PALCO.

The acronym for the Pacific Lumber Company, in big green letters on a white no trespassing sign, looms ominously just past the turnoff for Kristi Wrigley’s house. The main road continues up a slope beyond the sign, but only after a locked gate makes it impossible to drive farther. Wrigley’s driveway angles to the right, briefly threads through a patch of dark redwood forest and then comes into the open as it drops down to her house.

The home is perched on a small bluff above an orchard of apple trees. Beyond the orchard, screened from sight by thick vegetation, is the North Fork Elk River. In the past, the river was a dependable source of drinking and irrigation water—and a delightful place for kids to swim and fish. But that has all changed. For six to seven months of the year, the water is too choked with dirt to be fit to drink, and the swimming holes have filled with sediment and disappeared. The river is essentially an extension of Pacific Lumber’s timberlands—the load of organic debris it carries during the long, rainy winters on California’s north coast comes almost entirely from company clear-cuts and logging roads. The watershed above, once held in place by an old-growth redwood forest, is literally sailing by Wrigley’s property one soil particle at a time.

Wrigley drives up, slightly late for her appointment. She springs out of her car and, without so much as a hello, immediately starts talking. “I’m so goddamned angry. I’m labeled a fanatic. Well, my god, my property is flooded. No, I’m not a fanatic. I’m aware of the water rights that go with my land. In here,” she says, pointing to her head, “is an understanding of what it was like here when I was young and when my kids were young. And in here,” tapping her head again, “is an understanding of what happened here in the nineties.”

What happened was that Pacific Lumber greatly accelerated the rate at which it was pulling timber off the land upstream of Wrigley’s twenty-five-acre property. From 1974 to 1987, the company logged an average of seventy-two acres per year of the 14,000-acre North Fork Elk River watershed, located a few miles southeast of the town of Eureka, the seat of Humboldt County. Over the next ten years, from 1987 to 1997, the rate of logging jumped sevenfold—to 504 acres per year. The increased cut produced a slew of violations of state logging regulations—from 1990 to 1997, the California department of forestry issued sixty-four violation notices to the company regarding its logging operations in the North Fork. The cutting frenzy also unleashed massive amounts of sediment into the river. From 1994 to 1997, landslides in freshly cut areas of the watershed bled sediment into the North Fork at a rate thirteen times greater than landslides in parts of the watershed that hadn’t seen cutting in fifteen years or more. The total amount of sediment deposited in the river during that period was a whopping 84,000 cubic yards㭛 percent of which came from harvested areas and logging roads.

DIRTY SHOWERS

It was Wrigley’s mother who first noticed something wrong with the water. “She said the coffee tasted terrible. Then she said the water did, too. And we realized she was right. It tasted like dirt. We couldn’t believe it because we had always had really good water.” It was about that same time, the early nineties, that Wrigley and her family started noticing something else—taking a shower didn’t make them clean. “The water left us messy. We’d have grit on us.”

Wrigley goes onto a sun deck that wraps around two sides of her house and overlooks the orchard. Many of the apple trees are showing yellow leaves, which doesn’t seem surprising given that it’s late October. But Wrigley says, “The yellow trees are sick. The leaves should still be green and big.” The orchard has the misfortune of being in the first floodplain down from Pacific Lumber’s land. What that has meant is more flooding in the orchard than Wrigley has ever seen. She said that in the wet winters of 1995㫸 and 1996㫹, floods washed across the orchard half-a-dozen times each season. “I can only remember three other times when the orchard flooded at all,” says fifty-five-year-old Wrigley, who grew up on the property.

Wrigley, who works for the California Department of Transportation, also runs the family apple business. She says the flooding has hurt her production. “It used to be that in a normal bad year, we’d have 900 boxes of Woltana’s [a local variety] to sell. Now a normal bad year is 250 boxes. This year, which has been pretty good, we’ll be lucky to get 600 boxes. It should be 1,400.”

Wrigley pauses, and for a moment this tough, energetic woman looks deeply weary. Pacific Lumber, which has trucked in water under state order to Wrigley and her neighbors since 1999, insists that its logging and roads have not been a major cause of the increased flooding. The company has offered no compensation for the damage to property values—which is why Wrigley and twenty-two of her neighbors are suing.

She’s currently trying to refinance her home loan, but her bank has indicated approval is unlikely because of her water problems. Shaking her head she says, “you might as well be in the middle of Nevada if you can’t have your own water.”

ONE MAN’S GREED

When Wrigley says “PL,” she’s talking about the company before it was seized by Texas financier Charles Hurwitz in a hostile takeover in 1985. “That’s MAXXAM,” Wrigley says, using the name of Pacific Lumber’s parent corporation. “I won’t call them PL. It’s unfair to the employees who worked for the old company.”

The pre-Hurwitz Pacific Lumber Company was remarkable in that it had a no clear-cut policy that dated back decades—a policy that stemmed in part from a recognition that the soils in the region eroded easily. As a result, in the mid-1980s the company still had a large standing inventory of redwood trees—among the most commercially valuable of all conifer species—on its 211,000 acres. It was an inviting target for Hurwitz, who, along with Michael Milken, was heavily involved in the savings and loan scandal that was raging. Using $900 million in junk bonds, Hurwitz took control of a company estimated at the time to be worth more than $2 billion. He reinstituted clear-cutting and more than doubled the annual cut, single-handedly creating one of the longest-running, most highly publicized environmental controversies in memory. Julia Butterfly Hill and her two-year occupancy of a redwood tree named Luna, the epic battle for a 3,000-acre stand of virgin redwoods known as the Headwaters Grove, the burying of the tiny town of Stafford in a debris flow that roared down from Pacific Lumber land on New Year’s Day 1997, the tragic death of forest activist David “Gypsy” Chain, whose skull was crushed in September 1998 by a redwood felled by an angry logger—none of it would have happened without Hurwitz. Corporate robber to critics of the takeover, Darth Vader to environmentalists, Hurwitz has changed Humboldt County—the heart of Northern California’s redwood belt—for decades to come.

“It’s almost enough to break your heart what one man’s greed can do,” says Eureka attorney Bill Bertain, a vehement Hurwitz opponent and the lawyer representing Wrigley and the other property owners.

The battle against Hurwitz seemed to come to a head in March 1999, when, after more than a decade of protests and lawsuits, the federal government and the state of California negotiated a $480 million purchase of old-growth redwoods—including the famous Headwaters Grove. The deal rankled many, not least because it was essentially an out-of-court settlement of litigation filed by environmentalists to protect the marbled murrelet, a sea bird that nests in old-growth redwood forests. Because the bird was a federal threatened species, the Endangered Species Act was bringing Hurwitz’s logging of old-growth redwood to a screeching halt. “We paid him for redwoods that he couldn’t legally cut,” Bertain said.

Perhaps. But as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, pointed out, if the act was weakened by the Newt Gingrich Congress—or by some future Congress—there might be nothing to protect Headwaters and associated groves from the chain saw. Others also argued that there was value in having what became the 7,500-acre Headwaters Forest Preserve—which includes the main grove and associated stands—open to the public rather than marooned on Pacific Lumber’s land. “Fifty years from now, no one will remember how much it cost,” one proponent said after the deal was signed.

THE FIGHT GOES ON

A major purpose of the Headwaters agreement was to end the redwood wars that the Hurwitz takeover started. In that regard, the agreement has so far proven less than a success. Two and a half years after the deal was signed, controversy over Pacific Lumber’s logging practices continues. The simmering disputes include:

Disagreement about the extent to which the company can cut in areas set aside for endangered wildlife.

As part of the Headwaters deal, Pacific Lumber agreed to restrictions laid out in a document called the Habitat Conservation Plan, which governs logging on the company’s holdings for the next fifty years. The plan, which is tougher than California logging regulations, is designed to allow for the harvest of a profitable amount of timber and at the same time protect imperiled species such as the murrelet and coho salmon. A source of contention is over whether the company can cut within any portion of twelve areas on its land that were set aside as murrelet habitat. These areas, dubbed “lesser cathedrals” because they are much smaller than the Headwaters Grove, include scattered stands of both old-growth and second-growth redwood.

As of late November, the department of forestry was still reviewing a Pacific Lumber proposal to thin trees on seventy-six acres in Allen Creek, located a few miles southeast of the Headwaters preserve and known to harbor murrelets.

Pacific Lumber has argued that the Habitat Conservation Plan bans only “detrimental” logging in murrelet habitat and that the thinning the company wants to do will let in more light and water, thereby reducing the amount of time for uncut trees to grow into the giants that the bird prefers to nest in. “The whole idea here is that this is a win-win,” said Jared G. Carter, the company’s executive vice president and general counsel. “In thirty years, those trees that were left behind would be a whole lot bigger.” Federal and state biologists are skeptical, saying that opening the forest could let in harsh winds and make young murrelets vulnerable to predators, such as crows and ravens. They also say that accelerated forest growth might not benefit murrelets until after the fifty-year agreement expires and Pacific Lumber can cut as it sees fit.

The proposed logging has raised the ire of state Senator Byron Sher, a Democrat, who helped write conditions governing the state’s $130 million contribution to the Headwaters deal. Sher, in an October 1 letter to the department of forestry, said state legislation tied to the Headwaters deal, along with a state contract relating to enforcement of the legislation, makes it clear that there is “an unequivocal prohibition against any timber harvesting operations for fifty years” within the twelve protected areas.

Disagreement about the extent to which Pacific Lumber should be restrained from logging to protect water quality.

The company’s stand on this question is simple: the Headwaters agreement allows it to cut 176 million board feet of timber a year on its 211,000 acres. (In comparison, the nearby Six Rivers National Forest, which covers 1 million acres, has an annual cut of 20 million board feet.)

The problem, according to critics of the deal, is that that level of cutting is much too high given the damage done over the past fifteen years of intensive logging—not to mention the decades of logging before that. A score of rivers along California’s north coast, including several on Pacific Lumber land, are designated as sediment-impaired under the Clean Water Act, due primarily to logging. Many of these rivers are out of compliance, or close to being out of compliance, with state basin plans designed to limit the amount of human-caused sediment that is discharged into waterways. As Leslie Reid, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Redwood Sciences Laboratory in Arcata, put it, “If the [sediment] threshold is 20 percent [above natural background levels], and you’re already at 19 percent, there’s not a heck of a lot you can do.”

But because of cutting specified in the Headwaters deal, Pacific Lumber has argued that it isn’t required to comply with the basin plans—a debatable contention given that the Habitat Conservation Plan states that “all activities undertaken pursuant to this agreement must be in compliance with all applicable state laws and regulations.”

Conflict has been exacerbated by the fact that the Headwaters agreement did not place any limits on the rates of logging that can take place in discrete watersheds on Pacific Lumber land. This has led to some bizarre disconnects. Reid, for example, has calculated that the North Fork Elk River watershed (where Wrigley lives) was hit so hard by logging in the nineties that no more than thirty-nine acres—.3 percent of the watershed—should be logged per year for the foreseeable future. There are Pacific Lumber logging plans awaiting department of forestry approval that call for logging 1,700 acres—almost 12 percent of the watershed—in as little as one year. That’s a rate of logging as much as forty times greater than Reid, one of the world’s foremost experts on the cumulative impacts of logging, says the watershed can handle.

The issue of water quality may prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the Headwaters deal, and consequently, of Pacific Lumber’s future operations. In October, the California Water Quality Control Board, the authority for the state’s nine regional water quality boards, ordered the company for the first time to monitor sediment levels downstream of a logging project. Pacific Lumber’s critics hope the order is the first step toward forcing the company to adhere to limits on the amount of sediment individual harvesting operations can dump into streams. Within a month of the order’s issuance, Pacific Lumber filed suit, arguing that the board had overstepped its authority.

A DEMOCRACY FOR THE RICH

If the company was forced to limit sediment discharages, it would be fine with Ralph Kraus, who lives just down the road from Wrigley and, like her, is one of the parties to the suit that’s been filed against the company. But it wouldn’t change the fact that a lot of damage has already been done. Proof of that is easy to obtain. All Kraus has to do is take a piece of rebar, go out to the North Fork Elk River, lay the rebar on the riverbed and press down. “It goes down six to eight feet before you hit the old riverbed,” he says. “That’s how much sediment’s in there.”

A river that has had its bottom raised six to eight feet is going to flood a lot more for the simple reason that its channel carrying capacity has been reduced. Kraus has proof of that, too. “It used to be when we’d get a big storm that it would take an hour and a half before the road [that passes in front of their house] would flood. Now it floods in about half an hour.”

Kraus and his wife, Nona, have a serene air about them despite their difficulties with Pacific Lumber. Perhaps it’s the wisdom that comes with age (they’re both in their early seventies). Or perhaps it’s an inner strength they developed as they saw their daughter Edith through a battle with lung cancer. Whatever it is, they are a contrast to Wrigley, who is being driven damn near crazy by her corporate neighbor. She’s sick of the department of forestry because it failed to adequately regulate Pacific Lumber. And she’s sick of the administration of Governor Gray Davis, the recipient of large campaign contributions from the timber industry. It’s hardly surprising that she has ceased to believe, at least in this case, that the American system protects the rights of all of its citizens.

“It’s a democracy for the rich,” she says.