Forestland Protection
   Bark and Bite
Lane County's Forest Watchdogs

Four hundred people jammed the hearing room in the Lane County Courthouse. Some carried signs. Many offered their opinions on the proceedings without bothering to testify.

This was the battleground over the future of Lane County's, and Oregon's, private forestlands.

Speaker after speaker denounced the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) and its policy requiring the protection of forestland from being divided and developed for large-lot homesites.

Then a mild-mannered man in his early 60s stepped up to the microphone to testify to the Lane County Commission and the room became very quiet.

The year was 1984. The man was Cliff Lamb, a retired teacher who owned and managed more than 200 acres of forestland from his house south of Eugene. Many people in that room hated Cliff Lamb—some enough to leave anonymous threats on his home phone.

The threats, insults, and animosity had no effect on Cliff Lamb. He remained consistently friendly, earnest, and utterly committed. Cliff loved Oregon's forests and had made it a personal crusade to save them from what he called "division and development." By the time of the hearing he had collaborated with 1000 Friends of Oregon's staff and volunteer attorneys on several precedent-setting cases, all entitled Lamb v. Lane County.

"Overpowering Bigness:" While Oregonians widely appreciate the state's productive farmland, many take Oregon's forestlands for granted. That is not the reaction of most newcomers. When Gifford Pinchot, founder of the National Forest system, toured the coastal forests of the Northwest in 1897, he described them as "super magnificent. . . .The overpowering sense of bigness which emanated from that gigantic forest I can never forget."

Pinchot was overwhelmed by the awesome productivity of these forestlands, which can produce two or three times the amount of wood fiber needed to be classified as "prime" by the federal government. But Pinchot knew the magnificence of the Northwest's forests would not ensure their survival any more than it had protected the hardwood forests of the Midwest. By the 1970s Oregon was losing 14,000 acres of forestland each year to urban sprawl and other uses.

To conserve Oregon's private forestlands, LCDC adopted Goal 4 ("Forest Lands") in 1974. In 1982 and 1983 the commission considered regulations to give Goal 4 some teeth. But the resulting controversy led them to sidestep the big issues: land divisions and new houses. As a result, they had no clear basis for evaluating whether the various local plans and regulations they reviewed during the 1980s satisfied Goal 4.

Meanwhile, Cliff Lamb—along with other activists like Edna McDowell of Benton County—testified repeatedly at local government hearings to argue against allowing more homes and land divisions. They presented research showing that smaller parcels were managed less than large ones, and that forest parcels with houses did not benefit from better management than similar parcels without houses. In fact, many landowners managed their forest lands without living on, or even near them—including Cliff, who lived twenty miles from most of his land.

Not only do houses and small parcels convert productive forestland into residential lots, but they also lead to lawsuits over the use of sprays, conflicts over the contamination of surface streams used for drinking water, and—last but not least—fires and more forest fires.

Delayed, But Not Denied: Cliff Lamb's 1984 testimony was in vain. The County Commission approved strict zoning for more than 690,000 acres held by timber companies, but over Cliff's objections it zoned 125,000 acres of mostly prime forestland for large-lot residential use, in the guise of "woodlots."

However, Cliff's earlier appeals had established powerful legal precedents. In 1988, 1000 Friends rode these precedents to victory when the Oregon Supreme Court struck down LCDC's approval of Lane County's plan allowing dwellings and land divisions in its forest zones.

Research commissioned by the Legislature in 1989 vindicated 1000 Friends' contention that most small forestland lots were managed very little or not at all.

Prodded by the Supreme Court decision and research results, and with the support of the Board of Forestry, LCDC finally adopted new rules for forestlands in 1991. These rules codified many of the theories and standards 1000 Friends and its allies had worked to establish. In response, Lane County was obliged to increase its protection of private forestlands from "division and development."

But the battle for Lane County's forestlands was not over. The 1993 Legislature undid some of the new protections, opening up thousands of acres of highly productive forests for residential development. Then, during the late 1990s, the Lane County Commission began the process of amending its F-1 forest zone to allow houses where they had previously been off limits.

Forest Firestorm: The Eugene Register-Guard editorialized against the change. The Cottage Grove Sentinel, citing the infrastructure costs, fire risks, and impacts on timber jobs associated with "more far-flung rural development," wrote, "Just why the county is in favor of allowing homes on F-1 land is something of a mystery."

Still, the County Commission pushed on. Before the hearing on November 24, 1998, the change to the F-1 zone was described as a "done deal." As in 1984, the hearing room was packed. But this time the county's effort encountered what the Register Guard called a "firestorm of opposition from land use watchdog groups," led by the new group LandWatch Lane County. Retreating, the County Commission postponed action for several months.

The climactic hearing came on March 10, 1999. The County Commission voted 3-2 to reject the proposed change. Linda Pauly, president of LandWatch and a former neighbor of Cliff Lamb's, described the hearing as a "defining moment"-both for her new organization and for the new perspective toward forestlands in Lane County.

Cliff Lamb died in October 1998. But he lived long enough to see his work taken up by a whole new generation of citizens who shared his love for Oregon's forestlands.

    Cliff Lamb