SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ Ryan Zinke knew exactly whom to blame for the catastrophic wildfires that have scorched California and the West this year.
Touring the scarred neighborhoods of Redding in August, President Donald Trump's interior secretary blasted "special interest" environmental groups for blocking logging projects that he said would have made forests safer.
His words recalled the timber wars of the 1990s, when conservative politicians and out-of-work loggers blamed environmentalists for court rulings and a thicket of regulations that silenced chainsaws in many Western forests to protect the spotted owl and other threatened wildlife.
Now Zinke and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, are calling for more logging. "For too long, our forest management efforts have been thwarted by lawsuits from misguided, extreme environmentalists," they wrote recently in a Sacramento Bee opinion piece.
These days, however, the Trump administration's words ring hollow in many of California's 30 million acres of forests, an area covering one-third of the state's land mass.
Litigation has largely given way to cooperation. Timber industry officials say they've found common ground with environmental groups to thin out overgrown forests and reduce fire hazards. While forestry project approvals can take years _ and hundreds of thousands of acres of acres still need to be thinned _ logging advocates say the Trump administration's argument is outdated in California.
"To me, it represented a lack of understanding of the dynamics of what's going on here on the ground in California," said Rich Gordon, president of the California Forestry Association, the state's primary timber lobbying group. "So in some ways it may be campaign rhetoric, but it's not representative of what's happening in California.
"In many respects, some of our timber wars are over," Gordon said. "People are working at the table."
