THE JACKSON DEMONSTRATION State Forest was controversial from the day it was purchased in 1947 from the old Caspar Lumber Company. The government taking over private property can create suspicion, especially in those red scare days.
At the time, big lumber corporations from the Deep South and Pacific Northwest were clearcutting newly purchased lands in California. The old-growth timber resource of Mendocino County was almost entirely harvested. Replantings were either not done or were done in a nonscientific way, threatening the ecological and economic forest and causing alarm in universities, science and government.
Caspar Lumber remained one of the few large operators that was locally owned, with a famous annual family picnic. It was relatively responsible, practicing some selective logging in an age of bulldozer clearcutting.
Then came the creation of California’s demonstration forest system with four big land purchases by the state in the late 1940s. The Caspar Forest as it was known was sold to the state and renamed the Jacob Green Jackson State Forest to honor Caspar Lumber’s founder and later renamed again to Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF).
Jackson Forest came with the promise to be a nursery to millions of trees for all lumber companies to plant. Under government ownership, logging continued with an open bidding process that was new to local timber companies.
The public expected access to the new public lands, which was often difficult because of ongoing timber harvests. Old newspaper accounts reveal disputes among timber companies, off-road enthusiasts, and adjacent property owners. Walking the forest, ghosts of these grudges are still visible, with huge rocks placed to block a road or a fence wire entangled in a wall of trees to stop a rival user from going too far.
Oceanfront property acquired through a trade
In 1972, State Parks gave up one of the best stretches of timberland in the JDSF in a trade with timber company Boise Cascade. Boise got 978 acres of 20 million harvestable board feet of timber in exchange for 658 acres of oceanfront real estate, most of that being the north end of MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg. The trade also gave the public agency 70 acres that comprise the Mendocino Headlands, the entire oceanfront area west and north of the town of Mendocino.
It’s hard to envision the coast now without the long beaches and dunes of MacKerricher or the spectacular headlands. Even today, environmentalists think the planet got the best of that deal despite the big redwoods that were lost. The dunes and the bird nesting and breeding and resting rocks on the headlands are considered critical environmental reserves.
But clearcutting elsewhere in the county had dire environmental consequences. The Coho or Silver Salmon was the prime fish of the Mendocino and Sonoma County coasts until intense logging silted the rivers and streams. The ferocious fish was put on protected lists, and all fishing of it has been banned in California. In some cases, environmental agencies hastened the Coho’s decline, with misguided policies like attempts to clear streams of mud, when in fact stream clutter was needed that would allow spawning areas to develop naturally.
“Scientific” logging continued largely unquestioned in the JDSF through the ’80s until the dramatic rise of the local environmental protest movement, precipitated by what they saw as the excesses of timber cutting by many companies, including Charles Hurwitz and his Maxxam Inc. in Humboldt County.
With the old growth almost entirely gone in Mendocino County, the last stands in Humboldt County became much more valuable and suddenly passionately defended. This culminated in Redwood Summer in 1990, when protests all over the region grew to international notoriety, with environmentalists doing tree sits and chaining themselves to trees. Some were accused of employing sabotage like filling tractor engines with sand and even imbedding tree spikes in trunks. Leading environmental activists Daryl Cherney and the late Judi Bari were injured by a car bomb in a still-unsolved case. It all boiled over with a showdown between loggers and environmentalists in the middle of downtown Fort Bragg that was featured in a famous photo in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, showing waves of people coming at each other from opposite directions in a loud and angry standoff.
Environmentalists flex legal muscle
Environmentalists began disputing timber harvest plans all over, especially on public lands like the JDSF, where they claimed the California Department of Forestry (CDF) was a mere servant of timber companies. Legal actions that started in the late 1990s challenged laws that allowed CDF-Cal Fire to skip environmental impact reports and use their own Timber Harvest Plans to get through the revered and feared CEQA process (California Environmental Quality Act).
Opponents managed to stop all logging in the JDSF during most of the first nine years of the 21st century. A compromise created the Jackson Advisory Group in 2008, and the JAG was allowed to review and modify timber harvest plans.
But a few years later, the State Board of Forestry, which oversees Cal Fire and state forest lands, nixed much of the authority the JAG had. Critics said the board stripped the JAG of authority to regulate the harvest plans. Demonstration Forest Program head Kevin Conway and JAG members say many changes continued to be made voluntarily with JAG input. But the JAG never said no after 2011 to a timber harvest plan, and it was composed mostly of people from logging backgrounds.
Over time, the term “Indians” was replaced by “Native Americans” and Indigenous; CDF became Cal Fire; and climate change became a major question with forest carbon sequestration as a possible answer. A $100 million-plus carbon credit industry emerged in Mendocino County, with at least one Tribe among those taking the lead on this new way of using the forest. The biggest timberland owners became nonprofits like The Conservation Fund and the Redwood Forest Foundation Inc. (RFFI), which both also log the forests they preserve. Environmentalists pushed to broaden the JAG to include more community members. That compromise was made but local environmentalists like Bill Heil and Anna Marie Stenberg continued to view the JAG as a “rubber stamp” for Cal Fire.
Then in the second decade of the 21st century, big fires raged and killed many people in Santa Rosa, inland Mendocino County, Paradise, and more, drawing more eyes to the JDSF, especially piles of slash left behind by “scientific” logging. Cal Fire became more communicative. On a recent forest tour, a Cal Fire forester described all the measures to make slash more environmentally friendly and less fire-friendly, like removing invasives and cutting slash into small pieces. At least one longtime critic on that tour said they hadn’t known the extent of the work Cal Fire did to make the slash safer.
From 1900 to 2020, tribes that had historic claims to the land were not offered a hand in the actual management of the forest. They were invited to participate in various initiatives over the decades but found the rules often changed with each state governor. Big initiatives were announced with little follow-through. For First Nations, government promises needed to move beyond press releases to have any meaning.
Involving the Indigenous community
The fires made many people talk about the need for Indigenous input. Many people concluded that if First Nations had been given a role, forests might not be as cluttered and dangerous. Although the practice varies widely, Indigenous people worldwide, including in the JDSF, used brush control and other effective fire prevention methods, which had been pushed aside in the modern rush for the cash flow from logging.
In 2020, Cal Fire proposed one of the most ambitious Timber Harvest Plans ever, just after the pandemic started. No opposition came, and Cal Fire proceeded to bid the timber on a “Caspar 500” plan, which proposed cutting big redwoods close to sprawling rural properties in the unincorporated community of Caspar, long known as a retreat for hippies and musicians famous and otherwise. Also in 2020, Newsom issued his directive that the state find a way to co-manage with tribes, Statement of Administration Policy Native American Ancestral Lands.
When Cal Fire started marking the trees to be cut in the Caspar 500, a protest movement not seen since Redwood Summer came bursting into the forest. And this time, Native people and leaders of one prominent tribe were involved. People chained themselves to trees again. They went out into the forest where timber fallers were working, risking trees falling onto them and causing logging companies to stop work. Security guards were posted and patrolled 24/7.
As quickly as the saws started up, protests interrupted the work and cutting was halted.
Today, there is no timber harvesting. A co-management process is underway that gives new authority to Native Tribes, but which is also criticized as an effort to restart timber harvests.
Cal Fire and the JAG have moved meetings out of the boardroom and into the forest more often, where they are hashing out how logging, climate change and co-management can work.
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