THE SOCIAL ACCEPTABILITY OF CLEARCUTTING IN THE PACIFIC-NORTHWEST

The fate of the public forests of the Pacific Northwest draws attention to the different values that various constituencies use to make decisions about the acceptability of forest practices. Clearcutting is perhaps the most visible such decision, and it is the one that many people fasten onto when public participation, which is mandated for federal forest lands, becomes part of the planning process. Acceptability becomes an issue for those who make forest decisions. Values can at least be rank ordered for individuals, but knowing the order does not allow prediction of what is acceptable: the context in which the values are called on is important. Through the use of a mailed questionnaire and of in-depth interviews, several populations in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington were sampled to determine the acceptability of clearcutting. Both methods were used to ensure both population-wide validity and in-depth meanings of the practice of clearcutting. In all samples the majority or, in the case of a rural sample, the plurality was opposed to clearcutting as it has been practiced in the Pacific Northwest. Urban residents, women, the more highly educated, and those persons with a liberal ideology were more likely to oppose clearcutting, but interviews showed that people's responses to the questionnaire were more nuanced than a questionnaire could probe.