ARNOLD, Calif. — The nearby sawmill has long since been demolished and you can dine on tofu with peanut sauce and a glass of Calaveras County red wine at a popular local restaurant.
But logging trucks still rumble down winding California 4. And it's hard to find anybody in this mountain community--which caters to retirees, second-home owners and tourists--who thinks cutting down trees is a sin.
"This," noted county Supervisor Merita Callaway, "is not a Sierra Club kind of town."
So it's with some surprise that little Arnold finds itself in a fight with the biggest private timberland owner in the state, Sierra Pacific Industries. The giant lumber company has begun logging a patchwork of about 50 clear-cut parcels above a local reservoir, and the town's 4,000 year-round residents are in an uproar.
Arnold's reaction is evidence of growing concern over Sierra Pacific's plans to eventually clear-cut the majority of its timber holdings, which have swelled in the last decade to 1.5 million acres in California, or about 1% of the entire state.
As a logging technique, clear-cutting has long been a hot-button issue, attracting defenders and passionate detractors. Public opposition and subsequent policy changes have greatly reduced the practice--in which virtually every tree on a piece of property is chopped down--in federal forests. But Sierra Pacific is escalating clear-cutting on its lands, most of which lie in the Sierra Nevada.
In Nevada County and Calaveras County, environmental activists are responding with protests, blocking company trucks and locking themselves to logging equipment.
Less predictably, much of Arnold--where tourism and the quality of life are increasingly important--is also fuming. Meetings about the local cuts have drawn hundreds of distraught residents. Three members of the local quilting group have even sewn a clear-cut wall hanging to rally opposition.
The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors last month fired off a letter asking the governor to reexamine earlier state approval of the Arnold cuts. The county water district is worried that logging runoff will flow into the reservoir, White Pines Lake.
"No one likes the idea. Everyone is in shock it's approved," said Bob Chok, a bed-and-breakfast owner sipping an afternoon drink in the Lube Room Saloon, a cavernous, wood-beamed bar in which hangs everything from a traffic light to a mounted deer head.
A Forest Buying Binge
Sierra Pacific, a family-owned, politically well-connected company that prefers a low profile, shows no signs of backing off. Quite the opposite.
According to figures from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the number of acres clear-cut by the Redding-based company in the southern Sierra jumped from 500 in 1995 to 8,435 last year.
In the northern reaches of the state, the company's clear-cuts went from about 1,000 acres in 1994 to nearly 15,000 acres last year.
The reasons are simple. Sierra Pacific has been on a buying binge for more than a decade, increasing its holdings to the point where it now rivals media mogul Ted Turner as the largest private landowner in the nation. At the same time, the company has decided that clear-cutting is the best way to produce wood for its 13 sawmills.
"We can grow two to three times more wood in the long term by clear-cutting," Tom Nelson, Sierra Pacific's timberlands director, said as he bounced in a pickup truck past the first of the Arnold cuts, which will average about 18 acres each and total nearly 900 acres.
Nelson defends the company's embrace of clear-cutting, saying that much of the opposition is emotional and that the company needs to do a better job of explaining its methods to the public. By creating forest openings, he added, the company is to some extent mimicking what nature accomplishes with a fire.
Unpopular With the Public
Although foresters say properly conducted clear-cuts can be a perfectly legitimate logging practice, a good deal of the public detests them.
Consider Chinarose Flemming, a clerk at the Camp Connell General Store down the road from Arnold. Fresh clear-cuts are "hot, dry, dusty--just gross, just dirt," she said emphatically.
"Tourism," she said, "is what keeps this county alive. Without our trees we probably won't have tourism."
Even if they don't mind the battlefield-like scars of a new clear-cut, others worry about herbicides getting into watersheds. Problems go downhill, D. Dolbeare observed as he used a screwdriver to start the ignition of the beat-up, exhaust-belching pickup he uses to haul firewood.
Sierra Pacific intensively manages its clear-cuts--tilling the soil, planting pine seedlings, applying herbicides to kill unwanted plants, pruning and thinning weaker trees. In 80 years, the acreage will be cleared again.
All that, environmentalists contend, means that the lumber company is essentially establishing tree farms up and down the Sierra, ultimately diminishing the ecological, wildlife and scenic values of an enormous acreage.
