Word: lumbered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...city meaning there is to the notion of anyone's owning such a place loses force among the trees. Here the concept of unregulated private property, much admired by logging outfits, is an empty legalism.But the fact is that Headwaters and miles beyond it are owned, as is Pacific Lumber, by Hurwitz's Houston-based Maxxam company. After he grabbed Pacific in a 1986 hostile takeover, paid for largely with junk bonds issued by Drexel Burnham Lambert's Michael Milken, Hurwitz visited Pacific's mills at Scotia. "There's a story about the golden rule," he told employees...
Hero or villain? Hurwitz didn't fire anybody; he hired more workers and added a fourth mill. He continued a Pacific Lumber practice of giving a college scholarship to every employee's child who finished high school. Top hourly pay runs about $15 to $16 an hour, in an area of high unemployment. When he refinanced Pacific's debt a year ago, issuing $620 million in high-interest bonds to pay off $510 million in junkers, the fact that he also paid Maxxam a $25 million dividend from the new debt raised only murmurs. That was how the big boys...
...Pacific Lumber has been logging for 125 years and is accustomed to indulgent treatment by state forestry officials. Now several local creatures are on endangered-species lists: not only the murrelets but also the spotted owl, the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle and a couple of humble amphibians, the Pacific giant salamander and the tailed frog. While Coho salmon still spawn in Headwaters streams, stocks of this once plentiful game fish have crashed so sharply off California -- in part because of logging erosion -- that all sport and commercial fishing was banned recently. Environmentalists gripe that wildlife-survey regulations...
...federal-court lawsuit on the Owl Creek logging, due for trial in July, may determine how seriously logging firms must take endangered-species regulations. Mark Harris, a young lawyer for EPIC, which brought the suit, is bitter about Pacific Lumber and Maxxam. "They're hosing this county," he says. "If they've got a new Blazer in the driveway, that's their environment." In April EPIC also sued the California Department of Forestry for "failing to lawfully respond to environmental issues" in approving old- growth cutting. Lasting protection of the old-growth redwoods, however, depends on Congressman Hamburg's Headwaters...
Hurwitz, in the meantime, regards the world contentedly from the cover of a magazine called Leaders, which flatters CEOS with softball interviews. (Sample question: "You see opportunities where others may not see them?" Hurwitz's reply: "Yes.") He tells Leaders that his lumber people are looking into operations in New Zealand, South America, Mexico and Russia...