Word: northwest
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...futures of the owl and the ancient forest it inhabits have become entwined in a common struggle for survival. Man's appetite for timber threatens to consume much of the Pacific Northwest's remaining wilderness, an ecological frontier whose deep shadows and jagged profile are all that remain of the land as it was before the impact of man. But rescuing the owl and the timeless forest may mean barring the logging industry from many tracts of virgin timberland, and that would deliver a jarring economic blow to scores of timber-dependent communities across Washington, Oregon and Northern California...
...life cycle of the Pacific Northwest's primeval woodlands is measured not in decades but in centuries. No amount of saplings and science can make up for years of wanton harvesting, or replace a thousand-year-old fir. Only time can do that -- and time may be short for those mills that are specially designed to devour the old firs. The owners eye the forests hungrily, knowing they cannot wait for the millions of seedlings and young trees to mature. If the industry is allowed to keep cutting, some forestry experts say, the last ancient forests outside wilderness areas could...
...grasp the distinction by looking out from any one of a thousand promontories in the Northwest. Clear-cutting -- the indiscriminate leveling of every tree in an area -- has left the wilderness fragmented and scarred. Long after the last truck has pulled out, heavy with logs, and the debris has been torched, what remains is a blackened earth, pockmarked and studded with tombstone-like stumps. "It looks like Alamogordo, as if it's been nuked," concedes Dan Schindler, a Forest Service district ranger...
...logging operations have tattered the seamless fabric of old growth that once covered the land. "There are more holes in the blanket than there is blanket," laments BLM biologist Frank Oliver. According to the National Audubon Society, each year enough old-growth trees are taken from the Pacific Northwest to fill a convoy of trucks 20,000 miles long...
...transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual," says Richard Brown of the National Wildlife Federation. Less than 10% of the ancient forest that once covered the Northwest remains. From Alaska to British Columbia to Oregon, forests that predate the 13 Colonies are being sacrificed for plywood, planks and pulp. The rapidity with which these primeval stands are being cut down has driven a handful of environmental extremists to sabotage timber-industry equipment, tie themselves to trees slated...