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Hero or villain? Hurwitz didn't fire anybody; he hired more workers and added a fourth mill. He continued a Pacific Lumber practice of giving a college scholarship to every employee's child who finished high school. Top hourly pay runs about $15 to $16 an hour, in an area of high unemployment. When he refinanced Pacific's debt a year ago, issuing $620 million in high-interest bonds to pay off $510 million in junkers, the fact that he also paid Maxxam a $25 million dividend from the new debt raised only murmurs. That was how the big boys did things.
Pacific Lumber has been logging for 125 years and is accustomed to indulgent treatment by state forestry officials. Now several local creatures are on endangered-species lists: not only the murrelets but also the spotted owl, the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle and a couple of humble amphibians, the Pacific giant salamander and the tailed frog. While Coho salmon still spawn in Headwaters streams, stocks of this once plentiful game fish have crashed so sharply off California -- in part because of logging erosion -- that all sport and commercial fishing was banned recently. Environmentalists gripe that wildlife-survey regulations are a joke because logging companies do their own surveys. But regulations have slowed log production, and Pacific has fought back. In 1990 the company reamed a broad, mile-and-a-half corridor into the middle of the Headwaters forest and called it, with a wink and a snicker, "our wildlife-biologist study trail."
Two years later, in 1992, the logging firm defied state and federal regulations more directly. Over a frenzied Thanksgiving weekend of what environmentalists called "renegade logging," Pacific broke off negotiations with state officials and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and sent loggers into a prized old-growth stand called Owl Creek. Though Pacific claimed that the state board of forestry and the office of Governor Pete Wilson had approved the Thanksgiving cut, it was stopped after five days by a state appeals court. John Campbell, Pacific's combative president, shrugs off legal entanglements that have tied up virtually all the firm's old-growth stands since then. Campbell dismisses concern over spotted-owl habitat as "a hoax" and thinks research will show that the murrelet's old-growth needs are exaggerated. But he is proud of an industry award for a model project, done with the state, for rehabilitating erosion damage caused by the firm's logging at Shaw Creek.