Animals need old growth forests for shelter and protection. They need the ground cover that has been there for decades, able to nurture the small plants and animals that support the fragile ecosystem. Animals need a continuous stand of older growth, as survival among smaller trees with limited forage is unsustainable.

And it's not just owls that will suffer from the clearcuts. Removing trees that have been there for centuries causes tremendous erosion. Disappearance of vast root systems allows soil to run down into valleys and rivers, killing fish and destroying the water's web of life. And certainly man is affected by the clearcutting too.

No vacation-seeker would want to spend time in the barren, broken swaths of logged countryside. The loggers have turned many beautiful areas of the Pacific Northwest into ugly, bare brown-spots--almost totally devoid of life.

But the timber industry will go to incredible lengths to mask their true destructive intentions. For the strip of Highway 101 that runs through Forks, the Society of American Foresters actually publishes a brochure to guide you through a "motor tour" of the cut-down forests you pass along the way.

This bit of PR couldn't fool the most naive city-dweller. The pamphlet's first sentence reads, "It is not readily apparent to U.S. Highway 101 travelers that the logged areas all along the route are giving birth to a new generation of forests." No kidding. But it only gets better--"Although the recently logged areas will be unattractive for a time, new trees are growing rapidly." Well, not exactly. I could drive down that road every day for the rest of my life and it would still look like Mt. St. Helens had erupted in the next field over.

But in the end, the whole issue comes down to politics and economics. In a quest to woo voters from the rural Northwest, conservative politicians portray the issue as jobs versus the environment, security versus the owl. The move is on to water down the Endangered Species Act in order to allow the timber industry to retain current employment levels and log the spotted owl into extinction.

As reported in The New York Times on Tuesday, some of the small lumber mills in Forks have been forced to close. The town's treasurer and clerk said, "There's a lot of timber here, but it can't be harvested because of government regulation," under the Endangered Species Act.

"Save jobs, shoot an environmentalist"--grafitti scrawled inside a bathroom at an Oregon campground--thus came as no surprise.

And comments from a campground worker at a national park in Oregon were not that out of the ordinary either. Suddenly jumping to the environmental issue after a discussion about forest fires, he said, "It's those environmentalists. I heard one of them on a talk show and they finally got it out of him. They don't want to cut down trees because they don't want to build houses. They don't want anymore growth in this country. That's our whole problem."

President Bush, quick to focus on such popular resentment while campaigning in the Pacific Northwest, has found it easy to scapegoat the owl for the region's economic woes. Speaking in Colville, Washington on Monday, Bush said "Not far from here is a timber town called Forks. Like Colville, Forks supported a mill, and the mill supported a community. Because of a lack of timber, the mill had to close. Today unemployment at Forks is at 20 percent," Bush said. "It's time to put people ahead of owls," he concluded.

So the spotted owl and some of the last untouched wilderness in this country will be destroyed to satisfy the insecurities of the man-in-the-white-house in Washington, D.C. and the man-on-the-street in Forks, Washington. Sure. Cut everything down and unemployment will come in a few years anyway--no trees gives loggers nothing to cut down.

The issue isn't as simple as conservatives would have you believe. There's no need for a stark choice between the 3000 residents of Forks and the 3000 northern spotted owl nesting pairs left in Washington, Oregon and California.

What do environmentalists suggest? They're no "radicals" or "extremists," as their opponents insist. Says one ranger in Olympic National Park: "You still need some wood, but some of us support more selective cutting."

The trees are already gone and those left standing can't fend off the saws. Others must act in their stead.