Headwaters Forest

The tone and content of Alexander Cockburn's Aug. 2 Column Left inevitably leads one to the conclusion that he couldn't stand the objectivity of Times reporter Frank Clifford's article (July 25) on the effort to resolve the controversy surrounding the Headwaters forest in Northern California. For starters, and as the false and misleading crux of his entire premise, he misidentifies the Headwaters forest. Cockburn should have known that the same Environmental Protection Information Center that he twice mentions in 1990 defined the Headwaters forest, in its own ballot initiative, as approximately 3,000 acres.

John A. Campbell, 67, the mayor of Fortuna, Calif., and a former president of the Pacific Lumber Co. during a monumental battle between loggers and environmentalists, died of cancer Oct. 19 at his Fortuna home. Born in 1942 in Leura, New South Wales, Australia, Campbell served in that country's army before touring Europe and landing in New York in the early 1960s. He worked at the Australian Consulate in 1963 and 1964 before heading west. Campbell started working for Pacific Lumber in 1969 as a sales trainee and rose through the ranks to become president in 1989, three years after the Maxxam Co. of Houston acquired the logging firm and the surrounding Headwaters Forest.

California spared the world's largest privately held stand of ancient redwoods from the logger's ax Saturday, as Gov. Pete Wilson signed over the state's half of a $500-million deal to buy the Headwaters Forest. "I am convinced that what we are doing will stand the test of time and nature, knock on wood," Wilson said. Under the agreement--widely condemned by environmentalists--Pacific Lumber Co.

The Schwarzenegger administration is poised to allow financially troubled Pacific Lumber Co. to remove special habitat protections on more than 2,000 acres covered by a historic agreement creating the Headwaters Preserve of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County. In exchange, Pacific Lumber has proposed placing the environmental restrictions on an equivalent amount of its land that company and wildlife officials say has superior conservation value.

Federal and state officials said Friday that they have reached agreement with a major corporate landowner on a plan that will allow logging in a nearly 200,000-acre swath of Northern California while preserving some of the most environmentally sensitive acres in the Headwaters Forest.

Four protesters, including a 15-year-old youth. were arrested Saturday near the Pacific Lumber Co. Owl Creek site--bringing the arrest toll to more than 1,000, said Humboldt County Sheriff's Sgt. Pete Cirabellini. He said many protesters have climbed trees and are out of reach of deputies. Those being arrested have been trying to bring in food and other supplies to the tree perchers, Cirabellini said.

The state Board of Forestry, acting to preserve the largest stand of California redwoods remaining in private hands, rejected plans Wednesday by the Pacific Lumber Co. to begin logging the Headwaters Forest. By a vote of 5 to 3, the board ruled that plans to harvest 564 acres of the remote Northern California forest would seriously endanger the marbled murrelet, a rare fishing bird found only in the Headwaters Forest and two other regions of the coast.

A Bush administration decision to limit wilderness protection on federal land could imperil several sensitive sites in California -- including the Headwaters Forest Reserve, a grove of giant redwoods purchased by the state and federal governments for $480 million in 1999. The administration spelled out its new policy in an April settlement with the state of Utah. In a strongly worded letter to Interior Secretary Gale A.

Pacific Lumber Co. has told state forestry regulators that it intends to halt a five-year self-imposed moratorium on logging in Northern California's Headwaters Forest, the world's largest remaining privately owned old-growth redwood grove. Environmentalists immediately moved to block the company's bid to return to the 3,000-acre grove in southern Humboldt County, which has been the focus of a long, bitter environmental battle.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday proposed a flurry of almost $400 million in environmental spending initiatives, including $130 million to help buy the 7,500-acre Headwaters Forest, the largest tract of old-growth redwoods not in government hands. The forest's owner, Pacific Lumber Co., hailed the governor's proposal, saying in a statement that "permanent protection of the Headwaters Forest . . . would be significantly advanced" by the $130-million appropriation.

Jason Wilson was just 21 when a Lakota elder gave him a spirit name. Wilson, she said, was destined to carry a heavy weight. He would need the medicine of the name she offered, she told him, "to carry that weight in a good way, a strong way and as far as it needs to be carried." Three years later, on a September day in 1998, the bearded redhead from Missouri lay in a fetal curl on the floor of a Humboldt County forest, rocking and sobbing in the duff.

Re "Bankruptcy Threat With an Edge," Jan. 25: Perhaps Pacific Lumber Co. is "running out of logs" because timber companies such as Pacific Lumber have already deforested the vast majority of virgin forest in the United States. Permits to cut protected stands should not be issued. Do we want to silt more streams, create more flooding and lose the last of our first-generation forests? To halt financial losses, Pacific Lumber should implement more sustainable business practices (i.e. don't clear-cut everything in sight)

To the dismay of North Coast environmentalists and California lawmakers, a timber firm is attempting to alter key provisions of an agreement that was the cornerstone of a historic deal protecting the Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County. Pacific Lumber wants to revise the conservation plan in part so it can push logging closer to several of the rivers and tributaries that cut through its 217,000 acres.

The former director of the California Department of Forestry, bolstering a civil fraud case against Pacific Lumber Co., says he would have withheld approval for the $480-million Headwaters forest deal in 1999 had he known then that the firm had submitted false data on the danger of landslides from its logging operations.

A Bush administration decision to limit wilderness protection on federal land could imperil several sensitive sites in California -- including the Headwaters Forest Reserve, a grove of giant redwoods purchased by the state and federal governments for $480 million in 1999. The administration spelled out its new policy in an April settlement with the state of Utah. In a strongly worded letter to Interior Secretary Gale A.

New plans to cut trees in Northern California's redwood country are reigniting the controversy surrounding the Headwaters Forest Preserve, the subject of a $480-million state and federal acquisition in 1999. A state senator who helped draft the deal says that plans by Pacific Lumber Co. violate terms of the pact that extended protection to areas of the forest that are still owned by the logging firm.

In the first environmental test of his new Administration, Gov.-elect Pete Wilson will seek to preserve the Headwaters Forest in Northern California, the largest stand of ancient redwoods remaining in private hands, his office said Thursday. Siding with environmentalists who want to save the redwoods, Wilson will urge the state Board of Forestry to reject plans for logging two parcels of the 3,000-acre forest in Humboldt County, according to communications director Otto Bos.

Four months after announcing a deal to save the ancient redwood core of the Headwaters Forest in Northern California, state and federal officials have been unable to satisfy the demands of Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider who took control of the forest 11 years ago. Hope is fading that negotiations to acquire 7,500 acres of old growth redwoods and adjacent forest near Eureka from Hurwitz's Pacific Lumber Co.

A logging company must monitor stream quality before cutting an area in a 705-acre parcel surrounded by the Headwaters Forest Reserve. Pacific Lumber Co. and Scotia Pacific Lumber Co. LLC had appealed to the state Water Resources Control Board to stay a monitoring order by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.

With an eleventh-hour assist from Hollywood, two environmental groups posted a $250,000 bond Wednesday required to block logging on a tract of unprotected redwoods in the Headwaters Forest near Eureka. A judge had given the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Information Center until Wednesday to come up with the money, intended to offset income losses that may be suffered by the company that sought to log about half of the 1,000-acre tract.