San Francisco Chronicle -- Getting clear with Sierra Pacific Industries

A patch of forestland, owned by Sierra Pacific Industries near the Sierra foothills town of Manton, Calif., shows the immediate effects of clearcutting. Photo Courtesy of Marily Woodhouse

It is California's largest private landowner, with swaths of acreage that cascade from the state's far north all the way to Yosemite.

Sierra Pacific Industries may not be a household name, but anyone who's driven to the Sierra has seen the logging company's holdings: Mile after mile of trees that are majestic spirals of brown and green. The forest areas owned by Sierra Pacific Industries are an environmental treasure - one worth billions of dollars for the potential values of lumber and land.

"We're in the timber business," said Mark Pawlicki, director of government affairs for Sierra Pacific Industries. "That's our primary business. We grow trees and make wood products."

The company owns so much of California - 1.7 million acres of the state's forestland - that its properties put together are well more than twice the size of Yosemite National Park. Company officials say it's a responsibility they take seriously. But some activists say Sierra Pacific Industries causes untold damage with their logging practices.

Marily Woodhouse knows the arguments. For the past year, the 51-year-old resident of Manton - a sleepy Tehama County town of 750 people in the Sierra foothills - has come to know everything about Sierra Pacific Industries. A part-time bartender with no previous experience as an activist, Woodhouse is trying to prevent the Redding company from cutting every tree on an 800-acre land tract near Manton. Woodhouse said the clear-cutting would be followed by the planting of new trees that require huge amounts of herbicides, which she fears will leak into a nearby creek that supplies Manton with its water.

Last year, Woodhouse gathered signatures of a fifth of the town's residents on a petition to stop Sierra Pacific Industries' plan. And when the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection gave the company the go-ahead anyway, Woodhouse and other activists sued to stop it in Tehama County Court. The suit, filed last month, is still active.

"What's being done here is not logging, it's deforestation," Woodhouse said. "We're not trying to stop their logging. We're just trying to make it sustainable. You can't assault the environment like this and expect everything to be OK."

Woodhouse's cause is supported by ForestEthics, a San Francisco environmental group that has asked Sierra Pacific Industries to curtail its clear-cutting (which it says destroys wildlife habitat) and to accept voluntary monitoring by the Forest Stewardship Council, an independent oversight group that ensures forest wood is harvested using safe environmental practices.

Sierra Pacific Industries instead adheres to the standards of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, a group directed by the timber and paper industries. The company argues that the industry group is comparable to the Forest Stewardship Council.

The family-run Sierra Pacific Industries says its logging practices are environmentally sound - it replants five trees for every tree it cuts down; only harvests 1.2 percent of its land each year; uses herbicide amounts that are approved by state regulators; and sticks to a company pledge to "protect, maintain, or improve" water quality, plant and animal life, and fish and wildlife habitat. By clearing parcels of old-growth forests that it describes as "rotting," Sierra Pacific believes it removes a potential fire danger. Activists counter that those old forests are valuable habitat for rare species.

The company will agree with Woodhouse and ForestEthics only on one point: Its clear-cut tracts "look ugly." Viewed on satellite imagery, Sierra Pacific Industries' acreage is full of diamond- and square-shaped tracts of barren-looking, clear-cut land. Sierra Pacific Industries says these land tracts are eventually replanted with new trees.

"We're engaged in active forest management," Pawlicki said, "and in active forest management, you use several different types of forestry techniques - whatever is appropriate for the area. No matter what mechanism we use, we're growing far more (trees) than we're harvesting."

Asked how the sustainable movement has impacted Sierra Pacific Industries, Pawlicki points to one area: The growing demand for wood in green products. "Wood is the ultimate green building material," he said. "It's renewable, and it takes very little energy to produce."

Still, the nationwide housing slump has hurt Sierra Pacific Industries, which relies on new homes that need its lumber. "So much with us," Pawlicki said, "is directly tied to housing."

Sawmills were the company's first enterprise. Originally called R.H. Emerson & Son, Sierra Pacific Industries was started in the 1920s by a man whose descendants are still at the helm. Its expansion into land owning accelerated in the 1980s and '90s when it paid $660 million for almost a million acres of timberland throughout Northern California. Sierra Pacific Industries owns nearly 2 percent of the state's land, making it a major player in any consideration of the state's environmental future.

The Trust for Public Land is looking to buy some of that land back, including 7,000 acres near Lake Tahoe that would elongate a wildlife corridor linked to Tahoe National Forest. The trust has worked previously with Sierra Pacific Industries to buy small portions of its holdings.

"We've worked with Sierra Pacific Industries for many years now, and it's been an excellent working relationship," said David Sutton, Sierra Nevada program director for the Trust for Public Land. "We've done a lot of important land conservation together. They've been an extremely reliable landowner to work with."

ForestEthics isn't convinced. In an effort to stop Sierra Pacific Industries' clear-cutting, the organization has orchestrated public protests against the company, including its Fremont division called Sierra Pacific Windows. ForestEthics is even asking people to consider boycotting wood that Sierra Pacific Industries harvests from its Sierra lands - an extreme approach that mirrors the organization's "Victoria's Dirty Secret" campaign, when it targeted the lingerie maker because it was sending out millions of catalogues made from the pulp of old-growth trees in Canada.

After ForestEthics organized protests in front of Victoria's Secret stores and ran newspaper ads that showed a model with a chain saw, the lingerie-maker's parent company agreed to alter its paper use. Among the changes: printing catalogues with more recycled paper or on paper that meets specifications of the Forest Stewardship Council.

Josh Buswell-Charkow, ForestEthics' Sierra campaigner, estimated that the "Victoria's Dirty Secret" campaign helped save 12 million acres of forestland, most in Canada. He said ForestEthics' Sierra campaign would save tens of thousands of majestic trees from the Sierra Pacific Industries chopping block.

"We're trying to shift the market away from rewarding this kind of clear-cutting, toward a more creative alternative," Buswell-Charkow said. "When a company wants to do the right thing, we'll work with them."

Sierra Pacific Industries has refused to meet with the San Francisco group. The clear-cutting of trees near Manton - approved by state agencies - could take place this summer. If there are protests, more people will hear about a private company that is still little known to the millions of people who visit the Sierra every year.