258 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
eral forests. “Owls are important,” he said, “but people are more impor-
tant than owls.” It was risky business for a politician who won a second
term in the Senate by the skin of his teeth. Despite an environmental re-
cord that was creditable by any objective measure, dating back to his days
in the Legislature pushing Jim Ellis’s Forward Thrust legislation, Gorton
was now the greens’ public enemy No. 1. Polls suggested strong support
statewide for preserving old-growth forests, even if that left timber towns
in dire straits. The job loss from spotted owl set-asides was estimated at
35,000 in some reports, although environmentalists said that was hyper-
bole. Gorton acknowledged that decades of wanton clear-cutting had deci-
mated ancient forests. Those errors were being corrected by modern,
sustained-yield forestry that respected biodiversity, he said, but the bulk
of the new plantations wouldn’t be mature until the 21st century. “The
1990s are crucial. To get to that sustained harvest, we have to make it
through the 1990s.” Environmentalists, abetted by the liberal media, are
elitists who “don’t really believe in the realities of reforestation,” Gorton
said. “They don’t connect timber with the realities of housing, paper and
furniture... with real people and real families.”^12
Timber families took their cause to downtown Seattle. Aleda Dahl-
strom held her 8-year-old daughter tight and told reporters her husband’s
Hoquiam sawmill was just one of many that provided family-wage jobs.
“We want people to realize we are people. By shutting off the log supply
they are hurting our families.”^13
A Seattleite who watched Gorton being huzzah’d at one such demon-
stration called it a “diesel Chautauqua” in a letter to the editor. It re-
minded him “of nothing so much as those antebellum Southerners put
forward by Jefferson Davis to economically justify slavery. ‘Think of the
jobs that will be lost,’ they cried, ‘consider the economic devastation to
James Neel, a 9-year-old
from Forks, with his aunt,
Bev Larson, at a timber rally
in Olympia in 1991. Brian
DalBalcon/The Daily World