People coming of political age in the last decade or so were no doubt shocked to learn of the Biden administration’s insane plan for saving the northern spotted owl from purported extinction. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act, preserving the owl requires slaughtering nearly half a million barred owls at a cost, opponents say, of $1.3 billion over the next 30 years. That is so, the FWS maintains, because the larger, aggressive barred owl is killing its cousin at a prodigious rate.
Perhaps more stunning to these political newcomers is that the FWS made a similar prediction over 30 years ago regarding the northern spotted owl. In the early 1990s, the agency declared that logging in the Pacific Northwest, throughout Washington, Oregon, and northern California, was destroying the owl’s essential habitat and must end.
In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration, over the objections of tiny timber towns throughout the region and those who had worked, lived, and recreated there for generations, did just that. The government’s edict, an 80% reduction in timber harvesting, soon became 90%, devastating some 130 rural communities in Oregon and Washington alone.
Thirty years later, nothing has changed. None of these communities has “recovered.” Apparently, working for the FWS means never having to say, “We got it wrong,” let alone, “We’re sorry.”
President Donald Trump has promised relief, both by “Restoring Gold Standard Science” and by resuming the original mission of the Forest Service — that is, the “continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” In the meantime, the daily news tells of ravenous, deadly, and destructive wildfires sweeping across neglected federal lands — that is, lands off-limits to thinning, wood production, and even the basic necessity of fire breaks for town safety, as revealed horrifically in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.
Fortunately, for those who care about nature and the people who live and work in its midst, there is an exciting, fast-paced, fact-based novel in which only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain by T.H. Platt follows environmental reporter Grace Newman as she clashes with a truth-telling third-generation logger at an environmental conference in Los Angeles. She sets out for the Pacific Northwest to uncover his lies and retain the acclaim of her host of friends in the environmental and academic community.
Platt, a veteran of the environmental wars of the 1990s, knows whereof she speaks. Her family and friends had fished for tuna for generations on the high seas in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, an 8 million-square-mile area stretching from California to Chile and out to Hawaii. Radical environmentalists targeted this fishing community and mandated “solutions” that destroyed thousands of jobs while negatively affecting the fishery. I profiled her battle in It Takes a Hero, my 1994 book about former recluses such as her who fought back against the enormously affluent and powerful environmental juggernaut. Later, she spent time in the Pacific Northwest, Washington, D.C., and Europe.
What Grace discovers from college-educated logger Jackson Armstrong, who quotes Thoreau as easily, but differently, as do her environmental group friends at their galas and fundraisers in Los Angeles, shatters her illusions. You call us “timber dependent communities,” he scolds; “We in Silvercreek are not timber dependent. You are.”
Jackson tells how radicals “dumped sand in the gas tank” of the equipment at his mill, costing “thousands to repair,” while their lawyers “pour sand in everything, muddying up the works,” endangering his mill’s very existence. There is nothing Jackson, his family, friends, employees, and neighbors are unwilling to discuss in painstaking detail, from the magnificent and endlessly sustainable Douglas Fir forest that surrounds them, to their family mill that opened shortly after the Civil War, to the technological innovations necessary to keep pace economically and with the needs of the world’s urban, timber-dependent, but uninformed and unappreciative, communities.
Slowly, Grace begins to question everything she thought she knew. Then things turn dark — as one reviewer put it, what follows is “murder, treachery, betrayal and an inside look at the billionaire cult aspiring to control every acre of land on earth.”
There is not a false or insincere voice in The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, least of all from the men and women of the timber towns who have nothing left to lose by speaking forthrightly. Years ago, at the Northern Spotted Owl Wars conferences in Portland, Oregon, I represented them. Before that, I spent time in their woods, their mills, and their tiny towns and villages. Reading Platt’s book, I am back with them. It is painful, sobering, and sad, but it is also educational and encouraging. The war on the rural west and its productive, creative, and inventive people is not over.
HISTORIC GRAND CANYON LODGE DESTROYED AS WILDFIRES RAGE IN ARIZONA: WHAT TO KNOW
It has, however, gone global, and now our government has declared that the owls themselves are to be destroyed. As the book’s characters uncover the games being played by the rich, famous, and powerful and the shoddy science underlying their plan to make hundreds of thousands of America’s magnificent birds of prey their next victims, your blood will run cold.
By giving access to worlds many do not know exist, this beautifully written novel engages and changes the reader. The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain is available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and via Substack’s digital platform, where readers in 39 countries posted laudatory reviews.
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based public interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.