Chainsaws in the Chattahoochee forest

With the dull roar of the Chattooga River beckoning from just over the next ridge, Buzz Williams casts his trained eye across a hillside moonscape littered with downed pines, scrub brush and charred stumps.

"If you wanted a poster child for bad forest management, this is it," the forester-turned-environmental-activist says as he trudges along a logging trail carved into the slope. "It's too close to the scenic river corridor, it's way too steep and the soil is too erodible. For this place in the landscape, it's the worst thing they could have done."

Williams still bristles when describing the last and, in his opinion, the most disgraceful timber harvest that took place in his corner of the Chattahoochee National Forest before commercial logging was banned on federal land in Georgia nearly two years ago. Now, the wiry 50-year-old, who heads the Chattooga Conservancy in Rabun County, is convinced -- along with many Georgia environmentalists -- that the battle to preserve the national forests from heavy logging is gearing up to begin again.

Just last month, U.S. Forest Service officials approved measures that would allow the agency to revive suspended timber sales and sign new logging contracts. An updated forest management plan now under development would give the agency wide discretion in deciding when and where to cut trees.

But, by far the most profound change after a decade of slowed logging and expanding wilderness, is that President Bush is now in the White House. On the campaign trail, Bush pledged to "put the national forests back to work," and a series of steps he's taken on both the environment in general and national forests in particular signal that his administration will tilt management of the forest back toward logging.

To North Georgia's timber industry, the moves represent a chance to gear back up after five years of road-building halts, a logging moratorium and wilderness expansions.

But larger issues are at stake as well, including the health of the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, which provides drinking water to metro Atlanta; the diversity of plant and animal species; and the growing popularity of the North Georgia mountains as the state's largest playground, a destination for hikers, boaters and city slickers simply seeking the solitude of the forest.

For Clara Johnson, the recently installed Forest Service supervisor, the prospect of change from above amounts to a policy tightrope. On one side lies the old heavy emphasis on timber harvests; on the other lies the more environmentally sensitive ideals that began to creep into her agency over the last decade.

"We're looking forward to continuing scientifically sound ecosystem management with strong public involvement," Johnson says. "But if the president states he wants us to cut a certain number of board feet and move trees out of the national forest, then we will."

By most accounts, the Forest Service became the handmaiden of the timber industry in the 1930s and '40s, opening up huge swaths of federal land to clear-cutting. Commercial logging spiked up to a historic peak during the Reagan era, when the federal environmental agenda was being guided by folks like then-Interior Secretary James Watts, an anti-conservationist eventually ousted for his extremist views.

To make areas available to loggers, the Forest Service built roads through the woods, a massive undertaking that routinely cost more than the value of the logging contracts. The corporate welfare was explained away by arguing that roads were a long-term investment that served recreational use and fire-fighting efforts, and that timber sales created jobs and boosted rural economies.

For decades, the agency's funding was closely tied to "timber targets," the amount of lumber that was expected to be harvested and sold in each national forest.

The Chattahoochee National Forest was no exception. Founded in 1936, when the Great Depression made it cheap for the feds to buy up eroding mountain land that had been clear-cut in the late 1800s, it provided opportunities for thousands to find work replanting devastated watersheds.

In 1985, the forest adopted its first management plan, which detailed the procedures agency foresters in Georgia were to follow in determining where and how to market timber. That same year, a record 12 billion board feet -- roughly equivalent to 54 million mature trees -- were cut on federal land across the country.

The official Chattahoochee forest map, which hasn't been updated since 1988, features a large photo on the back showing a logger and a ranger chatting next to a tall stack of felled trees. The caption reads: "Timber harvesting is an important part of the Forest Service's multiple use concept."

At that time, Buzz Williams was working for the Forest Service, although he seemed an odd fit. He'd grown up in nearby rural South Carolina and first shot the Chattooga River in 1968, before the "Deliverance syndrome" drew hordes of thrill-seekers to its challenging rapids and stunning beauty. He'd acquired an abiding love of nature from his mother and a forestry degree from Clemson University.

In 1987, Williams was managing the Chattooga outpost of the Nantahala Outdoor Center, a rafting company, when he was recruited by the Forest Service to head up its new program along the National Wild and Scenic River.

"For me, the idea of the noble forester who wants to do the right thing for the environment was real, but they don't give you the chance," he says. "I took a downhill turn from day one."

As Williams became a frequent critic of the agency's decisions to clear-cut across the river in South Carolina's Sumter National Forest, his ranger duties -- patrolling the watershed, guiding trips, overseeing search-and-rescue efforts -- were stripped away one by one, he says, until he was busted down to cleaning out latrine pits. In 1991, after four years, the agency eliminated his position.

But Williams had found his calling. He helped found the conservancy in nearby Clayton. Largely supported by foundation grants, the group monitors Forest Service management of the Chattooga watershed, protects old-growth forests and publishes a membership newsletter, The Chattooga Quarterly. A cover drawing on the most recent issue depicts new Interior Secretary Gale Norton -- a former protegé of James Watt -- as a hungry fox guarding the environmental hen house.

Williams' cynicism toward his ex-employer can verge on the strident and his dedication to an eco-sensitive lifestyle is somewhat extreme. "I live in a yurt with no electricity," he says casually.

He's convinced, however, that even more moderate views than his are likely to be phased out of the Forest Service under the Bush administration.

Times have changed since Bush the Elder was in office. Beginning with early '90s lawsuits to protect spotted owl habitats from logging in the Pacific Northwest, a wave of litigation has essentially paralyzed timber sales on federal land nationwide.

Georgia became a battleground in 1996 when several environmental groups won an injunction to block eight timber sales on nearly 2,000 acres of federal land. They argued that the Forest Service wasn't following its own rules for estimating the impact logging would have on wildlife.

"In some areas, the trees were marked and ready for the blade," remembers Angela Martin of Georgia Forest Watch in Ellijay, which joined the local offices of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society in suing the Forest Service.

That lawsuit and a similar action in 1999 had a rippling effect, derailing 56 timber harvests in six Southeastern states, including 18 in Georgia.

A handful of existing logging contracts, including the one on the rim of the Chattooga corridor, were "grandfathered" and allowed to proceed, but most remain suspended.

With a primary revenue source suddenly snatched away, the Forest Service trimmed operations in Georgia and shifted staff to other states. Timber harvesting in the Chattahoochee dropped from its 1987 peak of 72 million board feet -- about 325,000 trees -- to less than 5 million annually since 1995. Many North Georgia sawmills closed up shop. All but 3 percent of the timber supply in Georgia now come from private lands, mostly in the southern half of the state.

Wayne Crews still runs the sawmill his father built in 1942 a few miles east of the North Georgia town of Blue Ridge. A 1960s survey showed 33 sawmills operating in surrounding Fannin County, which is half national forest land. In the past decade, Crews says, he's seen one after another shut down. He believes his is the last one that remains in business.

Times have been rough; he estimates that he traditionally got up to 90 percent of his timber from nearby federal land. In recent years, he's had to travel to North Carolina and Tennessee to cut trees. The few other loggers still in the area sometimes get work clearing sites for shopping centers and houses, he says.

Crews had begun cutting on two timber contracts worth about $60,000 he had in the Chattahoochee before he was told in May 1999 that he'd have to stop and clear out because the work had been suspended.

But Crews isn't bitter and he doesn't blame foresters for the leaner times. "We get along good with the Forest Service; it's the Sierra Club that did this. It's these people who move up here and want log cabins and bark chips for landscaping, but don't want you to cut any trees."

They are, in short, people like Angela Martin and her husband, Brent, executive director of Georgia Forest Watch. After years as activists in Atlanta, the husband-and-wife team moved to Ellijay so they could be near the action.

And they've watched closely as the Forest Service moved through the lengthy and contentious process of developing a new management plan for the Chattahoochee. They are concerned that the agency is trying to use the planning process to increase logging through subtle turns of benign-sounding phrases like "forest health," "wildlife management" and "ecosystem restoration."

Under early drafts of the plan, some areas would be off limits to new roads and logging. But most of the 750,000-acre forest would fall under more permissive guidelines. With the plan still two years away from adoption, the Bush administration has plenty of time to make its policy imprint.

"There's been a whole change in philosophy since the last forest plan, which focused largely on resource extraction," says Gainesville-based Forest Service planning officer David Smith, and it's hard to tell if he's promoting the agency's newfound ecological sensitivity or simply stating a fact. "We have no areas at all where the main objective is harvesting timber products."

While the forest plan itself won't specify where cutting or thinning of trees would occur, Smith says, "There will still be some cutting in the service of forest health."

But Brent Martin observes: "How terms like 'forest health' are interpreted makes all the difference." In the interest of, say, creating a habitat for a certain species of migratory songbird, reintroducing native oak hickory to an area populated by white pine, or removing thick underbrush that would serve as a wildfire hazard, the Forest Service could justify cutting or burning sections of forest.

Also hanging over the forest is the threat of the suspended timber contracts, which have never been nullified and could be revived if the political winds shift strongly enough. Only last month, the Forest Service adopted more lenient guidelines for assessing the impact to wildlife from tree-cutting and trail-building, a move that could allow the agency to wriggle out from under the Sierra Club lawsuit. Environmental groups are planning a new legal challenge.

But many Forest Service employees seem eager to see logging resume.

"We feel we've fixed the problems identified in the court ruling," says Ray Ellis, timber program manager for the Chattahoochee. The new rules, which will be written into the upcoming forest plan, could enable the Forest Service to honor some of the cutting contracts still in limbo, he says. "We're evaluating our options."

Sounding much like a businessman eager to increase his sales, Ellis says: "We have a unique source of hardwood and pine saw logs that's a higher quality than the product you'd get from private land because of our longer rotation cycle."

Logging itself is only one of several issues that will affect the future of the forest. The prospective forest plan calls for the designation of 33,000 new wilderness acres in North Georgia.

To many residents of mountain communities, wilderness designation amounts to a federal land grab, an unconstitutional taking of property from the public domain because roads are closed and most trails are restricted to hikers.

"We've got right-wingers up here who hate the federal government and don't want to do anything to preserve federal lands," says Angela Martin.

While wilderness often is popular in principle, however, specific proposals to expand federally designated wilderness can bring a lot of opposition. The two largest proposed wilderness additions to the Chattahoochee are likewise the most controversial: the popular, 12,000-acre Mountaintown area west of Ellijay is being fought by mountain-biking groups and the 8,300-acre Kelly Ridge sector southeast of Hiawassee has drawn heavy criticism from local residents and ATV owners.

Opposition even comes from the state Department of Natural Resources, which argues that added restrictions hinder its mission to look after forest wildlife. "We realize we're going against what people generally feel is a good thing, but wilderness ties the hands of land managers," says Larry McSwain, assistant director of the DNR's Wildlife Resources Division.

The DNR also is among opponents to a road-building ban declared in January by President Clinton. The ban was touted by conservationists as the most sweeping national forest preservation measure since the early 1900s. The initiative would place nearly 60 million acres -- almost one-third of all national forest land -- off limits to new roads and road improvements. That would permanently prohibit most logging, as well as all oil drilling and mining. It would protect 66,000 acres in the Chattahoochee.

Decades of logging have left the country with what is now a deteriorating, 386,000-mile network of forest roads -- eight times longer than the interstate highway system -- and an estimated $8.4 billion road-maintenance backlog. Thousands of miles of roads would be closed under the road ban.

The road ban has placed the Bush administration at its first major crossroads regarding the future of the nation's forests. Beginning in fall 1999, the Forest Service held more than 600 public meetings and collected more than 1.6 million public comments in drafting and finalizing the roadless initiative.

But that broad support didn't stop President Bush from delaying the implementation of the new law from March 13 until May 12 to give his administration time to review the policy.

In the meantime, all eyes are on Idaho, where state attorneys and the giant Boise-Cascade timber company have mounted a legal challenge to the roadless initiative that both supporters and opponents feel could be the nascent policy's undoing. In late March, Justice Department attorneys assigned to defend the rule instead asked a federal court in Boise for more time.

"I think they're trying to find a way out of the roadless policy," says Michael Goergen, director of forest policy for the Society of American Foresters and an opponent of the ban. "Whether they're looking to overturn it or settle the lawsuits, I don't know."

Although federal judge Edward Lodge refused to grant an injunction to block the law from being implemented, a preliminary statement he issued April 5 made it clear he agreed with critics that the rule illegally supercedes the local forest planning process. It's now up to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had opposed the roadless initiative as a Missouri senator, to decide how -- and whether -- to defend it.

Even if Bush doesn't have the chutzpah to abandon the new rules outright, environmentalists worry that he'll gut them through a negotiated court settlement with the timber industry.

"That's my biggest fear," says Robert Vandermark of the National Environmental Trust in Washington, D.C. "You could have four or five attorneys sitting behind closed doors deciding the fate of our entire national forest system. That would keep the hands of members of Congress clean."

in just three months, Bush has stunned environmentalists with a series of actions reversing Clinton's environmental policies. That juggernaut has been so complete that outgoing Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck stepped down at the end of March, a month earlier than scheduled, as a kind of preventative measure: He publicly asked the administration in a six-page letter to resist pressure from big business to undo protections to federal forests.

"Congress should now turn its attention to reforming the financial incentive system that promotes roadless area development and old-growth harvest," he wrote in his resignation letter.

But his pleas didn't stop Dave Tenney, interim deputy undersecretary of agriculture -- the administration's point position for the national forests -- from reversing, a week later, Dombeck's decision to strengthen wildlife protection in three Colorado national forests. The administration is now busy rewriting the ex-chief's new forest planning regulations.

"When [Ronald] Reagan came into office, his administration told the Forest Service to scrap all the progressive plans it had developed under Carter," says René Voss, a former staffer with the Sierra Club's Atlanta office who now serves on the group's national board in Washington. "We're essentially in that same situation now. There's a very good possibility the rug could be pulled out from under us. It's already happening."

At the same time, it's unclear how vigorously the administration will swing the pendulum. Last week, Bush appointed longtime forester Dale Bosworth as Forest Service chief. George Gay, Southeast regional director for the Wilderness Society, says he is "cautiously optimistic" about Bosworth, who previously oversaw forests in Utah, Nevada and southern Idaho, and has been a supporter of the road ban.

But Gay believes the new president will put the pressure on for a return to logging. "The Bush administration has rolled back a lot of measures designed to protect the environment and if that continues, it'll be difficult for this new chief to stay true to his ideals."

The forest road that spurs off the last bend of U.S. 76 in Rabun County before the highway crosses the Chattooga River looks brand-new as it heads into the woods. The layer of white limestone gravel is so thick that truck tires fairly seem to sink into it.

But the road has actually been here for years and goes nowhere in particular. It was restored last year, says Buzz Williams, for one reason: It leads to an 80-year-old stand of trees that the Forest Service has been trying to cut since 1993.

"That's a dogwood, that's a holly, a sourwood, a Southern yellow pine, a red oak," he says, pointing as he walks. He pauses at a poplar so large that two men touching fingertips could barely reach around it. It and most of the larger trees on this slope overlooking a small creek are marked with a faded, yard-long slash of orange paint -- a familiar sign to any logger that they are part of a timber harvest.

The area is part of a 200-acre timber sale that has been held up by appeals and lawsuits. Of all the places Williams' group is fighting to hold back the chain saws, this one is the most precious, he says, because the woods here have begun to enter an old-growth cycle that is essential to maintaining biodiversity. There are trees of varying ages and species, decaying logs, a variety of underbrush and ground cover.

"A lot of places in the South, we're on our third or fourth forest," he says. "This is not about protecting old growth -- it's too late for that -- but about restoring it."