The inland flight to Olympic National Forest is as majestic as any in America: Snowcapped mountains pierce a 3,000-foot ceiling of marshmallow cumulus that sandwiches our tiny Cessna 185 between mist and towering spruce. Our hawk-sized shadow glides over glistening wavelets of Puget Sound, over houses the size of Monopoly hotels with woodpiles that look like stacks of toothpicks.
”Let`s take a look up above,” pilot Michael Stewartt says as we swoop up into the cloud ceiling and over the first peak, about 45 minutes inland.
”There you go,” he says, ”this is what flight can show you-people don`t know this is going on.”
Spread before us is a 20-square-mile stretch of peaks and valleys that look like a marine haircut gone awry: entire mountainsides shaved down to stubble or bare dirt, leaving only the indent of logging roads spiraling to the top like the threads of a corkscrew. For the next hour we will navigate hundreds of feet above the ground, wielding a camera out the small, hinged window for aerial documentation.
This day`s ”Lighthawk” flight with a single journalist-later with a group of environmental experts-is a way to trumpet the plight of the shrinking primeval forests of the Northwest and to point out the further threat to an entire disappearing ecosystem.
Pilots for Project Lighthawk, which Stewartt founded, are aerial crusaders in the cause of conservation. This year they will fly similar missions from Alaska to Costa Rica, logging about 150,000 miles, spotlighting environmental hazards from waste dumps to spewing smokestacks, as well as identifying the perpetrators, whether strip miners or illegal squatters.
The Santa Fe-based group of pilots and volunteers named themselves for a mythical bird ”whose purpose is to shed light,” Stewartt says.
The key point Lighthawk wants to make is visceral and visual; something beyond statistics and environmental reports. By showing citizens, journalists and legislators the impact of, for example, a proposed nuclear waste site just one mile from Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, Lighthawk can help shape public opinion on environmental controversies.
Formed about 10 years ago, and now with hundreds of projects to its credit, Lighthawk is working with the Seattle Wilderness Society to chronicle the number of acres of old forest growth left. The figures will be compared with those of the U.S. Forest Service. Discrepancies-early estimates differ by hundreds of thousands of acres, Stewartt says-will be disclosed to journalists and legislators, in an effort to reverse the logging trend.
”Lighthawk is one of the most important and effective conservation efforts in the U.S. today,” says George Frampton, president of the Wilderness Society, one of more than 100 conservation organizations that have employed Lighthawk`s services.
It was an aerial mission such as this in the mid-1970s that led Stewartt to found Lighthawk, not only to spotlight environmental problems but to help solve them. (Pilots and planes have also been used for such purposes as a recent airlift of an endangered grouse, which might have become extinct had Lighthawk not rallied in very short time to save the world`s last 14 birds.)
In 1974, Stewartt had been a pilot for commuter airlines in Colorado and the Caribbean, as well as a bush pilot in Nome, Alaska. A native of Tucson, he offered to assist a Santa Fe environmental group opposed to the construction of a massive coal-fired power plant on the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah. When a press conference was organized to spread the word that pollution from the plant would spoil views of the nearby Grand Canyon and other parks, Stewartt organized planes and pilots to help photojournalists and network camera crews take a look.
The resulting news coverage caused such public uproar that officials proposing the plant scrapped the project. Many lauded the initiative of Stewartt. Four years later, in 1978, with a single plane, Lighthawk was off the ground. Today, two planes, two staff pilots, and seven volunteer pilots log tens of thousands of miles a year.
The result has been a string of victories for environmentalists. Among them was the closing last year of the Phelps Dodge copper-smelting plant in Douglas, Ariz., which was for 40 years the largest single source of sulfur-dioxide emissions-a major component of acid rain-in the United States. Lighthawk helped bring about national media exposure by flying journalists, politicians and experts over the remote plant site, near the Mexican border.
On their own initiative, Lighthawk members helped expose illegal logging and gold mining in protected land on the Osa Peninsula, adjacent to the Corcovado National Forest in Costa Rica. Pilots photographed clear-cut forests and burned pastures at low altitude and presented them to the minister of natural resources, Alvaro Humana Quesada. Later trips revealed stripping of stream beds, expressly forbidden in contracts with gold miners.
And in the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, Lighthawk has for more than a year been showing congressional and conservation leaders the results of the federal government`s logging subsidies. In 1986, for instance, the U.S. Forest Service spent more than $53 million to build logging roads and promote commercial timbering there. In return, it received $86,000 in total revenue from the sale of the trees. ”Trees that are over 9 feet in diameter and 100 feet tall are sold for $3 each and turned into pulp for Japan`s chemical and paper companies,” says Lighthawk`s Steele Wotkyns.
Lighthawk has developed a history of making airplanes available at about cost, $35 an hour, to smaller organizations.
”Lighthawk has really given the conservation community in the West some wings,” says Darrell Knuffke, Central Rockies regional director of the Wilderness Society.
Flying clients for cost means Lighthawk is always soliciting donations.
”We need money badly,” says Stewartt, who is looking to add a helicopter, a land rover and another plane that can land on water. Besides equipment, there are are operating costs, $202,000 this year, nearly all covered by donations. As a nonprofit conservation organization, Lighthawk depends on foundation grants, individual donations, client fees, and $35-a-year membership dues.
Donation of a Helio Courier bush airplane and 150 hours` worth of fuel got Lighthawk`s first clients up over a proposed dam site on Colorado`s Gunnison River. Builders reconsidered plans after Lighthawk found that valuable archeological digs would be flooded if the proposed site were used.
Two years later, donations of $60,000 enabled the purchase of Lighthawk`s first turbocharged Cessna 210. Four years later, a second plane was added.
Besides expanding with bigger and better airplanes, Lighthawk is initiating projects on its own without waiting for clients. Until now, 90 percent of its business was from groups such as the Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the National Geographic Society and the Wilderness Society.
But two recent Costa Rican projects were Stewartt`s initiatives. One, focusing on the Cathedral Rain Forest Science Preserve, received this fan letter:
”The donation of your impressive service has enabled us to proceed with the Costa Rican government in the identification of gold-mining and farming activities on the preserve, as well as in Costa Rica`s Gulf Vulce Forest Preserve,” writes Arnold Newman, vice president of the International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest.
”We`re not just a bunch of pilots anymore,” Stewartt adds. ”We`re following all the issues and asking what can we do.
