isolated grove and then up the slope to a sequoia towering on the ridge. The late August sun flashes off the back of a golden eagle preening in the tree’s broken-off top. Litton watches it intently, a determination in his steel blue eyes.

“We’ve got to save what’s left,” he says, shifting the Dodge into low gear for the steep climb ahead.