In Oregon, a Push to Protect Rain Forest Before Bush Takes Office Biologists call the Siskiyou region’s diversity a critical link in evolutionary chain. State’s timber interests pin hopes on GOP White House.

Some 200 million years ago, the Pacific sea floor shoved itself beneath the coastal plate, leaving exposed a primeval ocean under a crust of magnesium and iron. Rough shrubs grew. Over the years, hardy cedar and spruce pushed down roots.

Today, the serpentine slopes and forested valleys of the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon are a rare window into the ancient past. Some wildflower and tree species trace their roots back further than anything in the U.S. West.

As the Clinton administration moves into its final weeks, conservationists have launched a last-minute push to get 1 million acres of the Siskiyou region declared a national monument, protecting one of the most diverse coniferous rain forests in the world from a likely new push for logging and mining under the Bush administration.

Across the country, environmental groups are zeroing in on more than a dozen potential new monuments, from Alabama to Idaho, to supplement the 11 President Clinton has declared since 1993. Top priority is on permanent protection for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, threatened with oil drilling.

But such groups as the World Wildlife Fund say it is the Siskiyou region on the Oregon-California border, with 14 wild rivers tumbling through forested canyons and more than 280 plants unknown anywhere else on Earth, that is the next priority.

“It’s the Noah’s Ark gene pool of the West,” said longtime outfitter Dave Willis. “And so far, it has had only piecemeal protection.”

Biologists say the region’s unique botanical diversity, with continuous vegetation over a span of 70 million years, represents a critical link in the evolutionary chain. That link, conservationists say, is threatened with plans to log 24 million board feet of timber a year and mining claims that could transfer thousands of acres of public forest into private hands for open-pit mining.

Yet the push by environmental groups to expand the Siskiyou wilderness comes just as the crippled southern Oregon timber industry is seeing, with the advent of a Republican administration, a potential end to more than a decade of disaster.

The 27 sawmills that once dotted the Illinois River valley have shrunk to just two as logging cutbacks have closed off all but 7% of the Siskiyou National Forest to timber harvests.

“Right now, we have zero federal timber under contract. There’s a high probability that if this monument was created, we would cease to manufacture lumber,” said Link Phillippi of Rough and Ready Lumber, whose $6-million payroll is one of the only engines left in Cave Junction.

“After 150 years of natural resource production, they still think we’re beautiful enough to make a monument out of,” said Ron Smith of the Oregonians for Responsible Conservation Alliance, which is fighting the monument. “Do you think the federal government is going to take better care of this place than the people who live here and raise their kids here?”

In the end, the debate about the proposed Siskiyou Wild Rivers monument is the same debate that is playing out across the Northwest: Are the disappearing old-growth forests, seen by many scientists as a bedrock of biodiversity upon which human survival depends, able to survive further political compromise? Do they belong to the miners and loggers who have coexisted with them for generations, or to the Earth itself? Is there a new economy that can transform dying timber towns into havens of eco-tourism and sustainable wood product production?

Cave Junction was never an economic powerhouse; gold miners in the 1850s launched the first outposts, and today the Illinois Valley is a motley mix of liberal new-agers, flannel-shirted loggers, California retirees and backwoods gold miners.

Supporters of the monument say that protecting the wilderness and its stunning, salmon-bearing rivers will bring flocks of tourists, with an estimated 6.5% increase in new visitor spending. The 143 logging jobs lost could be offset by work restoring damaged watersheds, they say.

But there is skepticism. Nearby Crescent City hardly boomed with the opening of Redwood National Park. More than 179,850 acres of the Siskiyous were protected as the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in the 1960s and 1970s, notes miner Walt Freeman, “and they promised then the mill jobs would be replaced by tourism jobs. Well, we’re still waiting for the first of those jobs to show up.”

On the other hand, Josephine County in October posted its lowest unemployment figure in 35 years: a 5.4% jobless rate, with substantial new growth in the service industry. The transition, many believe, is already underway.

The problem with logging and mining the remaining pristine forests, says William Mondale, the brother of the former Democratic presidential candidate who gave up his job as a labor organizer in Washington, D.C., for a cabin in the Illinois Valley, is that there is never enough wood, never enough gold.

“If we stood out of the way, and if everybody just stood back and said, ‘Go!’--does anybody believe anything would be left?” Mondale asked. “And if everything went, tell me then: Where are the jobs?”

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A narrow trail winds up near Babyfoot Lake, and Romain Cooper, a biologist for the Siskiyou Project, pauses to point out why there is no more diverse coniferous forest in the world, save perhaps small tracts in the Himalayas.

Sadler oak, Jeffrey pine, Brewer’s spruce, incense cedar, Port Orford cedar, Douglas fir, sugar pine, red fir, white fir.

On the red-rocked slopes nearby, untouched by the glaciers that scoured most of the nation, low flowering plants such as the Kalmiopsis leachiana, an ancient relation of the rhododendron, and the tubular, insect-eating cobra lily date well before the Ice Age.

Incredibly, the Siskiyou region is home to the Alaska yellow cedar from the Arctic forest and the California desert manzanita. Plants from the Great Basin and the Pacific Coast have all found niches and prospered.

“About three years ago, me and several colleagues tried to catalog biodiversity across the North American continent and put it in a global context,” said Dominick DellaSala of the World Wildlife Fund. “What we found were a handful of eco-regions across the continent that were truly outstanding on a global scale. The Klamath-Siskiyou region was one of them.”

Clinton already has imposed some protection in a new roadless area policy that will exempt much of the Siskiyou from new road building and logging.

But Barbara Ullian, conservation director for the Siskiyou Project, worries that policy will do nothing to stop hundreds of new mining claims to be staked throughout the forest.

Already, rundown shacks and large piles of gravel mark mining claims staked across the region. The most controversial is Freeman’s claims totaling more than 4,000 acres, above Rough and Ready Creek, a prime botanical resource area. His company, Nicore Inc., proposes to extract 40,000 tons a year of nickel laterite to make stainless steel.

Ullian and others fear the mine would devastate salmon in the creek and the fragile plants along its banks. The U.S. Forest Service this year approved the plan, first submitted in 1992, but with conditions that will require him to spend more than $1 million to first prove that he can profitably extract the ore.

“They have subjected me to a war of attrition: delays, stalling, environmental impact statements. They figured I would run out of money and run out of heart, and they would win by default,” Freeman said. “If people knew how their money was being squandered by these federal bureaucrats, there’d be open rebellion in the streets. And now they say this monument proposal isn’t going to affect life in the Illinois Valley. Well, that’s a crock.”

Lou Gold, a former Illinois college professor, was another who came to the Siskiyous and never left. For much of the last decade, he has spent his summers on the face of Bald Mountain. He traveled in the winters with a slide show of the ancient forest and the vision he had that it was his life’s work to protect it.

The monument plan forced him out of retirement when he looked at a map of it and saw--right in the middle--the mountain he lived on for much of his youth.

“There’s a Native American story that says you go up on the mountain and you scream and you cry for a vision, and it comes out, and you spend the rest of your life trying to figure it out,” Gold said. “So that’s what happened. Eighteen years later, I got the other piece.”