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CHRIS ROBERTS: Good morning. With news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Chris Roberts. The National Weather Service says North Dakota and areas of Northern Minnesota will get hit with another winter storm today. Minnesota Public Radio's Hope Deutsch reports from Moorhead.

HOPE DEUTSCH: The Red River Valley is under a blizzard warning, with up to 9 inches of snow expected in the Northern part of the Valley. Already, classes are canceled in Grand Forks, including the University of North Dakota. Moorhead public and non-public schools have closed. Blizzard conditions are expected to hit the Grand Forks area this afternoon. Officials across North Dakota are warning motorists roads are slippery due to blowing snow and freezing rain.

Snow is already falling in Northwestern Minnesota. The Weather Service says 5 to 8 inches of snow should fall by this evening. The storm is expected to move into North Central Minnesota later today. The Weather Service says northerly winds will increase to 20 to 30 miles per hour, causing blowing and drifting snow. No travel is advised in the area today and tonight. I'm Hope Deutsch from Minnesota Public Radio.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Three Twin Cities literary groups will complete the purchase of a vacant warehouse near the Metrodome today. The 50,000 square foot building would house milkweed editions, the Loft Literary Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The groups have been working for two years on the project. Each of the organizations would have its own space in the building.

There are winter storm warnings for Northwestern Minnesota today and for far northern Central Minnesota today into tonight and advisories, winter weather advisories, for West Central Minnesota today and the Northeastern portion of the state today and tonight. Snow accumulating from 5 to 8 inches in the far Northwestern part of the state by this evening. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Chris Roberts.

RACHEL REABE: MPR's Main Street radio coverage of rural issues is supported by the Blandin foundation, committed to strengthening communities through grant making, leadership training, and convening.

Good morning, and welcome to a special Main Street radio broadcast on timber, Minnesota's first and still one of its largest industries. I'm Rachel Reabe and we're broadcasting today from Duluth and the Minnesota Public Radio studios of WSCN and WSCD. We're bringing together an environmentalist, a forest supervisor and an industry spokesman to answer your questions during the second hour of our show. But first, let's listen to a five-part report on Minnesota's timber industry entitled Our State, Our Forests. The series airs this week on Minnesota Public Radio's all things considered.

At the turn of the century, much of Minnesota's northern forest was leveled by logging and massive fires. Now, the state is in the midst of a second extensive round of cutting to supply new and expanded mills that have sprung up since the early 1980s. In the years since the mill expansions began, timber harvesting in Minnesota has increased more than 60% to the highest level since 1909.

Slowly, the face of Minnesota's northern forests is changing. There are few places anymore you can walk the kind of forest that covered Northern Minnesota 150 years ago. Giant white pines rose to 200 feet. When Minnesota became a state, more than half its land was in deep shade. Though vast, the Great North Woods weren't limitless.

By the turn of the century, Minnesota timber was being marketed from New York to Denver. The expanding frontier needed wood, and 30,000 lumberjacks were doing their best to supply it. Timber was far and away the biggest industry in the state, and it changed the very landscape we live in. Main street Radio's Leif Enger reports.

LEIF ENGER: There's a woods north of Grand Rapids called The Lost 40. In an age when policy makers argue whether a tree is old growth at 90 years or 120, The Lost 40 is the real thing. It's never been cut. Some of these white pines are 400 years old. In the 1830, 3.5 million acres of Minnesota forest were dominated by such pines. But The Lost 40, says Forester Chuck Winegard, is still here only because of a mistake.

CHUCK WINEGARD: It's a surveying error and the area that we're looking at was miss-meandered as part of Coddington lake. So since it showed in the survey records as lake, nobody could buy it. And if they couldn't buy it, they couldn't cut the timber from it. So it's here for us to see it today.

Traditionally, measuring 4.5 feet from the ground. So that's approximately here. And our diameter on this one is 39.6 inches. Circumference is 10.9 feet. You're probably looking at 2,000 board feet of lumber in a tree that size.

LEIF ENGER: 400 years old, 2,000 board feet, enough in one tree for a two stall garage or a century ago, a small barn, farmhouse, or church. In 1837, a treaty with Ojibwe Indians, the same treaty now being contested over hunting and fishing rights, opened a large triangle of East Central Minnesota to logging, but the heyday was still 50 years off. Most of the timber being used to build the American frontier was being cut in the abundant pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin. What jump started the timber trade in Minnesota was a potent union of technology and demand.

SKIP DRAKE: Steam power began to replace water power in the sawmills. Before this time, we had to be close to a watercourse of some kind, preferably a falls, Saint Anthony falls, to create water pressure to allow for sawmills.

LEIF ENGER: Skip Drake is director of the Forest History Center, a logging museum in Grand Rapids.

SKIP DRAKE: Steam began to be applied to the sawmilling business, which allowed sawmills to locate virtually any place up towards Duluth, Cloquet, Brainerd, Bemidji. So they're closer to the resource.

LEIF ENGER: Simultaneously, the pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin began to give out. The lumber companies saw Minnesota as the new El Dorado, a promised land of pines. With settlements springing up across the northern plains, there wasn't just a demand for wood, there was desperation for it.

SKIP DRAKE: Certainly logging and lumbering had been going on for 50 years, but it hadn't begun to highball. And that's what happened in the 1880s. And you needed good, cheap lumber to help build this country. Minnesota at the turn of the century was the king of white pine logging.

LEIF ENGER: And the white pine was king of Minnesota's economy. In 1901, when Teddy Roosevelt took office, 30,000 lumberjack were working in the forest. They were European immigrants and part-time farmers who slept two to a bunk in the logging camps and ate enormous breakfasts, yes, pancakes, before heading out to the woods. Small wonder the lumberjack is an epic figure. The trees were epic, often 200 feet tall and 6 feet wide, waist high. Even the way they fell was epic.

SKIP DRAKE: Once I got hit in the face and cut my lips, a branch punched through my cheek and knocked out a bunch of teeth. I was cutting the tree down, and it fell over on top of me. And that morning, it was about 30 below. It broke my leg too. I had to crawl out about half a mile. I spent 90 days in the hospital. Pretty goofy, wasn't it?

LEIF ENGER: Each pair of lumberjacks might cut only a few dozen trees per day using an 8-foot crosscut saw and a team of horses to drag out the logs. But so large was the workforce and so numerous the camps, it soon became plain that white pine was no endless resource.

SKIP DRAKE: People really began to know as early as the 1860s, 1870s that the forests were exhaustible. I mean, think about it. They were exhaustible back in Maine in the 1800s, the turn of that century. Clearly, they knew that the pine would not last.

But the old axiom is that the plow follows the ax. And it happened in those states, and it happened in the Ohio River Valley and even in neighboring Wisconsin it happened. And the true belief was that farming would come here in Northern Minnesota and be successful.

LEIF ENGER: So much of Minnesota's forest lands changed into cultivated fields, pastures and meadows. Old photographs show the towering white pine stands of superior's North Shore laid bare. But farming was to fail in much of Northern Minnesota. And as lumbermen moved on into the Arrowhead and Mississippi headwaters, the plow wasn't the only thing following the ax. Jeanne Coffey is director of the Hinckley Fire Museum.

JEANNE COFFEY: All they wanted was the trunk of the tree. They didn't want the tops, they didn't want the branches. So that was left to lay. That became known as slash. Any spark from a train or any lightning strikes or anything could really start a fire very spontaneously with this very dry slash.

LEIF ENGER: In August of 1894, General CC Andrews of the US Army made a speech to timber industry leaders. He'd just returned from studying forestry techniques in Sweden, and he was alarmed. If the lumber companies didn't change their practices, he warned, the Midwest would go up in flames. Nine days later, part of it did.

JEANNE COFFEY: You can still find stumps from the fire. You can still see, for instance, where these enormous trees were just blown right out of the Earth. And even today, if you dig down into the town of Hinckley, you can see the fire line. It's about a foot down. And you can see the black fire line, and it's built right on cinders from the fire.

LEIF ENGER: The great Hinckley fire was like nothing the state had ever seen. Traveling faster than a horse could gallop, it blackened 400 square miles in four hours. It burned, besides Hinckley, the towns of Sandstone, Mission Creek, Pokegama, Miller and Askov. The glow of the fire was visible from Iowa. An anonymous survivor wrote this account of escaping the blaze in a shallow creek.

SPEAKER 1: As we got in the water, a bunch of confused deer raced past us right into the blast that roared over us in seconds. Wilson was in the middle with a wet, coarse wool sock held over his mouth with his left hand. With his right, he splashed water over us and the creek bank. I went under as the water sizzled with the rain of firebrands. That warmed the water and killed the fish in seconds. I breathed through my wet shirt when I came up for air.

LEIF ENGER: The Hinckley fire killed 413 people. It was front page news nationwide, and in Europe, where articles appeared with grim pencil drawings depicting oxidized bodies amid smoking ruins. It also helped arouse a national debate over how to manage forests.

Early conservationists, including Sierra Club Founder John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, began to argue for federal regulation of timber. Some, like general Andrews and Gifford Pinchot, lobbied for a replanting and rotation cutting, old ideas in Europe, but revolutionary in America. Char Miller is a historian with Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

CHAR MILLER: We can see the transfer of ideas and transfer of technologies. The late 19th, early 20th century was a really fertile moment for the United States in which many, many ideas, much like these, were pouring across the North Atlantic and really transforming the way the Americans understood the world.

LEIF ENGER: So began the environmental debate that endures to this day, how much of the forest should be used and how much left alone. In 1892, John Muir founded the Sierra Club to proclaim the aesthetic values of pristine woods. His friend Gifford Pinchot thought pristine was well and good, but didn't put bread on the table.

Pinchot, a skillful politician, lobbied for controlled logging, mining and grazing in national forests. Teddy Roosevelt named him head of the brand new US Forest Service. And while he did push for reforestation, Minnesota's white pines continued to be cut at unsustainable rates.

LYN ROGERS: There's no way that the economic value of the White pines that people could stop that locomotive.

LEIF ENGER: Lynn Rogers is a former Forest Service biologist and founder of the Ely-based White Pine Society. In the 1920s, concerns over the loss of the giant trees led to a massive replanting program. But there was a problem. American nurseries didn't have enough space to raise the seedlings.

LYN ROGERS: So they sent seed over to Europe to be grown in the European nurseries. And when they brought those seedlings back for planting, they carried European white pine blister rust.

LEIF ENGER: When some of those seedlings died of blister rust, Rogers says, the whole effort was dropped. Sometimes red pines were planted in their place, sometimes nothing at all. In many cases, white pine clearcuts came up in aspen and other aggressive species.

By the mid 1930, Minnesota's white pine sawlog era was finished. While the pulp and paper industry remained, most lumber companies moved on to the next El Dorado, the Pacific Northwest. They left behind mill towns they'd brought to existence, hundreds of marginal farms and thousands of unemployed loggers. They also left behind a forest, changing over to aspen, another fast growing species. Trees that would become the focus for Minnesota's second great wave of logging, a century after the first.

RACHEL REABE: Though old growth forests were long gone, Minnesota's timber industry revived in the 1980s when new technology made the common aspen tree a desired commodity. For a decade, Minnesota had the fastest growing timber trade in the country. But even as pulp paper and chipboard mills continue to expand, questions have arisen about whether the forest is growing as fast as the business it supports. Leif Enger continues his report.

LEIF ENGER: When George Borman was a young lumberjack in the 1920s and '30s, the men used axes and crosscut saws and horses and they cut big pines, nothing scrawny.

GEORGE BORMAN: I never worked in a camp that they cut pulpwood. If it was in the road, we cut them and drag them out of the way. Aspen was weeds.

LEIF ENGER: Borman witnessed the end of the giant saw log era. By the mid '30s, the great white pines were all but gone and huge tracts of forest land were starting to come back as pulpwood, jackpine and aspen. 60 years later, these are the trees everyone wants. No one calls them weeds anymore.

Third generation logger Robin Walsh swivels inside the beeping, blinking cockpit of the family ponzi, a logging machine with a robotic arm.

ROBIN WALSH: What I'll do is I'll extend the boom out and grab hold of the tree. It reaches out 33 feet. So I can sit in one place and pick quite a few trees out.

LEIF ENGER: The ponzi's arm grips a jack pine. An automated chainsaw cuts it off at the base. The pine tilts and spiked rollers forced the trunk between a set of heavy blades. Limbs drop away. The trunk is sliced into clean 8-foot logs. Describing it takes longer than doing it.

The logging tradition has turned inside out from George Borman's day. The trees are smaller, the machines are bigger, the workforce is much smaller. There are fewer than 1,000 full-time loggers today, compared with 30,000 at the turn of the century. Yet timbers still Northern Minnesota's economic engine, a $7 billion industry that starts right up here in a computerized cab.

ROBIN WALSH: I have a little nephew that's three, almost four years old now, and he just loves sitting in here. It's like a video game, really. I mean, you're sitting here watching all the window, pushing buttons.

LEIF ENGER: Loggers like the Walsh's cut four million cords of wood annually in Minnesota. That's a pile 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 6,000 miles long. About half that wood pile is aspen, which grows so fast and migrates so easily, it invaded much of the pine forest land that was logged off early this century.

Tall and slim with smooth greenish trunks and trembling leaves that turn gold in autumn, aspen is sought by the paper industry because its dense fibers make strong paper. It also makes good OSB, that's oriented-strand board, the sheeting you see on new homes before the siding goes on. Minnesota has so much aspen that in the last 15 years, paper and OSB plants spent $3 billion building new factories or expanding old ones.

The Potlatch Company has three Minnesota OSB plants, like this one in Grand Rapids. A log riding the automated line is debarked, sawed a short lengths, and fed into what's called a wafer riser from which it emerges as a pile of thin flakes a few inches long. The flakes pass through cylindrical twirling dryers as big as school buses, then are aligned in crisscross layers and permeated with resins and wax before being pressed into sheets. Stand back, says plant manager Randy Anderson, the presses breathe heat.

RANDY ANDERSON: We have about 2,000 pounds per square inch on the mat and about 400 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature is actually what activates the resins.

LEIF ENGER: Though OSB factories like this one employ hundreds of Minnesotans, this is highly automated manufacturing. You can walk much of the line without seeing a soul. That and cheap aspen have made OSB so economical to produce it now claims 50% of the market once owned by plywood. Ron Salisbury is Potlatch's vice-president for Minnesota wood products.

RON SALISBURY: If you went into a plywood mill in the early '80s, it wasn't unusual to have 300 or so workers laying up the plywood. Today, if you look at an OSB plant, a particular shift takes about 22 people to run a 12-hour shift. That's from guard to supervisor to maintenance to quality control. That's everybody that takes to make a quality product.

LEIF ENGER: Remember that 6,000 mile pile of wood? OSB accounts for 2,000 of those miles all by itself. Simultaneously, the paper industry has mushroomed. Every major paper producer in Minnesota has expanded since 1980. All this growth driven by aspen and, says Dr. Jim Boyer, who teaches wood and paper science at the University of Minnesota, by those famous spotted owls in the forests of Oregon.

JIM BOYER: One person's tragedy is very often someone else's gain. And in the case of the Pacific Northwest, where there were massive job losses and so on, we saw tremendous growth of Minnesota's forest industry. And I think, in fact, that for a 10-year period, starting in the early 1980s, we were the fastest growing forest products industry of any state in the 50 states.

LEIF ENGER: But all that growth put pressure on Minnesota forests and on the industry they support. Environmentalists contended too much logging was underway. The state sponsored a generic environmental impact statement or GEIS designed to guide future timber policy.

The GEIS has been denounced by environmentalists who say it's too industry friendly, allowing, for example, a possible increase in logging to 4.5 million cords per year. Industry spokesman Wayne Brandt says the increase wouldn't hurt the forest a bit, but says pressure from environmental groups has already taken a lot of trees off the market.

WAYNE BRANDT: Forest service has decreased the amount of timber that they put up for sale. The DNR has decreased the amount that they put up for sale. There's only so much shifting between landowners that can occur.

LEIF ENGER: In the past, the industry bought about half its trees from national forests, state and County land, the other half from private landowners. Brandt says with public sources scaling back, the price of raw timber is climbing. Some manufacturers now import a percentage of their pulp from Canada.

WAYNE BRANDT: Their stumpage is under $5 and ours is $35 and above. If the trees in Minnesota get too costly, the manufacturing plants only have two choices, find less costly fiber or shut themselves down.

LEIF ENGER: The first option may be difficult. Environmental studies show in a decade or less, there could actually be a shortage of Minnesota aspen of the size used in paper and OSB. Meanwhile, mills in Canada and the Southern US are giving Minnesota producers more competition each year.

TOM NICHOLS: The clone is an NM6. It's actually a cross between black poplar from Europe and maximowiczii out of Japan. Tested well in Minnesota winters, and you can see that it's grown. We must be pushing 26, 27 feet now.

LEIF ENGER: To supplement what may be a shrinking wood supply. The industry is turning to science. Boise Cascade is one of several papermakers playing with aspen genetics. This NM6 clone, 26 feet tall, is just two years old. In a fusion of forestry and agriculture, the company has leased 700 acres to test thousands of hybrids. Research head Tom Nichols describes the ideal aspen.

TOM NICHOLS: The perfect tree would be almost 100% fiber. Thinner bark would be an ideal thing, nice, white color, insect resistance, disease, resistance. Cold hardiness is crucial to us.

LEIF ENGER: Though still experimental here, Boise Cascade has an 18,000 acre fiber farm in Washington State. The trees there reach 80 feet in six years and are cut for pulp. Every paper maker in Minnesota is either experimenting with hybrids or considering it. The U of M's, Jim Boyer, says in a culture torn between consumption and preservation, growing wood fiber as an agricultural crop may be an important compromise.

JIM BOYER: In the United States, every year we use more wood than all metals, all plastics and Portland and masonry cement combined. And yet our willingness to put up with the impacts of producing basic raw materials appears to be pretty much at an all-time low. Somehow we've got to find a way to bring those two things into sync. They have to come from someplace.

LEIF ENGER: Despite wood supply worries, Boyer believes the US market for paper and OSB will continue to drive Minnesota's timber industry. At least one market analyst has predicted a slowdown for the industry in 1999, followed by a recovery in 2000 or 2001. Leif Enger, Minnesota Public Radio.

RACHEL REABE: Coming up at noon today is a conversation with Jim Sanders of the Superior National Forest. Betsy Daub with the Audubon Society, and Wayne Brant, representing Minnesota Forest Industries. The phone lines will be open for your questions and comments.

But first, let's take a look at this changing winter weather today. For Koochiching Northern Saint Louis counties, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, including International Falls and Ely and Voyageurs National Park and Grand Marais, heavy snow and blowing snow is making driving dangerous. A winter storm warning is in effect for this afternoon and tonight.

A band of heavy snow has become established across the warning area. They're talking about snowfall rates of an inch or two per hour. Some locations could receive up to a foot of new snow from the storm by evening. The heavy snow may briefly diminish in some areas, but is expected to resume and continue this afternoon and through tonight.

Driving will be dangerous as some roads become blocked. Travel is not recommended in the warning area unless absolutely necessary. In the Twin Cities, there's a 50% chance of rain, possibly changing to light snow tonight and a 40% chance of light snow tomorrow morning.

MPR's Main Street radio coverage of rural issues is supported by the Blandin Foundation, committed to strengthening communities through grant making, leadership training and convening. We invite you to visit the Main Street website. Go to www.mpr.org, where you can hear today's program at your convenience. The address again is www.mpr.org.

I'm Rachel Reabe. This is a special two-hour Main Street Radio broadcast from Duluth on Minnesota's timber industry. We're listening to Our State, Our Forests, a five-part series airing this week on Minnesota Public Radio's All Things Considered.

The vast woodlands of Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and upper Michigan have long served as a refuge for wildlife. But as the intensified logging continues, environmentalists and many biologists are concerned that birds and wildlife that depend on older, diverse forests will suffer. Minnesota Public Radio's Mary Losure reports in the third part of our series on timber harvest issues.

MARY LOSURE: You can see the changes in Minnesota's forests near cache lakes cabin near Remer in Northern Minnesota. Luck, a former schoolteacher, bought her land there in 1968. In those days, she says, there was logging in the woods, but it was different than it is now.

LUCK: They would select a certain species, cut it with a chainsaw and move it out with a light skidder. Now, what I'm seeing now is semis in our forests. I counted at one time 35 going down Highway 6 out here within five hours, loaded to the gills. I go out and I watch how it's being cut today. I'll see huge machines, heavy machines, feller bunchers, heavy skidders out there cutting everything off.

MARY LOSURE: A few miles from her cabin, Luck walks through a leveled area, the size of several football fields. Only a few dozen trees are still standing. Clear cutting methods like these account for more than 80% of timber harvesting in Minnesota.

LUCK: Originally, I was not against logging. Now that I've walked these forests and seeing what's going on, I'm pulling back from walking them anymore because it is too disheartening.

MARY LOSURE: In her cabin, Luck has a copy of a Sierra Club book called Clear Cut with photos of vast, denuded landscapes, many of them in the Western United States. The logging in Minnesota doesn't look like the Sierra Club pictures, though. It's in much smaller patches, less visible in the state's flat terrain, cuts near highways or along spots frequented by tourists or hidden behind corridors of trees called Beauty strips.

But Betsy Daub of the National Audubon Society says Minnesota's North woods are slowly changing as older forests with a mixture of different types of trees are clear cut and converted into young stands dominated by one species, aspen. Aspen is a fast growing tree that sprouts from stumps left after clear cutting.

BETSY DAUB: Aspen is a perfectly good tree. The proliferation of it across the northern landscape means that we are simplifying our forest, and we are making it a much younger forest than it historically has been. And then the concern is what happens to all the plants and animals that have evolved over time with a much more diverse and a much older forest.

MARY LOSURE: An older forest with many different types and sizes of trees looks different from the young uniform stands that sprout after clearcutting. It also sounds different. At dawn in the Chippewa National Forest, wildlife biologist Rita Haret, listens intently to the birdsong all around her.

RITA HARET: There's a red eyed vireo behind me. They're really common. See, that bird right there sounds like, here I am. Look at me. Here I am.

MARY LOSURE: This particular site is a mature, diverse forest. Old aspen with birch, fir, and some maple mixed in. The birds calling here are typical of that kind of diverse habitat. A few miles away is a site that was clear cut 15 years ago. It's grown back to a brushy, uniform thicket of 10 to 15 foot tall aspen trees, what foresters call a regenerating stand. Haret notes down songs from a few bird species that like shrubby habitats. But most of the bird song seems to come from outside the aspen thicket.

RITA HARET: So when I'm hearing a lot of birds that are outside 100 meters, that aren't actually within the regenerating stand.

MARY LOSURE: I'm noticing. I mean, the birds here seem much more distant. They're just-- they're far away.

RITA HARET: Right. And they're probably singing from the mature forest or somewhere else outside of this stand of regenerating aspen. It's much quieter here.

MARY LOSURE: The question now is whether so many of Minnesota's older, diverse forests are being cut down, that wildlife that depend on older forests will suffer. Wayne Brandt, executive vice-president of Minnesota Forest Industries, a trade group representing the state's biggest pulp paper and lumber mills, dismisses the idea there is too much logging.

WAYNE BRANDT: On the state of Minnesota, we grow approximately 7.42 million cords of wood a year. We presently harvest 3.8 million cords of wood, so the harvest level is substantially below the growth.

RACHEL REABE: Brandt says the level of timber harvesting is still so low and Minnesota has so many trees that logging is not making a dent in the state's older forest habitat. He cites projections that show the area of the state's older forest will actually increase despite the cutting because so many middle aged trees are being left untouched to grow into older forests.

WAYNE BRANDT: Harvesting occurs on a little over 1% of the acres of forest land in any given year. So while harvesting has increased in the past 20 or 25 years, we believe that it's been done responsibly and continues to be done responsibly and that there is an opportunity for additional increases on into the future in a responsible manner.

MARY LOSURE: Environmentalists disagree. They say the industry's assurances that the area of older forest will increase are based on shaky models and faulty projections. And University of Minnesota Forest Ecologist John Pastor says while logging 1% of forest land a year might not sound like much, the vast majority of that is clearcutting, and clearcutting 1% of the forest a year means 10% in 10 years, and half of it in 50 years. He says under that scenario, huge tracts of older, diverse forests will be lost.

JOHN PASTOR: So what we're talking about is taking all this diversity of forest type and converting it back to young aspen stands at the rate of 1% of the acreage per year, and that's a lot, because if it's 1% per year going into those kinds of young forests over a long period of time, much of the forest gets converted to younger age classes.

MARY LOSURE: Pastor says given the industry's current practice of cutting trees at younger and younger ages, once those stands are clear cut, they will be cut again before they can mature. So those clear cut areas will not revert back to older, diverse forests.

It's not easy to tell which side is right, the industry or its critics. There are no up to date forest inventories that show clearly whether the composition of Minnesota's forests is changing. Both sides often cite a massive state sponsored study completed in 1994, but its realms of tables and statistics can be selectively used to support widely different interpretations of what's actually going on in Minnesota's forests.

The issue of whether the state is losing too much of its older forest has deeply divided the State Department of Natural Resources, which is responsible both for making timber sales on state land and for protecting the state's wildlife. Some DNR staff say there is little cause for worry. The younger forests left behind after clearcutting provide good habitat for popular game species, notably moose and white tailed deer. Deer populations have been thriving in part due to the increase in clearcutting.

But others in the agency expressed deep concern. Something's got to give, says one DNR biologist who declined a taped interview. Gretchen Mehmel, Red Lake area wildlife manager for the DNR, says foresters and biologists make the best decisions they can when deciding where to log and how many stands of older trees to leave for wildlife, but it's a hard call.

GRETCHEN MEHMEL: There's so much that's unknown. And I just hope when I drive by a stand where I used to, when I did a birding survey, heard a wood thrush, and now the stands been cut and you can't hear the wood thrushes call anymore, I just hope that we're making the correct decisions and that there are other areas where the wood thrush can go and then eventually come back to that stand when that stand grows up again.

MARY LOSURE: Because there is so much uncertainty over the effect of logging on Minnesota wildlife, the DNR is overseeing an eight-year study of Minnesota's forest birds in logged and unlogged areas. The study has shown no clear overall patterns. Its usefulness is limited because it applies only to the most abundant species, since two-thirds of Minnesota's forest birds are too rare to accurately monitor.

University of Minnesota Forest Ecologist John Pastor Worries that by the time scientists can find out for sure whether stepped up timber harvests are hurting the state's wildlife, it will be too late. And he says the wider question is not what level of logging wildlife can live with, but what kind of forest Minnesotans want to see in the future.

JOHN PASTOR: Do we want to see predominantly forests that are 30 and 40 years old or younger? I mean, I think what people should do is go look at a 30-year-old forest and see what it looks like. There's lots of it around. It's a thick aspen, maybe 6 inches in diameter and with not a whole lot underneath it, and look at it and say, think about the whole of Northern Minnesota being predominantly in this kind of forest. Is that what you want to bequeath your grandchildren?

MARY LOSURE: Timber industry representatives say this vision of a radically changed face of Minnesota's forests will never come true. It will be decades before the citizens of Minnesota can see who's right.

RACHEL REABE: Minnesota's timber harvest has increased 60% since 1980, when the pulp and paper industry began multi-million dollar expansions at mills across Northern Minnesota. Concerns over the stepped up logging have long prompted calls for improved forestry practices to protect woodland plants and wildlife. The timber industry says there has been substantial progress, but environmentalists say there have been few real reforms. Mary Losure continues her report.

MARY LOSURE: We're skimming 1,000 feet above the treetops. From that altitude, you can make out the varied shapes and colors of the Superior National Forest, the dark spires of evergreens and bright green puffy tops of birches and aspens. Biologist Chel Anderson looks down at the line that divides the Boundary Waters Canoe Area wilderness, which is protected from cutting from the rest of the Superior National Forest, which is not. The difference is stark.

CHEL ANDERSON: It's really obvious where the working forest, the harvestable part of the forest ends and the wilderness begins. The wilderness really-- here, you look out on contiguous forest. It's unrooted. It's not fragmented.

MARY LOSURE: If the wilderness looks like a new green carpet, the working forest alongside it looks like an old, ragged one. The brown patches of recent clearcuts look as though the carpet had worn through to the bare floor. Here and there you can see roads leading to piles of gray downed trees.

The view from the air is eye opening. It's clear the extent of the logging is much greater than anyone would realize from the ground. Anderson, a former Forest Service employee who is now an independent consulting biologist, is disturbed by both the amount of logging and how it's being done.

CHEL ANDERSON: This area up here around Greenwood lake is a good example of how there's been just a lot of cutting, but without much attention to the landscape results.

MARY LOSURE: Anderson calls it the cookie cutter approach to forestry. Uniform 40 to 100 acre clearings, a cut, then a fringe of trees, then another cut, a pattern extending off into the distance. She says that approach may suit people, but it doesn't suit the wide range of animals and plants that live in the forest, from songbirds to wildflowers to worms.

CHEL ANDERSON: By chopping everything up into small parcels and not acknowledging that some living things need different sized habitats and different combinations of habitats that are intact, we basically forego the opportunity to conserve those organisms.

MARY LOSURE: Environmentalists have long been worried about practices like these. Their concerns about the effect of intensified logging prompted the state of Minnesota to sponsor a massive study known as the generic environmental impact statement, which was completed in 1994. The GEIS, as it's known, recommended changes in forestry practices, so stepped up timber harvesting would not damage Minnesota's forest plants and wildlife.

In 1995, the Minnesota legislature set up the forest resources council to draw up voluntary logging guidelines. But those guidelines are still not complete. Environmentalists, like Betsy Daub of Minnesota's National Audubon Society, are getting tired of waiting.

BETSY DAUB: Since the beginning of this process, studying and talking, it's been nine years. And we still have years ahead of us, according to the land managers, before we might visualize change on the ground. And that's a very long time. And in the meantime, our forests are suffering.

MARY LOSURE: Jim Erkel of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy says environmental groups are becoming more and more disillusioned with the lengthy bureaucratic workings of the forest council.

JIM ERKEL: There are certainly those in the environmental community that think that this has been the strategy all along for the forest products industry to stretch out the process, to drag it out so that when site level guidelines, if any, are implemented, it will be way down the road.

MARY LOSURE: In the meantime, Erkel and others say hundreds of thousands of acres are being logged. The vast majority of them clearcut without proper safeguards to protect forest plants and wildlife. Environmentalists like Audubon's Betsy Daub say even areas identified by Forest Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources biologists as prime candidates for protection are being sold for timber, while the reform process grinds on.

BETSY DAUB: We feel a sense of urgency. These are processes that are going to take years still, and so we say what happens in the meantime. In the meantime, we see DNR timber sales and Forest Service timber sales in some of these identified special places, the best, the crown jewels of what we have left in Minnesota.

MARY LOSURE: Supporters of the state's current approach to forestry reform say the Forest Resources Council is a national model, a process in which varied interest groups sit down together to work out difficult solutions to highly complex problems. The council's executive director, Mike Kilgore, defends the pace of progress.

MIKE KILGORE: We're working in a collaborative mode. We're not command and control. We are seeking approaches that bring people together and try to find common ground. And when you do that, it takes time.

MARY LOSURE: The timber industry also defends the consensus approach. Wayne Brandt, executive vice-president of Minnesota Forest Industries, a trade group of the state's largest pulp paper and sawmills, says even without the formal guidelines, there have been real on the ground reforms in logging practices.

WAYNE BRANDT: Those who would suggest that forest management has been static since the GEIS was initiated or was completed, or that forest management and timber harvesting has done the same way today as it was done 15 years ago, ought to get out of their cars and get out into the woods and take a look at what's going on.

MARY LOSURE: Brandt notes, for example, that three-fourths of the wood harvested in Minnesota is by certified loggers, that loggers are leaving more standing trees for wildlife habitat and leaving buffers along streams. Loggers have also invested in new equipment to reduce soil compaction and erosion. Gerald Rose, director of the State Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, says the DNR has made major policy changes to ensure that increased timber harvesting does not diminish the biological richness of the state.

GERALD ROSE: We have an old growth program. We didn't have it 11 years ago. We have an extended rotation forest program. This stuff happened because the need evolved. As we began to harvest more intensively, it became necessary then to be more deliberate in identifying opportunities to maintain these kinds of habitats that were going to be lost if we didn't deliberately plan to get those done.

MARY LOSURE: While there are programs in place, environmentalists say the real test of whether reforms are working is what happens to rare biologically rich forests, places like a remote area in the Superior National Forest known as Big Lake Seven Beaver. The site has been identified by both state and federal biologists as a prime candidate for preservation, what environmentalists like Daub would call a crown jewel.

From the air, Big Lake Seven Beaver is a mosaic of different shades of green, wild forests surrounded by bogs, big shallow lakes and stretches of wild rice. Biologist Chel Anderson was one of several scientists commissioned by the Forest Service and the DNR to identify places within the Superior National Forest as possible preserves. She raided Big Lake Seven Beaver at the top of the list because of its exceptional size, diversity and lack of disturbance.

CHEL ANDERSON: On the landscape scale, this has the potential to be a wonderful place to see the relationships between a variety of habitats occurring in the natural landscape context and how those relationships play out in the natural world.

MARY LOSURE: The State Department of Natural Resources plans to build a road through Big Lake Seven Beaver to log DNR land inside the potential preserve. DNR officials defend the timber sale, which was planned long before the area was identified as a valuable study site. But Anderson and other critics say the planned logging of Big Lake Seven Beaver is a prime example of the lack of true reform.

CHEL ANDERSON: If public land managers aren't willing to take the steps necessary, well, then they should say so. Not say, well, yes, we want to do ecosystem management or we want to manage the forest for all values, but yet we're not willing to change anything about the way we do management.

MARY LOSURE: The DNR's decision to sell timber in an area identified by its own studies as a potential preserve has been the subject of intense controversy within the agency. One source inside the DNR puts it this way, we're talking the talk, but we're not walking the walk. It might be argued that no one site can be a test of how a whole state reform process is working. But if Big Lake Seven Beaver is such a test, then Minnesota appears to be failing.

RACHEL REABE: Efforts to preserve habitat for an elusive bird could cause much greater restrictions on the logging of the state's older forests. Mary Losure continues.

MARY LOSURE: In the Pacific Northwest, millions of acres of old growth timber have been protected from logging to save an endangered species, the famous spotted owl. So far, Minnesota has had no equivalent to the spotted owl, but its candidate for that role is an 18-inch tall hawk with a slate gray back, streaked breast and fierce red eyes, the northern goshawk.

From the point of view of conservationists eager to save old forests, the spotted owl was a perfect tool, a federally endangered species that depended for its survival on the ancient old growth forests of the West. But the goshawk isn't quite such a perfect tool. To begin with, it's not on the Federal Endangered Species list, but it is a rare species that government agencies, such as the Forest Service are obligated to protect, and it may depend on just the kind of forests conservationists in Minnesota want to save.

CLINT BOLLE: It's right through this opening right there. It's the tall aspen in the back. Look right up through there.

MARY LOSURE: In the Chippewa National Forest, in the shadowy light filtering through the canopy of big maples, basswoods, aspen and other trees, I can just make out the clump of sticks in the crook of an old Aspen. Biologist Clint Bolle is pointing out a goshawks nest. The goshawks have gone hunting.

CLINT BOLLE: They're called a short perch and wait predator. They fly up to a perch. And this is under the canopy of the forest, at the bottom of the canopy of the trees. They scan the area for a minute or two, then they move again. Scan, move, scan. They're built for speed, for a quick sprint. And they have a long tail that acts as a rudder and gives them a real amazing degree of maneuverability. The force provides an obstacle course and the goshawk is perfectly built to take on that challenge.

MARY LOSURE: The forest we are standing in is not true old growth. It's not virgin timber that has never been cut. There's almost none of that left in Minnesota. Massive logging at the turn of the century wiped out the state's cathedral-like groves of big white pines.

This stand in the Chippewa is what is now considered old forest for Minnesota, mature trees that have grown back since the state's Paul Bunyan era. The question now is whether the goshawk depends on these regrown, mature forests. This summer, Bolle's radio collared nine goshawks in and around the Chippewa.

CLINT BOLLE: He's transmitters have a position switch. So we can typically tell when they're perched, and when they're flying. The beep accelerates when they're flying.

MARY LOSURE: Bolle and other workers tracked the goshawks through the forest to find out exactly where the birds hunted. They mapped out the locations which will be analyzed to find out exactly what kind of habitat the goshawk requires in Minnesota. The timber industry, environmental groups and the US Forest Service are cooperating on the two-year study.

All are anxious to find out whether in Minnesota the goshawk needs large blocks of mature forests or can coexist with extensive logging. They don't know the answer yet, but the stakes are high. Raptor biologist Patricia Kennedy of Colorado State University says in other parts of the country, there have been significant reductions in timber harvesting to protect goshawk habitat.

PATRICIA KENNEDY: And what they've done, instead of just protecting the nest site, which may be, say, a 20 acre area, what they look at is protecting the area where the bird nests as well as where the bird hunts. And these birds hunt over 4,000 to 6,000 acre areas.

MARY LOSURE: It's not clear what effect protecting the entire range of nesting pairs of goshawks would have in Minnesota. No one knows exactly how many pairs of the birds live in the state. There are 13 known nests, but goshawks are reclusive and notoriously hard to study, and there have not been extensive surveys.

Kennedy says whether the goshawk proves an effective tool to reduce timber harvesting in Minnesota will also depend on whether state environmental groups are willing to press the issue. Ginny Yingling, Minnesota State Director of the Sierra Club, says so far, many of them have been holding back.

GINNY YINGLING: My sense is that most of the environmental organizations in Minnesota have not wanted to develop a spotted owl like conflict in this state, even though that did a lot for raising the issue of logging in the Western states and was a very good legal tool for slowing or stopping some of that logging.

MARY LOSURE: Yingling says the public often saw the spotted owl conflict as owls versus jobs, instead of an issue of preserving ancient forests. The bodies of spotted owls were found nailed to road signs, a backlash against the bird itself that environmentalists in Minnesota don't want to see happen to the goshawk.

Jim Erkel of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy calls fights over endangered species a backstop to use when all other efforts fail. But he says as the logging of mature forest in Minnesota continues, environmental groups are becoming more willing to consider such tactics.

JIM ERKEL: No matter what happens with the goshawk, this issue will continue coming up. It's not something that we can avoid. If it's not the goshawk, it may be a different species of bird that is dependent or has some need for old forest conditions. And we either address the problem now with the goshawk or it will be another species that will have to work with.

MARY LOSURE: Last year, the Minnesota Center for environmental advocacy, along with the Leach Lake Band of Chippewa, appealed a timber sale in a goshawks territory in the Chippewa National Forest. The Forest Service suspended the sale indefinitely. In the meantime, all sides are waiting for the results of the study of the goshawks habitat needs.

The timber industry does not expect it will have to make major changes. Tim O'Hara of Minnesota Forest Industries, a trade group representing the state's major pulp paper and lumber mills, says there's no evidence that in the midwest, the goshawk needs large blocks of unbroken forests.

TIM O'HARA: Its prey base. It's things like squirrels and rabbits and grouse, which is a main prey base for it. And those species are associated with younger forests. And the need for a older, mature forest comes with where it makes its nest and raises its young. So what we're speculating the goshawk would need, a whole mosaic out there, a young forest or older forests, which Minnesota has plenty of that habitat out there.

MARY LOSURE: O'Hara and other timber company representatives say Minnesota has plenty of older forests and can even increase logging rates without damaging wildlife species like the goshawk. John Schell, manager of Public Affairs for Blandin Paper Company in Grand Rapids, one of the state's biggest timber users, says from a broad environmental perspective, cutbacks in Midwest logging aren't even a good idea. He says worldwide demand for paper is growing. And if less logging is done here, more will be done in tropical rainforests and other places far less suitable to logging than the Midwest.

JOHN SCHELL: I think you have to step outside Minnesota and say on a worldwide basis, what is the best-- where is the best place to be growing these forests for industrial products. And your choice really comes down to the upper Midwest with a thriving industry now or other places such as eucalyptus plantations in South America, which are displacing huge areas of native rainforest and the richness of biodiversity that they represent.

MARY LOSURE: Schell says concerns about the goshawk, as well as other rare species, such as the boreal owl and the Canada lynx, are growing in Minnesota. But he says as an environmental issue, timber harvesting here is minor compared with the logging of ancient forests that sparked the spotted owl controversy out West.

JOHN SCHELL: It's really difficult for me to anticipate a representative of Earth First, for example, chaining himself around a 70-year-old aspen tree. That is not to say that these aren't resources that we need to manage effectively. It's simply saying that the issues of the West and the issues of the Midwest are not comparable.

MARY LOSURE: It's true that cutting 100-year-old trees in Minnesota is a less dramatic issue than the logging of 1,000 year old trees in the West. But the state is beginning to see more environmental activism as its stepped up timber harvest continues.

For the past two winters, Earth First activists have protested in the woods of Northern Minnesota. Nationwide, environmental groups have begun to take more interest in the fate of regrown forests and to pressure the US Forest Service to let older trees revert to wilderness, instead of being cut for pulp and paper. The goshawk may be a player in this battle, but its role, like its future, is still unclear. I'm Mary Losure, Minnesota Public Radio.

RACHEL REABE: Our state, Our Forest was written and produced by Mary Losure and Leif Enger, edited by Bill Buzenberg and Mike Edgerly. I'm Rachel Reabe. Next hour, you'll have a chance to call in with your questions and comments. It's all ahead after the news.

SPEAKER 2 : On the next All Things Considered, Our Series, Our State, Our Forest continues with a look at wildlife and logging. All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio.

RACHEL REABE: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. It's 43 degrees at KNOW FM 91.1. Minneapolis Saint Paul. Today's Twin Cities weather calls for a 50% chance of rain with a high in the mid 40s, 60% chance of precipitation tonight in the form of rain changing to light snow. Temperature again in the Twin Cities, 43 degrees.