By CHARLES MiiCCOY

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

        After Mr. McCrary's Big Creek Lumberii Co. bought 4,000 acres of redwood and fir forest above Butano Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1991, a lot of envi­ronmentalists were relieved: The par­cel's previous owner, Texas finan­cier Charles Hur­witz, had a reputa­tion for ruthless clear-cutting of an­cient forests; Mr. McCrary avoids clear-cutting and planned to cut just four old-growth trees an acre.

        "The Butano had been rescued," re­calls Gail Lucas, a former Sierra Club timber expert. "We knew Bud would log that land with care."

        But Mr. McCrary is also a symbol of a split in environmentalists' attitudes, with an increasing number abandoning support of careful, selective logging and opposing cutting any very old trees. The Sierra Club has turned on Mr. McCrary, joining court actions to stop him from logging the Butano. More extreme groups have used sabotage to slow his crews.

        “We will defend the trees of the Butano however we can,” says Daniel Barron, leader of a coalition including Greenpeace, Earth First! and local activists, which has put people on platforms in Mr. McCrary's trees to block their felling. "We want Big Creek out of business in the Butano."

        Asks Mr. McCrary: "Is it immoral to cut down an old tree?" To which Mr. Barron replies: "Absolutely."

Peace at Hand?

        President Clinton's call for the timber summit in Portland, Ore., prompted a gush of optimism that peace in the forests might at long last be on the horizon. Indeed, one seemingly promising proposal sure to come out of the summit will be a commit­ment from the timber industry to employ more of the low-impact techniques for which Mr. McCrary is known. Yet now even Mr. McCrary is having trouble cut­ting trees, underscoring the great diffi­culty of reaching compromise in the for­est.

        While federal policy makers have de­bated endlessly how to balance wildlife protection and timber harvest rates, many of the trench warriors in the forest wars, among both environmentalists and timber interests, have become increasingly radi­cal. Meanwhile, lumber prices are skyrocketing, largely because of logging restrictions on public land, provoking heavy cutting -- often with the brutish methods -- on much private land.

        For Mr. McCrary, a slim, soft-spoken 66-year-old, the flak is jarring after so many years of being regarded as a forest good guy. The McCrarys have lived along Big Creek, a waterfall-studded torrent, for four generations. Bud and his brother, Frank "Lud" McCrary, 64, started cutting timber on family land after returning from World War II; today, their Big Creek company owns about 8,000 acres and logs periodically on thousands more acres, all private. It employs 170 people and has annual sales of about $30 million. In its 47-year existence, Mr. McCrary says, the company has always made money.

Unusual Combination

        For most of that time, Mr. McCrary also was unscathed by the ferocious fights between loggers and environmentalists. Mr. McCrary -- and his green friends -- say that is because the McCrarys' approach blends a woodsman's respect for the land with a general indifference to maximum short-term profits, an unusual combina­tion in the timber business. Agnes McCrary, Bud and Lud's 89-year-old mother, says this may stem from a lifetime spent living on the land they log.

        "The boys learned that the real value out here isn't money or fancy clothes, it's the land," she says. "Destroy the land and you've got nothing."

        Bud McCrary puts it another way: "There's a lot of talk about bottom lines in this business, but the real bottom line is what will be here in 50 years, in 100 years, in 200 years."

        Such pronouncements from a logger might invite skepticism, but testimonials for Big Creek roll in from unlikely angles. "Mr. McCrary works with the forest, as opposed to working over the forest," says William Dempsey, a Nature Conservancy field representative. Adds Ms. Lucas, for­merly the Sierra Club's top California forest expert: "If all logging was done as carefully as Bud's, we wouldn't have a crisis in our forests."

        Last month, some West Coast environ­mentalists fearful about the future of Sibe­ria's virgin forests had Mr. McCrary meet with Russia's minister of natural re­sources. "We wanted Bud to explain to the minister that there are ways to log produc­tively without devastating the forests," says Mr. Dempsey.

        Out in the forests on a recent morning, it is clear that Big Creek isn't a run-of-the-­mill operation. Its lands bear none of the tractor gashes, smoldering clear-cuts and football-field-size landslides that mar much of the West's timberland. Roads are narrower than those other loggers cut, and built to minimize erosion. Big Creek typi­cally cuts only about half of the large trees on a tract; other California loggers often obliterate everything on an 80-acre parcel, the maximum clear-cut under state law. Oregon and Washington allow 500­-acre clear-cuts.

        Mr. McCrary lopes up a steep slope to part of an area logged three years ago. Big Creek took enough timber out of here to build dozens of houses. Now, young red­woods and firs sprout where the old trees stood. They jostle for light with 40-year-­old, 100-foot trees that weren't touched by the logging. The area doesn't look much different from the county-owned parkland that starts a few yards away.

        At times Mr. McCrary seems to have more in common with his opponents than with the rest of the timber business. He has donated land and money for a salmon and steelhead hatchery on the family home­stead to try to bring fish back to Big Creek and other nearby streams; past logging by other companies helped ruin spawning beds. Every year, he leads a Sierra Club day-hike to a series of wild, tree-lined waterfalls on McCrary land. Berry Falls, a gorgeous cascade flanked by 600-year-old redwoods, used to be on the McCrarys' land; they sold the spot to a state park in the 1960s. "It was, a special place, and it just had more value to society as park­land," Mr. McCrary says.

        Some in the timber industry regard Mr. McCrary as sanctimonious, and point out that as a private company, Big Creek doesn't face any pressure to maximize profits or please shareholders. Some think his green connections amount to fraterniz­ing with the enemy. But mostly, he is resented by some, timber interests for demonstrating that low-impact techniques work; timber companies have dismissed the gentler approach as hopelessly unecon­omic. "Bud's success stands as a reproach to them," says Robert Hrubes, a forestry consultant in Point Richmond, Calif.

        Mr. McCrary's recent troubles have made him a trailblazer in the art of what he calls “political forestry.”  Basically, this means constantly engaging opponents, trying to ease their fears and change their minds about big Creek’s work.  It carries Mr. McCrary into places where most woodcutters dare not tread.

        One such place is the University of California campus at Santa Cruz.  On a recent Friday night, Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, is addressing several hundred students and forest activists.  Mr. McCrary sits among them. "Howl with me now, howl for the wolf," Mr. Foreman implores. "Aaah-Rooo!" he cries: The audience also wails - except for Mr. McCrary. He scratches his thick white hair, watching in silence.

        Up to the howling part, Mr. Foreman has been talking eloquently about the need to restore the lost paradise of primordial American nature -- which, of course, would require severe logging restrictions. So when the howling fades, Mr. McCrary makes his way toward Mr. Foreman. "I own a logging company, and I enjoyed your speech," says Mr. McCrary. Mr. Foreman, who isn't accustomed to compli­ments from loggers, smiles and says: "Then, I'll have to get more radical." They talk about whether it is possible to log without wrecking the forest. They don't agree, but Mr. McCrary ends up inviting Mr. Foreman to tour Big Creek's opera­tions -- surely one of the few times a lum­berjack has asked such a renowned eco-radical onto his lands.

Unexpected Opposition

        The trouble around Butano Creek started in 1990, when Mr. McCrary began trying to log tracts in the area. He wasn't expecting a fuss. Big Creek had done some logging on the Butano without incident for several years as a contractor for Pacific Lumber Co. He had volunteered to put 378 acres of the land's old-growth trees in a conservation area, off limits to the saw. He planned to cut about four old trees an acre over three or four years.

Moreover, while the Butano woods are lovely, they aren't the dense weave of ancient trees at the heart of the West's timber battles. Except for the acres Mr. McCrary targeted for conservation, most of the old-growth habitat that once covered the land was wiped out by clear-cutting by other companies in the 1950s. What is left is mostly second-growth redwoods about 40 to 60 years old, with a few pockets of older giants. The area has no spotted owls. "We really didn't expect this kind of fight," Mr. McCrary says.

        It started nonetheless. The Audubon Society, a fly-fishermen's group and Mr. McCrary's old friends at the Sierra Club banded together to challenge Big Creek in court, where forest defenders have scored big victories in recent years. The suit, filed in early 1991 in state court in Redwoodi City, Calif., alleged that Big Creek's log­ging would imperil the marbled murrelet, a reclusive and endangered seabird pro­tected by state and federal law. In October of that year, a state judge dismissed the suit; citing a lack of evidence.

        A few months later, a second suit containing most of the same allegations was, filed in the same court. Biologists testified that no murrelet nests existed on the land and praised Big Greek's murrelet protections. State Judge Judith Kozloski ruled against the environmentalists, call­ing the case an "end-run" around the previous defeat. She ordered the plaintiffs to pay Big Creek's attorney fees.

        The real action, though, has been in the woods. Since last summer, Earth First! and other activists have bedeviled Big Creek with a tactic known as monkey wrenching. They have drained transmis­sion fluid from Big Creek tractors. They have plugged padlocks with epoxy and quick-drying cement. An activist calling herself Three Sisters camped in one of Mr. McCrary's tall redwoods for six days in protest before she was hauled down. Oth­ers have handcuffed and chained them­selves to logging trucks and to the sawmill main gate. Once, an exasperated Mr. McCrary, under the watchful eye of police, cut some of them loose with a blowtorch.

        The court maneuvering and sabotage slowed Big Creek's cutting and added hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs from legal fees and additional security, Mr. McCrary says. The result: By late fall, facing a shortage of raw logs, Mr. McCrary, for the first time, cut back workers' hours and put his main sawmill on a four-day work week. In December, he closed the mill altogether. It has been shuttered since.

        Now, as logging season looms, the Butano battle is flaring again: Big Creek is seeking approval from state forest regulators to log four old trees an acre on a different part of the property. Mr. McCrary says he needs the logs to reopen his mill. His opponents have bombarded timber regulators with complaints and threatened more lawsuits.

Some environmentalists think Mr. McCrary's critics are barking up the wrong tree - and may end up hurting the larger cause of forest protection. "Some people would rather fight than win," says the Nature Conservancy's Mr. Dempsey. "I admire these people's commitment and energy, but there are lots of villains in the forest. Bud's not among them."

        Particularly puzzling to some of Mr. McCrary's supporters is the Sierra Club's role. The club's national leaders' proposals on logging reform have never called for a total ban on the cutting of old trees -- in fact; they promote the kind of selective cutting Mr. McCrary has helped pioneer. Darryl Young, the club's legislative direc­tor for California, says the Butano is a special case. "We think Big Creek does a good job generally, but we don't think any old growth should be cut in the Butano," he says. "It's been ravaged in the past. . . . I'll admit that our position might seem contradictory."

Abused Forest

        Other Butano defenders offer more impassioned arguments. They contend that the Butano ecosystem was so badly abused by slash-and-burn cutting that it must be left untouched for decades if it is to recover. They worry that any new logging will trigger landslides that could clog Bu­tano Creek, damaging steelhead spawning sites, and silt up Pescadero Marsh, a coastal wetland the creek spills into. In­deed, for years after the earlier logging, parts of the creek were plugged with dirt, twigs and debris. They insist that marbled murrelets do need the old trees proposed for cutting, and that other rare species­ -- townsend big-eared bats, foothill yellow­-legged frogs, sharp-shinned hawks -- could be jeopardized, too.

        Then there are the moral arguments. Many of Big Creek's opponents simply believe it is wrong to cut down trees, particularly older ones. They say at least 90% of the nation's virgin forests are gone; many creatures dependent on them are gone or endangered. "We have laid waste to the forests, exterminated species," says Mr. Barron. "These trees are living beings that loggers are killing, and that is mani­festly wrong."

        All this weighs on Mr. McCrary. He won't talk much about Big Creek's finan­cial condition, but he clearly made a big stretch by buying the Butano tract for about $8 million. "We've got big payments to make," he says. "It's hard to make payments when you can't work much." Lately, he says, he has begun to think about maybe selling the Butano land, re­tiring to a life of hiking and building trails. But who would buy the land? The most likely bidders would be timber com­panies with deeper pockets, or housing developers. "Would that be progress?" he wonders aloud.

        Mr. McCrary's mother, Agnes, won­ders, too. She sits with Bud at her kitchen table, looking through old family photos. Some show parts of McCrary land almost bare of trees -- not from logging but from natural forces like lightning-sparked fires, which in the days before modern firefight­ing techniques regularly leveled tracts of forest land. Those same lands today are covered with redwoods and Douglas firs.

        She picks out a photo of a young Agnes, age five, standing next to a spindly red­wood just about as tall as she was. Today that tree is 140 feet tall and 15 feet around. "McCrarys have taken good care of this land for along time," she says. "It'd be awful sad to see that come to an end."

©THE WALL STREET JOURNAL THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 1993