”No shirt, no shoes, no problem,” says the handwritten sign on the door of the Pomona General Store.
This rickety business has anchored a corner in Pomona since 1876, supplying the town from its early days as a southern Illinois railroad and produce center to its present status: pop. 50, post office in a house trailer. The state of Illinois grew up from settlements here in the unglaciated forests and swampy flood plains of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. And as the bulk of the state`s population moved north from once-thriving communities such as Pomona, Makanda and Shawneetown, it left behind natural beauty and riches unsurpassed by any other region in Illinois.
The Pomona General Store, replete with Mason jars, a pot-bellied stove and rattlesnake skins, still does a fair business, luring tourists off buses and students and faculty off the campus of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a few miles to the north. Many stop for a beer, soda pop or sandwich en route to the state`s only national forest, the Shawnee, which, at 260,000 acres of oak and hickory, is one of the smallest of the 156 federally protected forests covering 190 million acres.
In recent years, the store has been as much fort as food pantry. From its porch, salvo after salvo of fighting words has been fired at the U.S. Forest Service, the government agency charged with managing the Shawnee.
”The foresters refer to this place as `The Mecca of Armchair Forestry, Pomona University,”` said the store`s cantankerous owner, Joe Glisson, 42.
Glisson`s store is the unofficial headquarters of a particularly avid band of about 220 grassroots environmentalists. This mellow but motivated group, whose laid-back lifestyle belies its sophisticated methods, takes a dead-serious stand against what its members perceive as scandalous
mismanagement of the Shawnee.
”People tend to think of the Forest Service as Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl, but we think of them as being in bed with the timber industry,” said Glisson, cofounder of the Regional Association of Concerned Environmentalists, or RACE, which sprung just two years ago from a smaller group, ACE, that was formed in 1985.
RACE and its members have protested chemical spraying, wildlife endangerment, improper bridge and road building, and, particularly, the cutting of public timber from the Shawnee and its sale to private lumber companies. They see that as an environmental loss to the forest and a financial loss to taxpayers.
The Forest Service claims the forests will regenerate, but the environmentalists are more than happy to lead observers to areas cut 20 years ago that remain barren.
Multiple-use plan
The public may tend to regard the national forests as places of recreation and preserves of natural beauty, yet the taking of timber from public lands by private companies has long been part of the federally mandated multiple-use management plan of the Forest Service.
In some forests, under the plan, the annual cost of building roads and bridges to provide access for the timber cutters often far exceeds the profits from timber sales.
In 1987, a record 12 million board feet was cut from the Shawnee, but the cost of access resulted in a loss to taxpayers of $798,000. Last year the deficit was $728,000.
A total of 12 billion board feet was cut from all national forests last year, according to Forest Service officials in Washington, D.C. A typical 30- foot tree yields about 1,000 board feet.
Total revenue for 1989 national forest timber sales was $1.5 billion. Net income, after operating expenses of $776 million, was $741 million. But many forests still operated at a loss individually, officials said.
RACE and other environmental groups, along with the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, dispute the method by which income from timber sales is figured, Forest Service officials acknowledge in their reports.
In January, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered that unprofitable timber sales in 12 national forests, including the Shawnee, be eliminated by 1991.
But because of exceptions that were quickly negotiated, the actual timber harvest from Illinois` only national forest would be cut by only a few million board feet, officials said.
”We don`t deny that on some forests we had sales that actually cost more to sell and administer than we got back from the timber, but there are other rationales for cutting timber,” said Denver James, a spokesman for the Forest Service in Washington.
Timber cuts allow for natural regeneration of the forest and open it to new growth for more wildlife, Forest Service officials said. And the subsidized logging roads become hiking and hunting trails that allow more people access to the forest.
Government mandate
The government`s mandate is to accommodate timber companies as well as hunters, hikers, horseback riders, bird watchers and environmentalists, said Tom Hagerty, spokesman for the Forest Service office in Harrisburg, from which the Shawnee is administered.
Hagerty noted that in recent years Japan has been a major buyer of U.S. timber. Officials said only 2 percent of the Shawnee`s cut timber goes overseas.
”The loss figures you read for timber sales do not put a value on forest-related benefits such as wildlife habitat improvement,” which also improves hunting, he added.
”What is it worth to let a guy from Kankakee shoot a white-tailed deer once a year? The state tourism folks will tell you that hunters come down here, spend a hundred bucks a day, and pump money into the economy,” Hagerty said.
The members of RACE contend, as do critics within the Forest Service, that in years past, the government`s men in the woods have focused too much on selling off its timber and too little on serving the more benevolent interests.
No inventory
Glisson`s organization has filed more than 50 formal appeals, two civil lawsuits (including one now pending in federal court), and countless letters of protest and cries of alarm concerning management of the forest.
RACE suspects the Forest Service has relied more on engineers than biologists, botanists and ornithologists.
Glisson said the Forest Service has never taken a year-round inventory of the Shawnee`s wildlife and plant population to determine just what lives among the trees that are coming down.
”We have the Shawnee shut down tighter than any forest in the United States, and our goal is to shut them down until we can find out what is going on in there,” said Glisson, alluding to government restraints on timber-cutting already in place.
Since the late 1960s, Glisson charged, the Shawnee has lost at least 13,000 acres of hardwood forest to the timber companies.
”As taxpayers, we are paying lumber companies to take our timber and sell it to Pacific Rim countries at tremendous profit,” Glisson said. ”The people of the U.S., and Illinois especially, are getting ripped off.”
Support from Bush
Glisson and other RACE members want the Shawnee`s emphasis to be recreation. To their surprise, they have recently gotten support from unexpected quarters. The Bush administration`s proposed budget for fiscal year 1991 includes $236,000 to expand recreational use in the Shawnee.
”I never thought I would be supported by a Republican president,”
Glisson said. ”Of course we don`t support Bush on anything else, but he is right on this particular point.”
Glisson is a native Alabaman who holds a real Ph.D. in criminal justice and a self-awarded master`s in bureaucrat-baiting. Grizzly-bearded and grizzly-tempered, he radiates and receives a great deal of the heat.
”I`ll tell you,” he said, ”a lot of people hate my guts.” He works almost full-time flailing the Forest Service.
He and fellow RACE activist Bill Cronin, 37, the fiddle-playing son of a River Forest physician, estimate that they have guided at least 500 individuals and groups, from U.S. Sen. Paul Simon to local grade school classes, through the Shawnee to show them the ravages of logging, and of clear-cutting: removing all trees from an area.
Generally laden with a beer cooler ”briefcase” stocked with Milwaukee`s Best Light beer, which he favors for its low alcoholic impact, Glisson picks out nature`s wonders and man`s mistakes in the forest with equal intensity.
Cronin, a bird lover and former zoology student, condones no Forest Service action that endangers the wild turkeys, songbirds, bobcats and other creatures that make up his noncaptive audiences when he plays his fiddle on the porch of his cabin at the edge of the Shawnee.
”There are too many things out in the forest that can`t speak for themselves,” Cronin said. Speaking for them is ”what we want to do.”
He and Glisson point to sections of the Shawnee cleared of timber 5, 10 and 20 years ago, and defy those who accompany them to find any significant number of regenerated oak and hickory trees.
Forestry is an inexact, fledgling science, they contend, and they object to even well-intentioned policies that they see as experiments with the public`s land.
For years, Glisson said, foresters claimed the best way to harvest timber was to clear-cut parcels as large as 40 acres.
Many environmentalists said clear-cutting caused erosion and did nothing to promote new growth, because oak and hickory sprouts were choked off by the thick brambles that flourished in the sunlight. Hiking, hunting and other activities were virtually impossible in such areas, Glisson said.
Only in the last few years have foresters begun to agree with those who derided clear-cutting. It has been banned from the Shawnee after 1991. Glisson wonders how many more mistakes will be made at the cost of public forest.
Their own back yards
Glisson and Cronin said they moved to the forest to escape middle-class lives. They were radicalized into environmental activism by one big mistake the Forest Service nearly made in their back yards two years ago.
The area, which sits below Cronin`s log pole back deck, is known as Cave Valley, home to a diverse plant and wildlife population that for 40 years has been visited and studied by students and professors, as well as amateur bird- watchers and nature lovers.
In 1988, the Forest Service announced it planned to sell off a 130-acre section of timber in Cave Valley. The service might as well have called the artillery to fire on its own positions.
”There was an enormous amount of local interest in the Cave Valley area,” said W.D. Klimstra, a professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University and former head of its Wildlife Research Laboratory.
Although the Forest Service said no wildlife or plant life would be threatened by the timber cut, Glisson, Cronin and others found abundant evidence to the contrary. They found it in the Forest Service`s own files: at least 13 rare, threatened or endangered plant and animal species living in the valley.
Confronted with that documentation and with public outcry, the Forest Service backed down, admitting that the Cave Valley timber sale had been ”a mistake.”
Glisson and his friends suspected it was not the only such mistake, and since that victory, RACE has been an ardent-some say overzealous-protector of the Shawnee.
Its members represent themselves in a federal civil lawsuit to stop a planned timber cut in a large portion of the forest in Jackson County, near Pomona. RACE is also calling for a congressional investigation of Forest Service practices, not only in the Shawnee but in all national forests.
If these methods prove unsuccessful, Glisson is threatening the sort of actions that RACE has stopped short of in the past.
”I imagine you`ll see folks getting arrested,” he said. ”I`m not going to sneak around in the night. Martin Luther King said you have to get arrested to call attention to the injustice.”
Dressed as bats
RACE has been careful to distance itself from Earth First! though it shares members with the local chapter of that much more radical environmental group. Earth First! members have staged showy protests and, just last month, held a national rendezvous of 100 members at an encampment near the Shawnee`s edge.
In December, local members of Earth First! invaded the Forest Service offices in Harrisburg. Dressed as endangered bats, birds and wild hogs, they played deafening chain-saw sounds on a boom box.
There are suspicions that Earth First! members are responsible for a few cases of equipment vandalism and tree-spiking in the Shawnee. The spikes, when driven into trees marked for cutting, have the potential to cause serious injury to loggers working with chain saws.
Though critics suspect that RACE is little more than an extension of Earth First!, its members deny that they participate in what activists call
”environmental terra-ism.” RACE prefers to work within the system, as long as the system listens to them, Glisson said.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard, an Illinois Democrat from Carterville, has tried to bring RACE and other critics of the Forest Service together, he said, but RACE refuses to sit down and compromise.
Poshard is trying to preserve the several hundred jobs the timber industry brings to this economically deprived part of the state, and also to hang onto the federal funds that rural counties get as a share of timber sales in their boundaries, he said.
Forest Service officials also are gun-shy of getting within earshot of RACE, particularly of Glisson, said spokesman Hagerty.
”They have alleged gross mismanagement of the Shawnee, and that is absolutely ridiculous,” Hagerty said. ”Frankly, I think RACE wants the forest to grow up and die. They want no human intervention in the natural process of a forest maturing and regenerating itself.”
RACE has earned enemies even among other environmentalists.
”We don`t want to have anything to do with RACE,” said Jim Bensman of Alton, chairman of the Sierra Club`s committee on the Shawnee. ”They always seem to be attacking individuals instead of dealing with the issues. I think they have attacked everybody at one time or another.”
Tough measures
Glisson thinks tough measures are in order to protect the Shawnee, otherwise, he said, ”They are gonna turn it into a giant tree farm.”
Though lanky and pale, Glisson has been known to stand with an ax handle in hand in the road that fronts his store to discourage off-road-vehicle enthusiasts from riding into the forest.
He has fended off cancer as well, he said, but is still racked with chronic arthritis and other afflictions.
Glisson seems to vent his aches and pains upon those who threaten the forest that he came to for its medicinal solace. He doesn`t have much use for people anymore, he said, but he loves his ”Momma Earth.”
”I left a comfortable middle-class life to move out here and enjoy the mature forest,” he said. ”And then I come to find the Forest Service and timber companies are raping it.
”Looking back, I`ll bet they wouldn`t have done it if they`d known a couple of worn out ol` drunks were around, with the brains to study up and the time to fight `em.”
