Terry Smith lost his job as a logger but found a program to help him find work restoring native ecosystems. plucking felled trees with its 110 inch steel claw and stripping them bare. Maybe it was the adrenaline racing through his veins when his chainsaw split the 12 foot base of an old growth spruce exactly where he wanted and let it fall into perfect position. On the other hand, maybe it was simply the humbleness he felt in a forest of majestic cedars, firs and pines that seemed to have a heartbeat of its own. Whatever the reason, Terry Smith loved being a logger. From Battle Ground, Washington, down the Oregon coastline to the Siuslaw National Forest and east to Deschutes County — he had logged it all. He estimates he has felled nearly half a million trees, sometimes 100 per day. But in 1994, after finishing a job on the Wilson River near Tillamook, his days as a logger ended. Smith now works as a forestry technician for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Since he stopped logging he has planted thousands of trees, fenced off miles of streams from grazing cattle, closed down forest roads, restored watersheds and trained other crews to do the same. All of these projects approached forestry from an "ecosystem management" perspective, which views the forest not as an individual stand of trees but as a complex and dynamic web of life. "You have to think of the big picture — from microorganisms to bears," he says. Smith made his transition from logger to forestry technician with the help of the Ecosystem Workforce Program (EWP), the first Oregon program to help retrain former timber workers for high-skill, high-wage jobs in environmental restoration. Other programs in the Northwest had retrained foresters to find jobs in entirely new fields, from engineering to electronics. But the EWP was the first of its kind to help form community training programs that built on the existing forestry skills of people such as Smith who had logged for so many years. Though the EWP is still struggling to persuade both federal and private land managers to hire more retrained workers, the program has helped convince people that healthy economies can co-exist with healthy forests. "I think there is an ethos here that what we’ve got in the way of communities and landscape is worth restoring," says EWP manager Charles Spencer. Today Smith uses Global Positioning System technology to map forest roads and monitor the condition of culverts, vegetation and streams. He has replaced his chainsaw with a high powered laptop computer strapped to the console of a government owned truck. He has replaced his 40 ton skidder with a 1996 Ford Bronco, which he drives along old logging roads to survey the Coast Range for damage caused by decades of aggressive timber harvesting. "After I did the training I thought I could really play a part and make a difference," he says. "What I’ve experienced in the last few years has changed my outlook entirely." One of the duties of jobs in the woods is to restore streamside habitats. Conservationists showed that the old growth timber once cherished by logging companies played an important role in the Northwest’s forest ecosystems. To switch from cutting these large diameter trees to smaller ones timber mills had to pay for an expensive retooling of machinery. Also, a number of animal species in the region, including the Northern spotted owl, were recognized as endangered because of their dependence on the same old growth forests that were being cut down. Then in 1994 President Clinton’s Forest Plan for the Pacific Northwest ordered a reduction in logging. As a result the amount of logging has declined by 80 percent since the early eighties. This scaling-back of logging operations forced many timber dependent communities, such as Tillamook and Sweet Home, Oregon, out of the industry almost entirely. Nearly 15,000 Oregonians lost their jobs between 1990 and 1995. To help logging towns adjust to the resulting economic transition, Clinton proposed the Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative. A part of this initiative, Jobs in the Woods (JITW), linked the two goals of environmental restoration and economic rejuvenation by directing the Forest Service and the BLM to conduct watershed restoration projects in a way that would provide jobs for the displaced timber workers. The plan also called for the formation of state community economic revitalization teams (SCERTs) so each community could plan its own ways of putting forest-savvy former loggers back to work in the woods. The Oregon SCERT formed the EWP, which developed curriculum and provided technical assistance for training programs in eight Oregon communities. These programs trained 165 former foresters between 1994 and 1998. According to Spencer, many people were at first skeptical about implementing the programs. "The conventional wisdom at the time was that there was no way loggers would do work in watershed restoration," he says. In the mid nineties the prevailing stereotype, and one that both Smith and Spencer agree still exists to some extent, pitted loggers versus greens and jobs versus the environment. Loggers blamed environmentalists for putting them out of work for what many viewed as a seemingly worthless owl. The conservationists in turn blamed the loggers for rapid forest depletion and a disregard for the delicate web of life. Five years later, says Spencer, the EWP had largely debunked these assumptions. To him the EWP seemed like a natural transition for former loggers. "You don’t work a decade or two out in that setting without having an instinctive connection and curiosity about all these processes," he says. Loggers made up approximately one-third of the ecosystem workforce; the others included workers from timber, pulp and paper mills as well as tree planters and thinners. But in the training sessions, Spencer says, it was the loggers who commonly asked the most penetrating questions and who showed the most excitement and energy. His father was a logger, and so was his grandfather. He grew up in remote logging camps high in the hills of Northern California with no electricity or running water. He began logging in 1975 at age 17. But even though he enjoyed his work, Smith knew the timber harvest was moving too fast. "If you’re a logger and you’re out in the woods, you see what’s happening," he says. "All the animals that live there are forced to move to other littler patches, so they end up outstarving each other."