Frustration fills the room as twenty members of the Quincy Library Group gather around a table for at least their hundredth public meeting. Anger and disappointment blend with brooding as ominous as the winter storm gathering over the mountains outside.

Measuring his words to contain his temper, Michael Jackson proposes that the group hold no more meetings with the U.S. Forest Service. By noon it is done. The alliance celebrated nationwide as the model of collaboration on land use controversies has abandoned cooperation to pursue litigation.

“It’s time to have the courts take over this process—time to shift into a more combative stage,” says Jackson, coalition cofounder.

Seated next to him, cofounder Bill Coates looks shaken. But he rallies to clarify what just happened. “We’re trying to blow the whistle on a process with no end and no results,” he says. “We don’t want our time and our optimism, our energy and hopes to be wasted anymore.”

How the Quincy Library Group evolved from a rural alliance giddy with political power to this abyss is a tale of vision and commitment, politics and inflexibility. Adopted by Congress in 1998 as the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act, the program to protect 350,000 acres of national forest land from catastrophic wildfire through thinning and selective logging will continue until 2004. It’s the law. But instead of working with Forest Service officials, the Quincy Library Group will now fight them—not as it has in the past, in the woods or in this community room, but in court.

Since 1993, when they first presented their plan for a five-year demonstration program encompassing 2.4 million acres of national forest land, members of the coalition have blamed the Forest Service for the delays and obstacles that have thwarted full implementation. The issue that is pushing them over the edge is the Sierra Nevada Framework, a management plan to protect old-growth trees, wildlife and riparian areas in eleven national forests in California. In December, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey upheld the controversial plan signed by former California Regional Forester Brad Powell in the closing days of the Clinton administration.

Although Jack Blackwell, the new regional forester, has called for a full reevaluation of the framework, as long as it is in effect it kills the Quincy program by halving the acreage designated for thinning and dropping to one-tenth the lumber volume mandated under the federal bill, says Jackson. The lower levels will not demonstrate whether the experimental program is effective in reducing the threat of wildfire and protecting wildlife habitat. “It’s not what the legislation calls for, and that’s illegal,” he says, fuming.

Opponents of the Quincy program have opposed its scale and intensity from the start. The legislation allows logging and thinning on up to 70,000 acres a year for five years. Although the coalition has always presented its project in terms of acres, Forest Service officials estimate the program can legally remove 280 million board feet of timber a year.

Far too much is at risk for an experiment, says Craig Thomas, conservation director for the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, a regional environmental group. The program threatens the habitat for California spotted owls, fishers and other sensitive species. “Hitting that much ground that fast and that hard dramatically nails habitat. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for a long time,” he says.

Besides, says Thomas, the law that Jackson touts so righteously requires the demonstration project to comply with all environmental regulations and any new guidelines adopted by the Forest Service. The Sierra Nevada Framework is a new guideline. Thomas says that the framework is based on science that balances habitat protections with less intensive thinning to reduce the threat of wildfires. Instead of ignoring the language of its own legislation, the Quincy Library Group should acknowledge the most recent scientific evidence and adapt as it changes, Thomas says. But the group’s members never have. “Their tragic innate flaw is their inability to change,” he says.

QLG FOUNDATION

It was a demand for change and an extraordinary willingness to amend past practices that drew together the original members of the Quincy Library Group. Most had spent years fighting one another. When the group formed in 1993, Jackson, a self-described environmental wacko, and Coates, a flag-waving Republican, were inveterate enemies. Their conflicts were not agreements to disagree but bitter knockdown-dragouts of politically driven men with cavernous philosophical differences.

What impelled them to cooperate was a drama playing out in timber-dependent towns throughout the West. Decades of overcutting on national forests provoked court orders and shifts in public policy that caused national forest timber harvest levels to plummet, leaving lumber mills closed and rural communities floundering in a wave of unemployment.

Both Jackson, a Quincy attorney, and Coates, then a Plumas County supervisor, feared for their adopted town. They watched the annual timber cut on the Plumas National Forest drop from a 1980s annual average of 200 million board feet to 60 million board feet. Neither liked what he saw—not the threat to the timber industry, which Coates had always championed, and not the threat to the neighborhood, which Jackson had come to love. Both worried about the buildup of forest fuels and the danger of wildfire. They started meeting with Tom Nelson, a Sierra Pacific Industries forester, and a group of civic and timber industry leaders who knew the national forest free-for-all was over. They called themselves the Quincy Library Group after the only neutral gathering place they could agree on.

Their focus at first was working together for national forest management that would provide logs for local mills and protect the roadless and sensitive areas important to Jackson and other environmentalists. They began with a plan for the Plumas National Forest developed by Friends of Plumas Wilderness, a local environmental organization. This expanded to include the Lassen National Forest, which surrounds Lassen National Park, and the Sierraville District of the Tahoe National Forest just north of Lake Tahoe.

Instead of being clear-cut, trees would be logged in two-acre groups or one at a time. The larger felled trees would be hauled to local sawmills, most of them owned by Sierra Pacific, which dominates the region’s timber-dependent economy. The smaller trees and underbrush would be chipped, reducing the forest fuel ladder and creating a byproduct. The proposal established a buffer of up to 300 feet around streams. It forbade logging on about 500,000 acres of roadless and environmentally sensitive areas.

It was, at heart, a simple idea: restore the forests to the health they had before Europeans arrived. The trees and underbrush removed by logging and thinning would reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire while fueling the local timber industry. The off-limits areas would be allowed to prosper without human interference. Both the ecosystem and the rural economy would be winners.

The Forest Service response was enthusiastic. After years of taking hits from all sides, thenÐPlumas Forest Supervisor Wayne Thornton welcomed the rare unanimity. “All sides are applying equal pressure to the Forest Service but they’re singing from the same song sheet, and that’s music to my ears,” he said. But the singing didn’t last. Neither, apparently, did the agency’s enthusiasm. Two years after the alliance presented its community stability proposal to the public, little had changed in the woods. Never a patient group, its members grew irritated and increasingly shrill.

Intensifying their economic anxiety was growing concern over wildfires throughout the West. In 1994, more than 3.3 million acres burned; thirty-four firefighters died. In 1996, the wildfire total was 5.8 million acres. To protect their backyard, the Quincy group members developed a system of fuelbreaks using a Forest Service model called defensible fuel profile zones. Their emphasis on reducing the risk of forest fires struck a chord nationally. Land managers and scientists saw it as an opportunity to test the effects of reducing forest fuels on a landscape scale. Western congressional representatives saw it as a way to rally public support for logging.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Representative Wally Herger, a Republican, sponsored legislation to make the Quincy plan law, they found policymakers receptive. On July 9, 1997, stunned alliance members in Quincy tuned in C-SPAN and watched the House of Representatives pass their program 429-1. “It was a beautiful thing to behold,” says John Sheehan, coalition member and executive director of Plumas Corporation, a local economic development firm.

But for environmentalists across the nation, the fight was on. The legislation called for thinning small trees on up to 60,000 acres a year for five years and felling up to thirty-inch-diameter trees on as many as 9,000 acres a year. They mounted a furious campaign to block the plan they viewed as a subterfuge to double the logging on the three national forests.

NEW GUIDELINES

When the legislation finally passed on a 1998 appropriations rider, it included the condition that has come to haunt the Quincy program—the mandate that the group follow any new guidelines implemented during the five-year demonstration period. That has allowed the Forest Service to whittle away at the legislation’s acreage and board-foot targets, first through the environmental study adopted in August 1999 and then through the Sierra Nevada Framework, which regulates management of eleven of California’s eighteen national forests—from the Modoc in the northeast to the Sequoia near Bakersfield. New interpretations of the framework could affect the Quincy program, but for now, it is generally limited to cutting trees no larger than twenty inches in diameter and retaining a canopy cover of at least 50 percent.

This tinkering drives the Quincy Library Group crazy. Under the constraints imposed by the new standards, work on the ground will not demonstrate their program, says Jackson. And if it isn’t their program, they do not want to be held responsible. “This is an experiment that has never really been allowed,” he says.

The Quincy program is an experiment based on interim guidelines that scientists never supported as a long-term strategy, says Peter Stine, science team leader for the Sierra Nevada Framework. The new guidelines are based on studies that suggest California spotted owls need larger trees and greater canopy cover than most scientists believed in 1993. Although scientists still know little about the owl’s response to habitat manipulation, the Forest Service policy decision for managing the Sierra Nevada was to err on the side of scientific caution, Stine says.

On the ground, the difference between the Quincy plan and the Sierra Nevada Framework plan is “the difference between a meat ax and a fine scalpel,” says Thomas.

Jackson calls the framework science “stupid.” “We do not expect to be exempted from the law and didn’t ask to be exempted from the law, but we’d like to be exempted from this insanity,” he says.

Along with this argument over thinning and habitat, there is disagreement over how well the fuelbreaks work. Several built as prototypes have proved their worth in recent wildfires. When the flames racing through adjacent thickets reached the areas cleared of underbrush and small trees, the fire dropped to the ground and cooled.

But critics say the fuelbreaks will create more intense fire risk over time. By reducing the forest canopy cover, they allow flammable brush, shrubs and young trees to proliferate, eventually increasing the spread of fires. A federal district court judge agreed, ordering the Forest Service to come up with a plan for long-term maintenance of the fuelbreaks.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Although the dispute over science and scale rages, there have been some on-the-ground accomplishments. The Forest Service is quietly thinning the forest and putting up timber sales in compliance with the law. After an appallingly slow start, the work is beginning to pick up momentum. Since the five-year clock began ticking August 20, 1999, the agency has awarded contracts to reduce the fuels on 46,219 acres. That’s just over half the minimum acreage mandated by Congress during the first two years. But the thinning work projected for 2002 would double what’s already been contracted, bringing the program close to the target levels.

The Forest Service is lagging further behind on the targets for group harvests and single-tree logging. Less than 20 percent of the 18,600 acres mandated in the legislation have been completed. Agency officials have made no projections for the timber they hope to contract for cutting in 2002.

The pace of the program and its reduced scale have taken a toll on local sawmills. Several have closed in the region since the Quincy Library Group organized. The first to go was in 1996—thirty jobs at Big Valley Lumber Company’s mill in Bieber. A year ago, Sierra Pacific closed its sawmill in Loyalton, which left 180 workers without jobs. Between April 2001 and October, owner Bruce Main closed the doors of two other Big Valley Lumber mills, leaving 145 workers without jobs. The final blow came when officials of Collins Pine Company in Chester announced that their sawmill built in 1943 would close just before Christmas for the entire winter, idling 170 workers.

The permanent loss of more than 350 jobs within the Quincy program area has not devastated the economy. Unemployment rates in Lassen, Plumas and Sierra counties have dropped steadily from an average of 12.6 percent in 1993, when the proposal was conceived, to an average of 7.6 percent in 2000.

Jobs in the recreation and tourism industry have replaced the lost logging jobs, says Sheehan of the Plumas economic development firm. Although the service sector pays less than the lumber industry, the local economy shows more diversity and general health. That’s thanks, in part, to an increase in per capita earnings based on investment income from retirees, Sheehan says.

ROADLESS AREAS

With both the rural economy and the woods work puttering along despite rates slower than the Quincy coalition would like, the forest experiment may leave its most permanent mark on the region’s roadless areas. The premise of the group’s original five-year proposal was to balance increased logging in some areas with protection of 526,400 acres of roadless areas, which were vulnerable to commercial timber harvests in 1993. The group withstood several major challenges from its members to enter these off-limits areas and salvage log following forest fires.

Despite its commitment to provide environmental protections along with logs for local mills, the Quincy Library Group has left sensitive areas more vulnerable than they were before. The fate of Chips Creek, Soda Creek and other roadless areas is uncertain after 2004, when the safeguards imposed by Quincy legislation sunset. Although Senator Barbara Boxer is working on a wilderness bill to be introduced later this year, the Quincy Library Group roadless areas are not included. Environmentalists in the Quincy coalition said the group would not support wilderness status, says Pamela Flick, a spokeswoman for California Wild Heritage Campaign, which is coordinating Boxer’s proposal. Without local backing, the chances of an area showing up in a wilderness bill are nil.

Jackson and a few other coalition members support increased wilderness, but there is no longer a local organization lobbying for it. Disagreement over the Quincy plan divided Friends of Plumas Wilderness, which won creation of the Bucks Lake Wilderness in 1984. Friends of Plumas Wilderness has not met since 1995.

“We have no environmental movement in Plumas County,” says John Preschutti, a Plumas County forest activist. “The environmentalists in the QLG developed an almost cultlike view that has allowed no interaction, no dialogue.”

Still, as the Quincy Library Group prepares to pursue its objectives in court, its legacy transcends controversy. The program has influenced loggers to focus on forest health and to value what they leave in the woods. Even the group’s most outspoken critics credit it with bringing the issue of fire and forest fuel loading to the attention of the national environmental community. Ironically, the Sierra Nevada Framework reflects the alarm over wildfire sounded in Quincy.

What diminishes the coalition is its belligerence, its circle-the-wagons mentality that has made enemies of anyone who begged to differ. This, too, is part of its legacy. The vitriol that continues to vent from the Quincy Library Group is working to its detriment, says Jay Watson, California regional director for the Wilderness Society. “You can’t keep slapping people in the face and expect them to do you any favors.”

The coalition’s reputation as a model of collaboration for traditional enemies has long since been replaced by its reputation for antagonism. Some coalition members agree privately that they have paid for their dearth of human decency and excess of bravado. Today the Quincy Library Group is touted as an example of how the process shouldn’t happen.

That a group of rural adversaries could cooperate and muster the political clout to win federal legislation is inspiring to anyone who has wanted to bring change to a community. Coates credits the value of an idea that is “wholesome and healthy and bigger than we are. Whether the Quincy Library Group dies or goes forward, changes are taking place. Neither we nor our forests will ever be the same.”